Intersection Wizard Tip

I was working with a cutomer yesterday on some corridor issues.  When I cam across something that I had really not thought about.  The issue was that the customer’s corridor was superelevated along its entire length, except for a short section at the beginning of the alignment.  When the customer created his intersections using the intersection wizard in Civil 3D, the corresponding section of the corridor had a normal crown. 

My first thought was that we were going to have to update the profile for, in this case, the left edge of pavement to match the calculated profile based on the design cross slope.  But, then I got to thinking about the settings in the intersection wizard and I remembered the Lane Slope Parameters section.  I checked the settings for the Primary Road and the lane slope was set to -2.00% each direction.  I adjusted the left side slope to 2.00% and Voila!  The model acted as the designer had intended.

 

 

Volume Dashboard for AutoCAD Civil 3d 2012

A new tool for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 users has been released on the Subscription Center today!  This new tool is the Volume Dashboard.  Here is the link to a video demo of the add-on.  Check it out, go to the Subscription Center, download the application and happy volume computing!

 

Web Training Coming Up Soon

This is hot off the presses this afternoon.  I will be leading two web-based courses in AutoCAD Civil 3D on November 18, 2010.  This will be the first such offerings for me as an Application Engineer at Applied Technology Group.  Come and join us as we discuss a couple of topics that I find fascinating.  The first topic that we will cover will be the creation of a surface.  No, this is not going to be your average create surface, right-click add point groups, etc…. I think that it is important that we understand how the software builds the surface.  What routine is being used?  Where did it come from?

The second class that day will look at grading in Civil 3D.  There are many different ways to grade in Civil 3D and this class will look at some of those options.  By the end of the class you should be familiar with the grading tools in Civil 3D and be able to apply the different methods to your projects.

If you are interested in these topics, please follow this link for more information and to register.

 

Another New Beginning

There is an old saying that all good things must come to an end.  Another saying that I have heard for a long time is that the only thing that is constant in this world is change.  We are human and change is one of the scariest issues that we deal with in life.  Well, enough of that.

I am excited about a new beginning that happened for me and a couple of my colleagues in the last week or so.  Lana Giessinger, Margie Purvis and I have begun working with Applied Technology Group out of Little Rock, AR.  I think we are all excited about this newest chapter in our careers.  You will be hearing more about the goings on at Applied Technology Group, or ATG for short, in the near future.

 

Working with Contours in AutoCAD Civil 3D

Have you ever created a surface in Civil 3D and wondered how in the world can I calculate the area at a particular elevation?  Well, if the elevation falls on the contour interval, that task is rather easy.  Extract the contour line from the surface as a polyline and list it.  What if the elevation does not fall on the contour interval?  The process is similar, you just have to create a user contour.

Creating a User Contour is fairly simple.  If you can do a slope or elevation analysis in your surface, you can create User Contours.  The first thing to do is create the surface.

This surface could represent a pond or ground feature.  Let’s assume that you needed to know the area at a 52.5 elevation.  Open up the Surface Properties and go to the Analysis Tab.  On the Surface Analysis tab, change the analysis type to User-Defined Contours, set the number of ranges, or user-defined elevations that you want to create and run the analysis.  When the range is created you may have to manually adjust the elevation for the user-defined contour.

After running the analysis and changing the elevation of the contour, go back to the Information tab.  On the information tab we need to edit the surface style so that the user-defined contour is displayed in the style.

After turning on the visibility of the user contours, we can click OK and close the dialog box.  This should regenerate the surface and show the user-defined contour based on the applied surface style.

You can see in the image above that the user contour is yellow-orange and of a dashed linetype.  Now, in my opinion, the easiest way to get the area of that contour is to extract a polyline from the surface.  Click on the Modify Tab of the ribbon and then click on Surface.  This will open up the contextual surface ribbon.  On the Surface Tools panel you will see the Extract Objects command.  Click on the Icon to initiate the command.

In this case we only want the user contours, so we will deselect the other check boxes.  This will create a polyline from the user contour that we can then list to get the area.  Creating user contours can also be beneficial if you are using the stage/storage tool as it will add the elevation into the table when computing the volumes.

 

This Has to be One of the Best New Features for 2011

If you dig back through the archives of this blog, you will find an entry on creating transparent hatches using a combination of Civil 3D and Map 3D.  You may recall that in Civil 3D we created our hatch areas on separate layers and used the SHRINKWRAP command to combine the hatch boundaries into a single entity.  After that we exported the hatch boundaries to a .sdf format and opened Map 3D.

In Map 3D we themed the hatch boundaries and controled the transparency through the style in Map 3D.  Then we used the FDO Connection to attach the .sdf to our drawing in Civil 3D and changed the MAPPLOTTRANSPARENCY variable to get our plotters to produce the transparent plot that we needed.  This was a lot of time-consuming steps, but it was a good workaround for producing exhibits for public hearings or Planning Commission meetings.  At last, we were able to convey our thoughts with colored areas on maps which was easier to understand than a set of engineered drawings.

It has taken a couple of releases, but the developers at Autodesk have finally given us a tool that we have been asking for.  Now, it is easier than ever to create a transparent hatch.  the example that I am going to use is of a Master Plan for a small development.  The development consists of high, medium and low density single family zoning, commercial and open space zoning.  All of these will be denoted by a different color hatch.  The Master Plan looks like the following in its infancy.

As you can see in the image above, I have created some parcels with a solid hatch pattern, each one colored based on the zoning.  So, now we need to make the hatches transparent so that we can see the image below.  In this case, I have established a layer for each hatch.  I did this because there may be times when we need a different level of transparency for different hatches.  (OK…..I hope you caught the hint!)

The hint was Layers!  The transparency is controlled by layers in 2011!  Why am I having “Shrek” flashbacks?  And moving along…..  If you take a look at the Layer Properties Manager you will see a new column associated to your layer properties.  That column is the layer transparency.

You will also notice that the default is zero(0).  This means that the layer is not transparent.  To change the level of transparency, click in the transparency column for the layer that you want to adjust and enter the value in the dialog box, or choose a value from the drop-down menu.  It is that easy.  For this case I chose the Medium Density Single Family zoning and increased the transparency to 60.  Here are the results.

 

The next question that usually arises is, “Well, that is great on my display, but can I plot the transparent hatch?”  The good news is yes you can plot the transparent hatch.  Make sure that when you are ready to plot your drawing that you enable the plot transparency switch in the Plot dialog box.

Transparent hatches are that simple!  No more exporting to .sdf and connecting to the .sdf with the FDO connection.  We can do them all inside of Civil 3D!  Happy Hatching!

 

Just Announced…..

The Raster Design Object Enabler for 2011 has been posted at the Autodesk website.  There are two flavors depending which software version you have installed, 32-bit or 64-bit.

Download it here.

 

Welcome to the New Home of Getting to the Dirt!

Well, you have found it.  This is the new home for Getting to the Dirt.  I hope you like the new digs.  My intent here is to contiune to bring you tidbits of information from Civil 3D.  If you would like to be notified via email of a new post on this site, just click on the “Sign Me Up” button to the right!

 

The Conditional Subassembly – Could it be Right for You?

I want to start this post by giving credit to Jason Hickey at Autodesk Support for suggesting that I look into the use of the Conditional Subassembly when trying to assist one of my customers a couple of weeks ago. I have to say what an asset Jason and the rest of the Civil 3D support team are! Thanks guys.

So, what is this Conditional Subassembly anyway? Well, if you ever had a course in computer programming you may remember the “If, Then” statement that placed conditions on your routine. (i.e. If x>0, then y=3x^2…) The Conditional Subassembly does the same thing for your Assembly and corridor model. The Conditional Subassembly comes in two varieties, one that targets horizontal alignments while the other targets cut/fill situations. (Note: for the rest of this post we will be looking at the Conditional Cut/Fill Subassembly.) There is no limit to the number of Conditional Subassemblies that can be applied to the Assembly. One of the neat things that you can do with this subassembly is apply it to other conditional subassemblies.

So, with a little planning and forethought upfront, you may be able to model a corridor with 1 or 1 assemblies instead of 5 or 6 or more. If you are an outside the box kind of thinker, then the possibilities of applying the conditional subassembly could be endless.

The hardest thing to overcome when using the conditional subassembly is that the subassembly requires a Length and Slope as parameters. The length and slope are only used to place the conditional subaseembly and any subassemblies to be applied for that condition graphically on the screen, instead of having all of them stacked on top of each other. This makes selecting and editing the individual conditions easier for the user. Again, these length and slope parameters are not specifying a length and slope from the attachment point to a point where the subassemblies will be applied, but just placing them on the screen. The subassemblies will be applied at the connection point of the conditional subassembly.OK, now that I have described the conditional subassembly, let’s take a look at how we can apply it. Let’s assume that we have a roadway that we are designing or needing to model. We will build an assembly as usual, but when we get out to the daylight area we will have a couple of decisions to make. Let’s assume that along our roadway if we have to cut more than three feet from the elevation at the edge of the outside boulevard of the sidewalk that we will be required to construct a retaining wall along our roadway. If we were to design this roadway without using the conditional assembly, it is conceivable that we could do this with one assembly, assuming that the height of wall and amount of cover are adjusted so that the retaining wall subassembly is not applied in areas where our cut is less than 3 feet from the outside boulevard elevation.

But, our goal here is to make this as simple as possible. By applying the conditional subassembly we can define what happens in areas of cut from 0.00′ to 3.00′ above the outside boulevard elevation and then again for anything above 3.00′ of cut. We will also define what happens in the fill situation. The roadway will be a typical two-lane road using the LaneOutsideSuper and UrbanCurbGutterGeneral subassemblies. We will then apply the UrbanSidewalk subassembly with an inside boulevard of 2.5′, sidewalk width of 4′, depth of 4″, an outside boulevard width of 1.5′ and a slope of 2%.

Our assembly should resemble the image above. Now will will add the first conditional cut/fill subassembly to the right side. On the tool palette click on the conditional tab and then select the ConditionalCutOrFill subassembly. The Properties dialog will open and look something like this:

Notice the parameters for Layout Width and Layout Grade. These are the parameters that are going to locate the Conditional Cut or Fill subassembly in relation to the edge of the outside boulevard of our sidewalk subassembly. We are going to enter a Layout Width of 20 and a Layout Grade of 1:1. Then we will change the Maximum Distance to 2.99′ and attach this subassembly to the marker at the right edge of the Outside Boulevard. Then we will add the BasicSideSlopeCutDitch Subassembly to the end of the CondtionalCutOrFill Subassembly after changing the parameters for the Cut Ditch subassembly by reducing the Foreslope and Backslope widths to 0.00 and the slope for the Cut to 3:1. The result looks like this:

Next we will add the condition for our retaining wall and the fill condition. When you are trying to figure out what the Layout Length and Layout Grade needs to be for your conditional subassembly, if it is a cut situation the parameters input will place the conditional subassembly above a horizontal projection from the connection point. If it is a fill condition that you are establishing, it will place the conditional below the horizontal projection from the connection point. So, after adding in the conditional subassemblies and copying all of the assemblies to the left side of our Assembly, we should have something like this:

Now we can create our corridor model and set the target for all of the daylight assemblies to Existing Ground. There may be a need to change how often the assembly is applied to the corridor to help get an accurate location for the transition from from a cut slope to the retaining wall. If you have those stations established, you could just add them in as supplemental stations.

After the corridor has been created, we can look at the corridor sections to see if the corridor model applied the conditions correctly. Below are some screen captures from the station immediately prior to transitioning to the retaining wall and from the retaining wall to a cut section.

Happy Modeling!

 

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011

Last week Autodesk officially announced its 2011 portfolio of products. Some of those products are available on the Subscription Center. With this year’s releases, downloading from the Subscription Center is the primary way to get you software now. But, you can click on a link there and request media.

Now, I don’t have a lot of time this morning but, I want to leave you with one thing about the upcoming release………..64-bit! Yes, that is right. This year’s release of AutoCAD Civil 3d will be released in 32-bit and 64-bit.

I will be posting some more information in the coming days.