Analyzing your existing conditions

There are many ways we can begin inspecting and analyzing our existing conditions model. These methods can certainly be carried throughout our design lifecycle and applied to design models as well. Although we’ll get into some more complex ways of analyzing our existing conditions model over the next few chapters, let’s start out with some very simple methods that anyone just starting off can pick up.

Going back to our Survey Model_Start.dwg file, let’s begin by taking a good look at our Surface model in a three-dimensional view to make sure that our existing surface at least appears to be accurate from a visual standpoint.

To perform this quick validation, we can simply select our existing Surface model in Model space by right-clicking and selecting the Object Viewer… option, as shown in Figure 4.17:

Figure 4.17 – Object Viewer selection

Once selected, an Object Viewer dialog box will...