Creating a Watershed and Water Drop Analysis

This tutorial demonstrates how to create two kinds of surface analysis: watershed and water drop.

You use watershed analysis, which is one of several types of analysis that you can perform on a surface, to visualize and analyze the surface watersheds. You use water drop analysis, which is a separate utility, to trace the path that water would take across a surface. This tutorial includes the following general steps:

• Configuring the watershed display and legend settings.
• Configuring and creating a watershed analysis.
• Inserting the watershed legend table.
• Extracting objects from a surface.
• Configuring and creating a water drop analysis.
• Creating a catchment area.

Autodesk Civil 3D uses the surface TIN lines to calculate the areas that water would flow along the surface. From these areas, the drain targets and watersheds are determined.

Other types of surface analysis include slope, aspect, elevations, and contours.