CE562 Geometric Design of Highways

Purdue University

Tutorial 3: Creating a Surface Model in Eagle Point

1) Turn off all the layers of your drawing, except for ‘Spot Elevations’. Make sure the ‘Spot Elevations’ layer is
not frozen.
2) Zoom to the extent of the drawing by typing ‘z’ on the command line and hitting the ENTER key, and then
typing ‘e’ on the command line and hitting the ENTER key.
3) In the Eagle Point menu, go to Products  Surface Modeling, or click the icon on the toolbar.

4) In the Surface Modeling menu, go to Prepare  Manage Surface Models.

a) We have no surfaces at this point, so create a new one by clicking on the ‘New Surface Model’ icon.

b) The New Surface Model window has four tabs.

i) In the Surface Model tab, type ‘existing_ground’ in the description line.

ii) In the Contours tab, make the following changes:

(1) For Intermediate Interval, choose 2 meters.
(2) Index Interval should be automatically updated to 10 meters when you click on it.
(3) For Smoothing Factor, choose 3.
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 (4) For Polynomial Factor, choose 2.
c) Hit OK and close the Manage Surfaces Model window.

5) In the Surface Modeling menu, go to Triangulate  Surface Model.

a) In the Triangulate Surface Model window, make sure that the surface model is set to existing_ground. If
not, select it from the pull-down list and hit Apply.

b) You have to select the points you want to triangulate. Drag a box around ALL the spot elevations. Start by
clicking in a corner outside of the area composed of the spot elevations, hold the button and drag the cursor
over the area, after you have a box around all of them, and click again the left mouse button. The
command window should say that there were 14273 objects found. If not, repeat the procedure.

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 c) Right-click over the Auto-CAD window. If a warning appears that there are “crossing breaklines”, select
YES to the question of if you would like to continue. Wait for the process to finish and close the
Triangulate Surface Model dialogue box.

6) In the Surface Modeling menu, go to Contours  Make Intermediate & Index.

a) Hit Apply and wait a few minutes while the contours are generated.

b) Close the Make Intermediate & Index Contours dialogue box when the process is finished.

7) Turn off the Spot Elevations layer, and turn on the Contours and Contours_idx layers. You should now have
contours to help you in the placement of the road. The red contours are spaced every 2 meters. The yellow
ones are spaced every 10 meters.

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8) Save your drawing file.

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Purdue University, Spring 2010