HecRAS river centerline and cross-sections via Civil 3D

This workshop shows you how to obtain river centerline data and cross-sections from Civil
3D and import them into HecRAS. You will learn how RAS and CAD see the world
differently, and the procedures in RAS to make the CAD data work properly. The
recommended version of HecRAS is 5.0 or later.

The first section describes details of creating geometry in AutoCAD Civil 3D. These steps can
be skipped unless you want to explore drawing centerline and cross-sections in CAD and
exporting the file for RAS.

1. Creating river centerline and cross-sections in Civil 3D

****** This section requires Civil 3D. Skip to section 2 to for RAS aspects. *******

a. To create RAS geometry in Civil 3D you will need a “Surface” which defines the ground to
good detail. This can be generated from a high resolution set of survey points, or you can
bring into CAD a TIN, DEM, or set of contours generated outside of CAD. You may wish to
open and examine the file “BalchCreekForRAS.dwg” in the CADtoRASworkshop\CAD
directory, which has RAS lines drawn, or the blank surface in “BalchCreekSurface.dwg.”

b. The surface in BalchCreek.dwg came from a LiDAR survey of a reach of Balch Creek in
Portland OR. In Civil 3D you will see the surface as a set of 2-foot contours. To create RAS
geometry, the stream centerline is drawn first. Use the Polyline function to draw the
centerline from downstream to upstream, (opposite of how you would do in RAS).

c. Next, make the polyline into an alignment. From the Home tab, Create Design section,
choose Alignments, and Create Alignment from Objects. Select the stream centerline polyline
and hit Enter. It will give you the opportunity to reverse the stationing and you DO NOT
want to reverse. Complete the alignment by clicking Enter again.

A window comes up, allowing you to name the alignment. Name it “Thurman reach”. (Note
that RAS will use this name as the reach identifier, not the river name.) Be sure to uncheck
the box that tells CAD to “Add curves between tangents”. That functionality makes sense
with roadway alignments, but not stream channels! Click OK to close that window.

d. Next draw cross-sections. The same Polyline function will be used, but this time it does
not matter what order you draw them in, or whether you draw from left bank to right or the
other way around. Of course, keeping in mind your hydraulic modeling needs, you will
want to space the cross-sections appropriately and to draw them generally perpendicularly
to the flow direction. You can see the cross-sections in BalchCreekForRAS.dwg.

e. Connect the cross-sections to the alignment: from the Home tab in Civil 3D, in the Profile
& Section Views section, select the Sample Lines icon. Hit Enter, and a window opens, which
enables you to select the river alignment. Select the “Thurman reach” alignment and hit OK.

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Then, a windows opens which enables you to name the collection of polylines that represent
the cross-sections. Name them “Balch xsecs” and click OK. The Sample Lines Tools window
is still open. One of the clickable icons is for “Sample Line Creation Methods.” From that
icon, choose the option “Select existing polylines.” This gives the mouse the ability to draw a
box, and you would draw it around all of the polylines that represent cross-sections. (After
drawing the box, click Enter. It will not be obvious that anything happened, but it did.)
Close the Sample Line Tools window.

f. Using polylines, we can also have CAD determine reach lengths between cross-sections.
This is not necessary, but saves the time spent setting reach lengths one by one in RAS. Draw
two polylines in Civil 3D roughly parallel to the centerline, but offset to right and left. Draw
them so that the lengths of polyline between each cross-section represent the reach lengths
you desire. That is, for flow in the left or right overbanks, these lines will represent the
direction and distance as the overbank flow goes from section to section. It does not matter
whether you draw them upstream to downstream, or which bank line is drawn first.

g. The centerline and cross-sections are now ready to export to RAS. From the Civil 3D
Output tab, in the Export section, find Export to HEC RAS. A window opens, which allows
you to select a ground surface (for the elevation data that will go with the centerline and
cross-sections). Also, specify the “Reach alignment” (the river centerline “Thurman reach”)
and the “Sample line groups” (the cross-sections). Another box for “River name” enables
you to specify the RAS river name. If you created bank polylines (step f) check the box that
says “Check this to use river banks.” Two more check boxes become available, for left and
right banks. As you check each one, Civil 3D expects you to click the polyline in the drawing
that you want to use. Select each bank polyline by keeping in mind that RAS considers left
and right to be from the point of view “looking downstream”.

Click Export and tell CAD where to put the file. (This has already been done for this
workshop. The file BalchCreekFromCAD.geo is in the CADtoRASworkshop\CAD
directory.) Then click OK to close the export window.

*** some additional info about the exported data: ***

RAS and CAD do stationing opposite from each other. CAD was designed for roadways,
and thinks stations need to increase in the direction you draw an alignment. RAS must have
stations decreasing in the downstream direction and cross-sections left to right looking
downstream. RAS provides some capabiity to reverse imported data, but it requires several
steps, and for cross-sections is quite tedious because they must be done one by one.

An Excel spreadsheet macro does all the work with one push of a button. But to be fully
informed, here is what would have to be done in RAS to do all the reversals by hand. The
stream centerline GIS coordinates can be reversed from the GIS Tools pulldown in the
Geometric Data editor. For the cross-sections, the “cut lines” which have GIS coordinates
have to be reversed, also from the GIS Tools pulldown menu. But also, all the station-
elevation data for the cross-sections must be reversed. In the cross-section editor, each cross-
section must also have left and right banks reversed and left and right reach lengths reversed.
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This is why using the spreadsheet macro is much easier and quicker.

One last thing in CAD. Since we want things georeferenced in RAS, you will want to set up
the correct projection and coordinate system in Civil 3D. When you have your drawing up,
go into the Toolspace area on the left of the CAD window, with the Settings tab selected.
Right-click on the drawing name at the top and select Edit Drawing Settings. For your
drawings, by whatever means you create a surface, you will want to set up the proper
projection here. For the Balch Creek drawings you can see it has been set to be NAD83
Washington State Planes, South Zone, US Foot. (Make sure it is in feet so RAS measure tools
will be correct!)

** The procedures in the above involve Civil 3D The remaining use RAS. ***

2. Importing Civil 3D geometry into RAS

a. First, we will use the spreadsheet to fix up the exported data. Open the Excel spreadsheet
“RASflipper.xlsm”. Click the “Flip ‘em!” button and navigate to the exported file
BalchCreekFromCAD.geo. Output is automatically named BalchCreekFromCADFlipt.geo.

b. Start up RAS and create a New project with the Title, “Balch Creek Oregon”. Store it in
the workshop RAS directory. Open the Geometry editor, and from the File pulldown menu,
go to Import Geometry Data, and choose “GIS Format”. Navigate to the CAD directory and
select BalchCreekFromCADFlipt.geo. Using check boxes, RAS allows you to import any
subset of available RAS geometric pieces. We want everything, but for future reference, if
desired, you could import only one or a selection of cross-sections. Don’t import yet, see next
section.

c. Another handy feature of the import window is that you can round off the station names.
Click on the tab for “Cross Sections and IB Nodes”. Left-click on the head of the column of
cross-section station numbers (where it says, “Import As”). This will highlight the entire
column of cross-section station numbers. You will see a box below the Imported RS window
which is labeled “Round Selected RS.” Use the down arrow to select “0 decimal places” and
click the Round button. The highlighted column shows that the import will round river
stations to the nearest foot. (That is plenty close enough!)

d. Next, notice that the little box labeled “Starting RS Value:” has a zero. This is ok, but it
allows you the option to make the most downstream station whatever you want, and all the
cross-section stations will be adjusted from that starting station. We will leave it at zero, and
nothing else needs to be done. But if you wanted to change the starting station, you would
specify that station and then click either button to create river stations in feet or miles. The
stations in the Import As column would show the adjustment. But since we are leaving the
starting station at zero, simply click the button “Finished – Import Data.”

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e. The centerline and cross-sections from CAD are now in RAS. Go to File, Save Geometry
As, and name it “Balch Creek from CAD”. As you look at the geometry data, you will see the
river direction arrow pointing roughly from southwest to northeast. This is the correct flow
direction. From the View pulldown menu, choose View Options, and click the check box for
XS Direction Arrows. The arrows, plotted beside each cross-section, show that RAS correctly
shows that the cross-sections are left to right looking downstream. (You may need to zoom
in to see these arrows.)

3. RAS Mapper preliminaries

a. Open RAS Mapper, either from the GIS Tools pulldown menu or from the icon .
From the Tools pulldown menu, select Set Projection for Project. RAS needs some projection
file from GIS (with a .prj extension). Take note, however, of a possibly confusing issue: The
main project file for RAS is given the .prj extension in RAS, but this is NOT a projection file
from GIS! A file with the correct projection has already been created and stored in the
CADtoRASworkshop\GIS\ directory. Navigate there and select the file “mask.prj”. The
projection info will be shown and you can click OK.

b. In the Mapper layer tree (left column), click the check boxes next to Geometries, Balch
Creek, Rivers, and XS. This turns on the current geometry. Right-click on Map Layers and
select Add Web Imagery layer. (This won’t work if you don’t have a web connection.) Select
Google Satellite and click OK. Click the check box next to Map Layers and expand the Map
Layers tree. You can see that Balch Creek is hidden in trees.

c. Let’s make the river centerline and cross-sections stand out better. Right-click on the
Rivers layer and choose Layer Properties. Play with the Line Style color and width until the
display is what you would prefer. Do the same for the XS layer.

d. Grab the measure tool from the tool icons above the map (looks like a ruler). Play around
with it until you figure out how it works. What is a typical distance between cross-sections in
this Balch Creek model? Leave Mapper open, but go over to the main RAS window and Save
the project.

4. Terrain data

Let’s load terrain data in RAS Mapper. For many projects the Google Satellite imagery
would be very helpful, but here we can’t see the creek for the trees. A terrain raster has been
created (from either CAD or GIS). In RAS, we can’t just import it as is, but must transform it
into a RAS terrain.

a. Click on the check box next to Terrains, then right-click on Terrains and select Create a
new terrain. For this, we will need to have prepared a terrain raster in either CAD or GIS. In
the New Terrain Layer window, click the plus sign button on the left. A browse window

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opens, and you can see, in the lower right, that RAS is expecting you to go find a raster layer,
with an extension such as “.tif”. Go the the CADtoRASworkshop\GIS\terrain directory and
open TiffReach1.tif.

b. In the New Terrain Layer window, notice the Filename box across the bottom. Let’s
rename the new terrain layer. The default is “Terrain.hdf”. Click the folder icon to the right
of the filename box. Navigate to CADtoRASworkshop\RAS\terrains and make the filename
“BalchLiDAR”. Click the Save button. Back in the New Terrain Layer window, click the
Create button. A computation window appears, showing progress. It should successfully
create the terrain. Close the Compute window.

c. Back in RAS Mapper, click off the Google Satellite image, and you will see the new terrain.
Close Mapper and save the RAS project. Open the Geometry Editor and click the
Background icon from the top bar of icons. Notice that check boxes exist for either Plot
Terrain or Google Satellite. RAS version 5.0 can be a bit flakey with the background display.
Either background box may be checked but not show up. You may be able to click off the
terrain check box and close the Background window. Reopen the Background window and
click back on the Plot Terrain check box. It should now show up. Sometimes we can help
RAS get straightened out by closing the whole program and reopening.

d. See if you can get the terrain to show up in the Geometry as a background. Similarly to
RAS Mapper, here in the Geometry window, we might want to edit line styles and/or colors.
From the Edit pulldown, select Lines and Symbols. First, click the Default Line Styles radio
button. Then change the Schem River line and the Schem XS line to make them more visible
with the terrain. (If you don’t makes the edits in Default Line Styles the changes will be
active only for this RAS session.)

5. unFlipped xsec station-elev data

a. Zoom in to the upstream end of the reach. Go get the Cross-Section editor, and notice that
in the section plot, RAS shows the current terrain behind the section. Use the down arrow
button to scroll through a number of cross-sections. You can see that the cross-section line is
tracking with the terrain. What if we had not flipped the data?

b. Close the Cross Section editor. Make a new Geometry by importing the unFlipped data.
In the Geometry editor, go to File, Import… (similarly to 2b above, except choose the
unflipped .geo file “BalchCreekFromCAD.geo”. Round of the stations, similarly to 2c. To
not overwrite our correct data, we need to save the file by another name. Go File, Save
Geometry As, and title it “Balch Creek from CAD unFlipt”.

c. Now zoom in to the upper end and open the cross-section data editor. The terrain plot
appears to be a mirror image of the cross-section. The stations are increasing in the upstream
direction, but the reach flow direction arrow is backward. This shows why you want to use
the flipper Excel file when importing a CAD .geo file.