A very interesting question was posed to me: how would one display a cut and fill a surface in colour, differentiating between cut and fill with separate colours? It is easier than one would expect.
The cut and fill surface that is created from a cut and fill analysis is a volume surface that reports the volume difference between two surfaces. It appears based at the zero elevation as a reference meaning no cut of fill. A positive value indicates a fill, and a negative value indicates a cut. All that is then required is to create a surface style that displays elevations in differing colours. Typically, two colours are used. Green for fill and red for a cut.
Create a new volume surface from existing surfaces. Shown below is the Final Grade surface (FG) and the Existing Grade surface (EG). The FG surface is made up of pasting the Alignment surface onto the EG surface.
Use the Volumes Dashboard to set EG as the base surface and FG as the comparison surface.
Make sure only the Elevations layer is switched on for the new surface style.
On the Surface properties, do an elevation analysis with two bands and a tolerance specified around zero to filter out small values. This is then all that is required to show the surface in cur and fill.
Since this is a low-resolution surface, it is still interesting to see the crown of the road display.
If you need help adopting Civil 3D in your practice, please contact micrographics so we can be of assistance.
