The Art of Modeling Geology on a Linear Route in AutoCAD Civil 3D

GARY MORIN: I've got to turn this on, primarily for the recording so these sessions will get recorded. So hi, everybody. I'm Gary Morin. And if you hadn't realized, you're in the class The Art of Modeling Geology on a Linear Route in AutoCAD Civil 3D. I'm a director and actually co-founder of Keynetx. We're a UK software developer. And we develop the geotechnical module inside AutoCAD Civil.

I've been working with CAD and GIS all my life, trained as a civil engineer, went straight into computing. Can't quite remember which version my first AutoCAD was, but it was in '87. So if someone can tell me what version of AutoCAD was out in '87. I think a drew a Coke can in it. My first thing I drew in AutoCAD, a 3D Coke can.

But I didn't start using it in earnest seriously until 1990, where-- I used to run a data capture bureau, and we used to customize AutoCAD to really allow us to type in and get data into AutoCAD drawings as quick as possible on it all. As time went on, I got more into doing GIS because most of the stuff we're capturing were maps.

And I set up a company doing web based GIS. And that company had a sister company that did geotechnics. So they looked at what I did. I looked at what they did. And we thought, well, what if we can combine GIS and geotechnics together and have maps with boreholes on where people can look at where information is spatially and see how it all works? And we thought out a solution. We won a major contract for Highways Agency. It was smoke and mirrors.

And that outgrew the company very quickly, so we merged our companies together and set up Keynetix, which is where we are now. So as I said, we developed the geotechnical module which we licensed to Autodesk. And we also do geotechnical data management software, so whole base extension for Civil 3D. And very recently, we put it all up on to the cloud so you can share data between different offices. So this class is all about looking at how do you model linear sites?

Now, someone just mentioned I had a spelling mistake. But he was joking. I'm dyslexic. So now I'm paranoid every slide I look at. So please forgive me if you see any spelling mistakes. And you will find that some of them won't be spelling mistakes. It's how we do it in England, OK? That's my excuse. It's how we spell it in England. There's no English people here, are they, in the class? Yeah. It's spelled right, it's just English, OK?

So we're going to look at basically working with profiles, whether we need to use static profiles or dynamic, how we go and extract and create 3D feature lines from their profiles, and update in the actual various geology strata. So if this is not the class you thought it was going to be, I will not worry at all if you leave. But at least 50% please stay behind. But if anybody-- this is the wrong class, please go and find something more appropriate for you.

So why are linear sites different? Well, if any of you have watched any of the videos I've produced or been in previous classes I've done, I normally work with a nice, fairly even rayed out set of boreholes. And when you bring it in and you tell it to generate a triangulation between the surfaces, it generates something quite reasonable to work with.

The problem is, when we go to do it on a linear site, you get that. And the technique I've generally trained people to use doesn't really apply, because what we try to do is-- let's go back here-- bear with me for a moment, because as I say, I haven't got my mouse here, so I handle it from the touchpad.

You'll see a little bit. We basically try to plot and draw 3D lines-- the x, y, and the z. The problem we have with linear roots, it's very difficult to get the z right. And that's primarily what this class is going to be all about. So before we go too far into this, let's just rewind and have a look at how we go about modeling typical sites. It's all about drawing feature lines. We would normally create-- the way I quite often do it is I draw implant a polyline-- 2D polyline-- where I think the extents of a particular geology ends.

I then convert it into a feature line, and quite often assign an elevation to it. But I use another surface that looks quite reasonable that is nearby to actually extract the z value from and use that. Or if it's a relatively small feature lens of material, you can look at other surfaces around there, just draw the feature line directly and use the y and z value, z value, whenever you do it on it all.

So that's the traditional way of doing those feature lines. We then at the appropriate surfaces, and it can be up to four surfaces you need to do, add them as breaklines. So you're shaping the geology of the surfaces to go through your individual feature lines you're doing by using breaklines. And if need be, you can add boundaries, hide and show boundaries, to shape it to see the area we want.

The problem is, so there you go. So there in those particular three feature lines, they represent the extent of the geology. You can also draw feature lines through particular strata just to pull it up or put it down. I quite often say inflate it. So you basically draw where you want a particular geology to flow through and then just add it as a break line. And it's just getting that mindset in your head is how we go about doing this.

There's a few rules when we do this. Don't cross. Feature lines should not cross different geologies. Any suggestions why we shouldn't cross different geologies when we draw feature lines? There's a prize involved.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Pardon?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Not necessarily. If you think back to the process we just talked about of feature lines, breaklines, so why wouldn't we want a feature line--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yep. So what would happen if I use the feature line and carried on with the processing?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

GARY MORIN: Pardon? Who said interact with each other?

AUDIENCE: Interact with each other.

GARY MORIN: That's it. So basically what happens is, imagine above that three sets of geology we had there the top right-- that's right-- we'll say made ground and the bottom left was top soil. We've shown the divide between that. If we went through the process and then said, wait, we're going to add this as a breakline to the topsoil and to make ground, no problems at all.

But soon as we add that to the topsoil of that red subject, that's going to extend all the way across all the other geology surfaces, as well. The ones will go the other way around. So we have to treat each individual segment as a separate item.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Still will happen the same way, because we add them as breaklines. So when you add that whole polyline-- whole feature line as a breakline to the red, it's going to extend it all the way around. But yeah, we have to use sites, as well. Recommend-- never-- well, don't use sites. Always say none for your sites when working with this. There you go. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry, I'm not insured, so--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: So things like snap to the edge don't have dangly bits because if the z value is not right when you come to model it, you have spikes shooting all over the place. But the main one is making sure your feature lines stop and end at the right places. When you come to add it as a breakline, you then have to think about, well, what surfaces do we actually need to apply it to?

So the geotechnical module will create both top and base surfaces for each strata. So here, where we have the gray, the peat, and it pinches out, that one feature line will need to be added as a breakline to the topsoil base. Peat top, peat base, and the sand top. And that's probably one of the other difficult areas is actually being aware of what surfaces you're manipulating. And you need to go back and keep checking your nearby boreholes. Have that in your mind when you go to do it all.

So here's a little video showing that process. So you should see we have those five boreholes that-- with the purple surfaces that represent clay, in this case. And we're going to digitize a polyline where we think the extent of the clay is. So at the moment, we don't know what the z value is going to be there. So I'm going to convert it over to a feature line.

We'll come along and tell it not to use any sites. We actually don't want that feature lines interacting with each other. I'm going to tell it now to assign an elevation. And this is it. So I'm going to use the elevation of the base of the fill above, or the topsoil above. It's a nice, continuous surface, so I'm going to assume my clay pinches out underneath of my topsoil.

So that's where I'm taking my z value, my z value, from to do that. And we now go through and we now say, OK, let's make it as a break line into my topsoil base, into my clay top, my clay base, and the geology below. So we're just looping through this process now, doing it four times. So whenever you do this, especially when you're starting, it's almost worth just having a notepad beside you and just draw the order down, especially if you're in office with telephones going, people talking to you, because you'll forget where you are.

The one nice thing about that, though, I should say, with AutoCAD, you just go to a surface and go to Definitions. And you can see what you've done. So you can actually reverse it. So there, as we're talking, we've just gone through and we've manipulated it because we had a good existing surface to work with. You see across the whole of that feature line how we've pinched the clay in all the way across.

There's also the green, where the green ends, which is gravel, in this case. So here I am going to create another feature line, but this time, I'm going to do it from scratch. So instead of using the poly line I'm just going to draw the feature line in 3D. But I'm going to use the same process. I'm going to use a feature line. Tell it to snap to a surface, take the elevation from the surface. So I'm picking, in this case, fill base again.

I'm going to do it. It's the same principle. I'm using the existing surface as my donor for the z value. Now, I don't have to do that on every point. Here I'm using transition, which basically means calculate the z value of this for my start points and my end points. So here I'm going back to use this surface. It just smooths the actual elevation a little bit by doing it this way. So here we're drawing the feature line in 3D in the white in the first place.

But in both circumstances, we've used an existing surface as a donor to get our z values from. It's helped us out using this value. And we'll now go through the same process of adding it as breaklines. So obviously there's a big question in doing this. I haven't even addressed it at all as we've gone through this, is do you need to do a 3D volume model? If you have a think-- you sometimes have to think, and I've talked a little bit about this in last year's class. There are many advantages in doing 3D volumes, 3D surfaces to do calculations and stuff. But you don't always have to do them. It's cross sections.

Having said that, the big advantages are is that you can get cross-sections through so quickly, you can actually see-- use them as validation checks of how you assume your model is going to look like. It's a really quick way of checking, crossing it through by doing this. Let's see. We'll move down my slide in a moment. Always happens. There we go.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yep.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: No. So feature lines are primarily polylines, 3D polylines, on steroids. They basically are 3D elements that you draw. Breaklines are a way of telling a surface to follow that feature line. So you're basically forcing a-- by adding breaklines, you've forced all the vertices of a surface to go through that line. So it's really a way of just molding, shaping surfaces. And that's what the breakline is. So breaklines only ever refer to surfaces. They don't refer to anything else.

AUDIENCE: So basically, you're looking with multiple [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yeah. So you use the same feature line and you add-- so you then say, I want this surface to flow through that feature line. I want this surface to flow through that one. So it pulls them all together so they all follow the same geometry. So we're going to look at linear sites. One way we could do it is by the 3D fence diagrams that we added to the geotechnical module last year, which is not doing any volumes. It's just giving you-- this is what the geology is through this route.

And the technique we're doing today, as a byproduct of that we will be generating 3D fence diagrams, as well. But I'm going to concentrate primarily on how to do proper volume surfaces along our routes, what we got on the right hand side.

So the problem is, and you can see it there, is when we draw alignment to create a nice little ribbon of geology running down our site, where I drew that line, there's no surfaces there. There is no z value, there's no z values to take. So how do we get those z values into our model? And to be honest with you, that's what this class is really just about, just that one problem. And I am embarrassed to say I've been using Civil now for six, seven years. I've been training people how to model geology, Autodesk staff, expert CAD users, and the command I'm going to use, no one's ever told me about. I don't know why no one's told me about it, but no one's told me about it.

It may just be the way I was using it is different to other people so they never thought it would be appropriate. We'll see as we go through. So yeah, the x and y are obtained from the alignment route in this particular case, but what about the z? So a profile has the z value on it. So when we draw a profile of you, you draw a profile on, the xy is taken from the alignment where z is taken from the profile.

Our problem is is converting the profile into a 3D feature line so we can use it for something. And that's where-- so here we go. Use a profile to obtain the z. How do we convert it to a feature line? The command create feature line from alignment. Now please show me how stupid I am. How many people know that command and have used it?

OK, I'm stupid. OK? Because I didn't realize that actually meant create feature line from profile. That changes loads of things. If I knew that a few years ago, I would done my software bit differently and trained people differently. But actually, that really helps out things enormously knowing that.

So before we have this three step, now I've got a five step method for linear routes for generating models. First thing we're going to do is create ourselves a profile view just offset from where boreholes are, or down the route that we want to actually model. We then go and create profiles for each one of our stratas, going down the list. We then convert those profiles back into feature lines, and then after there, we're back into safe territory again. We add those feature lines, those breaklines. We add them and create boundaries if we need to.

So we've basically got a different way of creating our feature lines using this technique. So those three basically are repeating that one step we had before when we just drew the poly lines. So a couple of things to bear in mind. We're going to create a ribbon. Don't get too bold and create your alignment too far away from your boreholes because you're guessing more and more what the geology is, especially if it's a Revit site. Likewise, don't have your bore holes too far apart.

But you know those arguments, talking to clients who won't give budgets-- like budget to actually do the right investigation. But try to keep them as close as you can so you're not trying to project too far a distance from your boreholes onto your profiles what you're drawing. Also, because we're going to actually use these breaklines to actually pull surfaces together, all these feature lines, we're going to use them later on to pull surfaces together, I always find it's really good and it's helpful to know where the vertices along your profiles are.

I know you have end points that you can use. But believe me, when you're doing this often, trying to wait for your endpoint to get into the right place to see where you are is a pain. So I always generate a profile style that emphasizes where the vertices are. Makes it much easier for snapping and seeing what you're doing. So if you haven't done that before, I'm going to show it quickly in a video in a moment.

But basically, you just go to create a new profile style. And you just go and make sure that the points of vertical intersection and begin profile and end profile just use a little marker, little symbol, simple as that. I quite often change the color and change the line weight so it stands out. So if this works-- so here you just go into Settings. Go to your profiles. I'm just going to copy over my basic style, give it a new name. So I'm just going to call this geology.

And all we do is go to Markers and go down to the points of vertical. And I'm just going to change that to, I think, the default one here. Basic circle and cross. And I'm just going to do it for the next three down-- next two down. So begin profile and end profile. So I'm not saving this into my template drawing. Normally you'd save this back into your template drawing so it's there to be used in the future.

Go back through to display. Change the color to something else to make it stand out. And I haven't changed the line weight here, but you could change the line weight also to make it stand out. So we now have this new style associated here. So we're going to go and start creating profiles for each one of our stratas. Now, the geotechnical module actually creates them for us. So a dilemma we've got is do we edit the ones that the geotechnical modules created?

In this particular profile view we created, there's going to be none there. But when we do it on the other side, there'll be some surfaces already in that area. So we could start editing those. And really, the choice is yours. Having been refining this process, I actually find now unless the actual automatically generated profile is very close to what you need, I'll just go and create a new one from scratch. And the example I'm going to show you today, we've just created from scratch.

The benefit of that is that the automatically generated profiles done by the geotechnical module will automatically update and actually still carry on working the way they're designed to do. You'll see what I mean as we go through the process. So if you were to edit existing profiles, what you have to do is go and change the profile update method from dynamic to static. And when you make something static-- go on. Two more left.

So what happens when you make a profile static? What is it doing? Beverly?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Sorry, say that again?

AUDIENCE: You can edit the profile.

GARY MORIN: You can edit the profile. And the reason you can edit the profile, it's removing the link through to the original surface. So for that shape of that profile to be dictated by the surface, it's removing that. So it's a completely separate entity for it all. So that's the main reason for doing it. Yeah, I won't throw things at you. OK.

So you just set it to static and then you can edit it. In this case, though, I'm actually going to create the profiles from scratch. So we use the profile curation tool. And what we're going to do is create a profile for the top of each one of our strata. Now, it's important you name these something sensible because you will be going back and you will be looking at the profile names and picking them again.

So in this case, I'm just going to name them from the strata material as we go down. So this one is going to be for glacial till. So I don't like typing so GT for that. We're going to go down and tell its user geology style we've just created. We don't want to use any labels and design criteria. We don't any design criteria set. So we just set that the way we want it to go.

And now we go ahead. So we only go through to the geotechnical module and create a geotechnical profile. We can use any profile style and/or banding sets you want to. I'm just turning them off for the time being. And I'm just going to digitize in where my alignment needs to go. OK. You notice obviously extending it past the start and end boreholes there, so it picks them up.

Now we haven't just set the buffer size, so it's bigger than the distance from our alignment to those boreholes. So I've just increased it so those boreholes will be projected onto a profile of you. And there we are. You notice there's no surfaces shown there because we're outside the area where the surfaces are. So what we're going to do is go to Profile and Create Profile Tool. Pick our profile we're going to work on.

Now again, this is really important. We come in through here and we're giving it, in this case, fill. We're telling it to use our geology style and we're telling it not to use any labels. I click on the first icon there, which is insert new tangent points. And we just start digitizing it. And we don't need to be too accurate here. Remember, those boreholes are like 20, 30, 50 feet away. So you're just using those as a reference of where you think the geology is, from where you're sitting on the side of there.

So as we get further across, you'll see perhaps there's a dip in the geology. We know it's sloping. If that's the case, take that into account. Just digitize below where the top of the boreholes are if you know the ground is sloping over in the area, like we are here. So you're just going through this process. You can see why I'm not doing this live now, because I'm going to do this for every profile here. And you'll just be sat here for the next hour while I go click, click, click, click on here.

So now we're going to the topic Glacier 2. So the name is going to be Glacier 2. Yep. All the other defaults already apply. So hit OK. And now I'm going to digitize in where the top of my glacier till goes. Again, here, don't get too accurate and think about this too much from the point of view of your dots. You need to think about it from what the geology is doing. And I haven't given you my health warning that I have to do, and I forgot to do this one, so I should do it in a moment. So we're coming across here.

And you'll see this is where the glacier till ends. So because we set it a little bit deep, I'm repeating that here. But here, we're going to cross while the glacier till disappears here. So I'm just going to come across and just draw where I think the extents of my glacier till. You notice they're also a little bit lower down. But there was a health one I forgot to give you here, especially because I wanted two geologists-- the geotechs in here, as well.

The stuff we're doing here, you shouldn't really just join the dots together on between two boreholes. If you have four boreholes, the borehole in the middle-- if you had a fifth one-- could show completely different geology to the ones around it. So I always say to people, you need to have as much documentation, as much expert knowledge as you possibly can get, to work out how to go draw these things. Drawing the lines are easy. It's actually understanding where the lines should be is the hard thing. And that is geotechnics out and out.

So work with as much data as you possibly can, as much insight as you possibly can, to help you predict where they are. So my health warning, but we'll move on now. So what we've done here is basically, I know it looks like we're at the bottom of the glacier till here. That's because I'm assuming it's a bit of a slope on the actual land here.

But we just digitize where we think the glacier till, the extent of the glacier till is, and we just dot that line. Now the reason for that, if you remember, is-- so yeah, just going quickly while I remember. Dip and strike, so dip and strike-- are the dip is how the geology is sloping down sort of compared to the vertical of the ground. And the strike is the orientation looking down on it from above. So you got the dip and then how it's going down to it.

So sometimes-- you know there's a lot going on in the territory you're working on. At the moment, you just have to mentally take that into your mind as you draw these profiles. But if you remember, the conversation we had about not crossing geology with our feature lines, it still applies with the way we're working now. So that's the reason why I stopped that glacier till, because the boulder clay underneath when we come to draw it will be underneath the glacier till on one side and underneath our fill on the other side.

So we have to deal with them as two separate profiles on it. So that's the reason why I stopped where we were there. So if we look at this, we have that point a where I've already stopped my glacier till, the red. And then going to the right of there, where we had number three, that's going to be the top of my boulder clay. But my boulder clay will be sat underneath my fill. So when I come to name it, I'm going to call it something like BC dash fill is boulder clay under fill.

To the right of that point, you can see the yellow line, number four. Well, that's the top of my boulder clay, but that's the boulder clay that sits underneath the glacier till. So we just have to think about dealing with these as different profiles, because these will create different feature lines that we add as breaklines into it. So what would happen is if we drew line number 4 continuous all the way over to where 3 is, when we added as the base of glacier till, the glaciers till will go all the way across to the end of the drawing, as well. And we don't want that to happen. That's where we have to pull it back and do it in segments.

So here we go. So more button pressing. So I'm going to go back into the Create Profile Tool pane, the Create-- it's called Create Profile Tool. That's it. Again, give it a sensible name. So here, Boulder Clay dash. And this is going to be the line that sits underneath the fill. So I'm just calling it Boulder Clay dash fill. We snap to the end of the glacier till where we've already been working. And I'll just digitize this last little bit across.

So that's these over the top of my boulder clay, the underside of my fill in that area. We're now going to come across and draw the rest of my boulder clay. So again, you click on the profile. You give it a sensible name again. So this is going to be Boulder Clay dash GT for underneath the glacier till. And this time, I'll just start from that point and work the other way.

I have done a little bit of testing with this. And I'm just using straight lines here. I did find out that instead of using just tangential straight lines that when I told it to use curves in it, it actually worked fine, as well. Haven't done too much testing with it, but it actually just-- the surfaces create look really nice. But remember they're just-- people may think they're more accurate than they really are if you do that.

So finally, we're doing this for the-- basically the material, the green at the bottom, which is our limestone. So here there's nothing much shown. So I'm just going to say, well, let's just assume the top of my limestones just across here, because remember, those boreholes are only drilled down a certain distance. They have yellow at the bottom, which is our boulder clay. We don't know where the boulder clay stops underneath there.

We could tell its user base of those, but you get a really messy looking surface occur. So it's easier just to draw a line across. It's really going to be the bottom of our model. So we just do something like that. I'm not going to repeat it for the other side, because that gets a little bit boring. Why should we press the buttons? But primarily you just draw another alignment-- in this case, on the left hand side. You just go through the same process.

If you know you've got a really even site, that your boreholes are right down the middle of your road, you may get away by using a feature line offset. So your feature lines that you've already drawn later on will actually offset them across to the other side of the site. So you can do it that way. You can also do an alignment offset, as well. And it works this way. Here I've just drawn another alignment and just go through the same process. OK. Does that make sense?

So we've now got our profiles. We need to create feature lines from them. So we use this command, create feature lines from alignments, OK? And I must admit, you've actually read what it said years ago. It does actually say from profiles. But who reads?

So you go through. You pick the alignment you got to work on. You, again, you want to make sure you don't specify any sites, OK? So I think was it 17 when you could have siteless feature lines come into it? If you use an early version, you need to remember to put unique sites for each one of your different geology types on there, because you don't want your feature lines interacting with each other.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: 2016. OK. We should be OK, because we gave up supporting anything before 2016. Name, really important. But by default, it doesn't name any feature lines. Here, you want to check on the feature line and give it an appropriate name. So what I'm doing here is I will go call and call my feature line fill right for the right alignment, fill left for the left alignment. Yeah? So you create name. You'll see why it's important in a moment as we go through this.

We have to obviously pick the right profile, the ones we've just drawn. And you can see why we named them now, because we got to pick them from my list. So we have to give them something sensible so we can recognize them again. The rest of the stuff we don't really worry too much about the style in this case. The button at the end, create dynamic link to the alignment, you'll leave that checked on. I'm not going to say too much about it now. We'll come back to that towards the end of the class. It's a really neat thing what it can do with that left on.

So what we're going to do is we're going to repeat this process for both alignments. And we go through. So we're going to go down to create feature line from alignment. I'm just going to hit Enter on the prompt. And it will ask me which alignment you want to do it for, so alignment 1. We come through, tell it to use no sight. And now we're going to go through.

And I generally do it in the order of my geology strata going down. So I'm going to start with my fill and just work my way down the geology order. So we're going to give it a name. So this is going to be my fill. I'm going to create the feature line. It's going to be for the right alignment. So it can be fill right. We're leaving the check for Create Dynamic Link on. We'll leave all the defaults for the other information. And that's it done.

So you can just slightly see on screen there a little green line, which is the feature line it's just created. Now, this gets really boring, because I'm just going to do the same thing 10 times now. So I don't think I'll wait for this to do the whole lot here. So you're just going through each one giving each one a sensible name. So again, this time glacier till right. And we're going to do it all the way through on it.

How we doing time-wise? We got loads of times. So important doing these the right names. We're going to use these. While we're waiting for this to happen, any questions at all? Happy with what we're doing so far? So again, you can see here now where we got these double ones. So we got boulder clay glacier till on the right side, boulder clay, glacier till on the left side.

So it's a little bit laborious going through this. But you go through working on creating all of the feature lines or all of this information. This video does speed up, by the way.

AUDIENCE: How come you're not actually putting them [INAUDIBLE]?

GARY MORIN: If you put them on no site, no site, they don't interact anyhow. And we don't have-- I don't normally let them interact, anyhow, what we do. So I just find it's just easier not to think about it by putting them all on the none, i.e., make them site. Are there any benefits to make it individual sites? It's a question.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: That's providing good geology by providing supplemental data. [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yeah, so we're doing, within this particular example, a nice row of linear. But the technique we're using, if you've got little clumps of extra boreholes every so often, it doesn't make it-- it uses the same technique. It's just, when you get to that point, you don't need to have your feature line drawn in-- your alignment joining one straight line. Just change the shape of it so you actually gather a lump around it all.

And here, we're just doing two alignments. You can do extra alignments going across the site to give it more volume, more size, as you go along. So this is just giving you, really, the principle. You can apply in so many different ways.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Using--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yeah, you can use the corridors to generate the feature lines and do it that way. Yeah. I'm not great on that side of AutoCAD. So I'm going to have to go away now and do a bit research on that side using corridors. So that will generate the feature lines for you. You can extract those feature lines from the corridor, draw it through the site where you need to do.

Then any problem you're going to have to do is work out where does that actually correspond to each one of your geologists? Because those feature lines will be elements on your actual corridor assembly, won't they? Will they actually relate to the strata, whereas this is obviously relating to the strata that you--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: Yeah. But the corridor won't create those profiles for you, will it? Because you're looking at this and interpreting what's inside the boreholes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: OK. Yeah. I see what you're saying. Yep. You can do it. So the other way of doing it is just to do the offset of the feature lines from each, generating them at the end, so you just do one side and just copying them over to the other side and do it that way. But I'm doing these classes, I'm learning myself from what other people are doing. As I said beforehand, someone could've told me about this feature lines from alignments some time. It would've done some of this stuff.

The same principle still applies. It's just the way you create the feature lines. You know, if you got a better way of doing it, great. So once we've done that, we can now go through-- so we've done all this process as a way of creating those feature lines. So again, if you have a different technique to create those feature lines, great, because all we're trying to do is work out where we put the feature lines to add them to our surfaces to force our strata surface to the places we want them to go.

So what we're going to do now is go through and add these feature lines as breaklines. So this is where it's understanding the order of your strata is quite important. So the fill top is going to be straightforward, because we just used the fill top profile feature line we've created. The glacier till top is going to be relatively straightforward. But what about the fill base?

The fill base, you're going to use the top of the glacier till line we've drawn and we're going to use the top of the boulder clay stroke dash fill of the-- underneath the fill. So you've got to start thinking about what feature lines you need to pull together to actually add into your surface. So the way we tend to do this now is I found the quickest way when I was doing it is just using a tool prospector. You can go and select these feature lines on the drawing, but it gets really fiddly.

And I found that if you named all your feature lines correctly, it's quicker just using the actual prospector to do it from. So when we add them into the surface, we just add them in as a standard breakline. And we just have to think about these different surfaces we're going to add them into. So again, let's just go through and we'll show it working now.

So you can see I've got feature lines selected in the prospector and there are all my feature lines named correctly. So I'm going to add to my fill top my fill left and fill right feature lines we created. And we go through this process. And there you see that surface being generated to do that. OK. So it's pretty straightforward in doing the fill, because there's just those two.

But as we go down all the other surfaces we've got, it gets a little bit more complicated. Not massive, you've just got to have your wits about you as you work through it. So as I said, the fill base is going to use the glacier till on the left, the glacier till on the right, the boulder clay underneath fill on the left, boulder clay underneath fill on the right, and so forth as you just go through. It's the same process.

So as you see these going on, I could pick the surfaces from the actual profiles directly there, but-- sorry, not the feature lines you can't. But here we have the glacier till. There we have the [INAUDIBLE] underneath fill. So we're picking all four feature lines. Right click. Add it to my fill base and hit OK. And now we've got the top fill and the base fill modeled, and hence automatically it's hatched that it. And remember, the geotechnical strata surfaces we created and the geotechnical profiles that are being created by the geotechnical module, we haven't changed those. So they've been updated automatically now with the new feature lines that we've just added to it all.

So we're just going through this process. It doesn't actually take long at all to go through each one of our surfaces, add in all the appropriate feature lines as we go through into it. And you can see all those strata surfaces have been updated. The profile views have been updated to match this information across the whole of our site.

So we're just about there. Doing it now for the top. I'm using the limestone to do the base of my boulder clay. You sometimes get slight peculiarities, I notice, with the hatching when it doesn't hatch. And you'll see this happen a few times. The hatches will just disappear in the profile views. I have to just go and tweak stuff. It seems that in profile views, the civil hatchet is a little bit iffy when it decides to show it and doesn't to show it.

But you can see now we actually have strata surfaces all the way across our site. So really, what we're going to do now is just end up cleaning it all up so we can just quickly add a boundary, so the last step in this particular sort of process. So we're just going to draw a closed polyline around the whole site. Here I've just snapped it to the alignment on the left, closed it, snapped it to the alignment on the right, closed it, and just used that as the outline for my boundary.

And all you do is-- I'll speed these up very quickly-- go for each one of your surfaces and just add this as an outer boundary. And I also clip it back to your site so you get a fairly neat ribbon effect down the whole site by during this. So these surfaces are the ones that are automatically generated by the geotechnical module. So when you import your data--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GARY MORIN: So, I-- to-- I haven't played about with corridors too much because I don't design roads. I don't design things on it. So all these services have been automatically generated from the import geotechnical data through the geotechnical module into it. So it's like the automatically updated or maintained from that. So I don't know how you link your corridors to the multiple surfaces round there. If it's a way of doing that and telling it to cut and generate feature lines from it, that will be a big help. I don't know whether you can do that or not do that. Beverly?