Survey setup

Setting up your Survey Model properly from the get-go can be compared to setting the foundation for a house. All design elements will essentially be built on top of—and will need to reference in—various methods, the Survey Model depicting the existing built environment.

In this section, we’ll run through the basics of Civil 3D survey tools and get a clearer understanding of how we can leverage each to configure or set up our Survey Models. This section will act as our inspection phase of the survey to investigate the conditions of the drawing, including ensuring the geolocation has been properly set, determining how the existing conditions were modeled, and checking the entire drawing for miscellaneous drawing elements to ensure the file is neat and ready to be used as the foundation of our design.

Let’s go ahead and open up our Survey Model_Start.dwg file. Once it’s open, you should see your overall existing conditions, or Survey...