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Michael Kinnear/5 min read

Setting Up Slope Analysis in Civil 3D: Creating Slope Ranges and Displaying Data

Slope Analysis Setup

1

Surface Properties

Right-click surface > Surface Properties > Analysis tab.

2

Pick Slope Type

Slopes 2D or 3D depending on use case.

3

Define Ranges

0-5%, 5-15%, etc. — match project regulatory thresholds.

4

Apply Color Scheme

Color bands make slope categories instantly visible on plan.

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This Civil 3D tutorial walks through setting up slope analysis in civil 3d: creating slope ranges and displaying data, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Now that we have our surface style set up, we're ready to start working with our analysis. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to drop down my analysis type, set it to slopes, and then we can start working on our slope analysis.

We currently only have two options for our legend. We have slope and standard. I'm going to go ahead and use slope.

If I go in here and I go to edit current selection, what you'll notice here is I have a table style slope. So as I said in the previous video, our table here for our parcels is just like our legend for our slope analysis. It is in fact a table style.

So in here, we have our information tab, what the name of it is, what the description of it is, the data properties. So what the text is going to look like, wrapping text, maintaining view orientation, repeat titles in split tables, repeat column headers in split tables. How do you want to sort the data, whether or not you want to have it sorted or not, your text settings for your title, your header, and your data, what the text height is going to be, what the text style is going to be.

Then you have the actual structure of your table. So inside of here, what you're going to have is the number, minimum slope, maximum slope, area, and color. If I added another column, we could see what other data we can return.

So inside of here, you can see surface range, color, surface range, 2D area, surface range, maximum slope, surface range, minimum slope. So I'm going to go ahead and click in here and double-click the column value, and I'm going to drop down my properties. So inside of our table, we have the number of ranges, range ID, range, minimum slope, range, maximum slope, surface range, color, 2D area, 3D area.

If you wanted to, you could add this information, but because we already have min and max slopes, we already have area and color, and we already have our surface range ID, there's not very much more that we need to add. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this column. So I selected the upper portion of the column and then clicked delete to delete that out.

So moving on from there, we have our display. So what objects inside of the title or inside of the table we would be displaying, and then we have our summary tab. So I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel.

I'm not making any changes to the slope legend table. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and set my ranges. I'm going to set four ranges, and then I'm going to click down.

So from here, what we have available to us is the different ranges that we have and the scheme that it's in. So it still says scheme reds. However, we are using a rainbow scheme here.

You have the options for scale scheme to fit. That is just basically scaling this range to fit inside here. We're going to go ahead and begin setting our slopes.

So inside of here, you have Civil 3D automatically populates your minimum slope value and your maximum slope value on your surface. So from here, we know that I don't need to adjust this upper slope maximum, and I don't need to adjust this lower slope minimum, but I can adjust the numbers in between here to get the ranges I want. If I want to have something like 0 to 25%, then I can go ahead and change the first maximum slope to 25 and hit ENTER.

So moving on from there, I want to have this range pick up at 25 and go upwards. If I was to type in 25 here, I'm going to get an error because you can't have your minimum slope be larger than your maximum slope. So I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER just so that you can see that error.

The minimum value must be less than the maximum value. Okay. So what we're going to go ahead and do is set our maximum value as something like 35%.

So then we'll go 25 to 35%. Then we'll have 45% as the upper range for our next one. And 35 is the lower range for our previous one.

And then I'll go ahead and set 45 as my maximum slope or my minimum slope for my last range. And then I'm going to go ahead and hit apply. And when I hit apply, it applies my slope analysis to my surface here.

And what we can see here now is that we have our reds, which is our 0 to 25% slopes. We have our greens, which is our 25 to 35% slopes. We have our aqua, which is our 35 to 45% slopes.

And then we have our purples, which is our 45 up to 476.3692% slopes, which are these ranges in here. So as you can see, you're going to have some of these shapes in here that are these little small triangles. And that's simply based on how your tins are oriented inside of your drawing.

We're going to go ahead and hit OK. We're going to save our drawing. And then I'll meet you in the next video where we'll start putting this table that we were talking about in this video into the drawing.