Create a TIN surface

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In this video, we are going to start creating a TIN surface.

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And TIN, T-I-N, stands for triangular irregular networks or triangulated irregular networks.

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And what a TIN surface is, it is a network of lines that create triangles,

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and these triangles create planes that are the face of a surface inside of Civil 3D.

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So in order to create a TIN surface, what you need to go ahead and do is you need to navigate over to the Toolspace,

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and you're going to go over to the surfaces area of the Toolspace and right click and you want to select Create Surface.

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What you need to know is that when we're creating a surface,

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the first thing that we're doing is we are just creating a placeholder for that surface.

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In future videos, we're going to talk about adding data to that surface.

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Until you add data to your surface, there's no information to build that surface off of, and so you just have empty, no displayed surface,

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and Civil 3D doesn't have any information to use to build that surface off of.

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So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to create a placeholder for our future TIN surface.

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So I'm going go ahead and name it.

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I'm going to name it EG. You could give it a description.

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You could also give it a display style, but since we have no data in our surface yet, I'm not going to choose a display style.

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And then what you can go ahead and do is if you were going to render it in 3-dimensional space, you can choose a render material,

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or you could do a by layer of whatever surface layer type you're going to have.

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So I'm going to go ahead and click "OK" and we now have a surface called EG that is ready for us to add data to.