From the Ground Up

Autodesk BIM for Infrastructure - Transportation

Take a look at our latest web site pages with lots of resources on the topic of BIM for Infrastructure.

Also some interviews with some of our users

www.autodesk.co.uk/transportation

 

 

Jack Strongitharm

Geotechnica UK 2012

Last week I had the opportunity to join Keynetix, our geotechnical Industry Partners, at the Geotechnica 2012 event in Banbury. It is not often that I get to attend shows held in a marquee in the middle of a field and with all the rain we have had over the last few weeks it had a certain festival mud feeling to it.

From left to right (Roger Chandler, Jack Strongitharm (Me), Gary Morin)

Dr Roger Chandler, managing director at Keynetix, made a presentation on the first day which covered a number of geotechnical data management mistakes that you must avoid at all cost and I was pleased to see that one of this top 5 mistakes was “Ignoring BIM”

The geotechnical community is rapidly coming to terms with the advantages that BIM can offer it and it was interesting to see a geotechnical perspective on BIM models like the one below where there is no reference to the ground surface let alone what is below it.

Things are never that easy underground as the next example illustrates. This model was created in Civil 3D with the help of the Keynetix KeyHOLE product.

If you would like to learn more you can register for the replay of the presentation at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/923759296 or watch the YouTube video of KeyHOLE in action in AutoCAD Civil 3D at http://youtu.be/3bMC951PDBo

 

Jack Strongitharm

Guest post follow up - GENIO Alignments Import & (re)Export

I've had some comments related to my previous post. Specifically they relate to importing alignments, making some edits and re-exporting them again.

As I said in my earlier post, this is not a workflow that the extension was designed to support, but since the question seems increasingly common I thought I would further detail the rationale here.

Because of differences in support and logic in the way alignments are calculated the only way Civil 3D can guarantee to accurately represent alignments from GENIO is to create all elements, including spirals as 'fixed' elements. If we didn't follow that route then we would be certain to at least change the geometry slightly and if we looked to calculate tangency from the geometry we may calculate a substantially different alignment. It's also possible we not be able to resolve tangency and have to reject the alignment completely.

Note that neither GENIO, nor the MX modelfile store the logic, nor input data by which the alignment was created.

Because the result in Civil 3D is an alignment with all elements fixed, you cannot re-export many of these alignment to MX, because MX has no concept of a fixed spiral. It is however possible for a Civil 3D (2012 and later) user to edit the alignment element fixity and recalculate the curve, spiral tangency in order to export back to MX.

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 SP2

Service pack 2 for Civil 3D 2012 just has been released...

It can be found here

This Service Pack includes all previous hotfixes and service packs for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012. It also includes the fixes included in AutoCAD 2012 Service Pack 2 and AutoCAD Map 3D 2012 Service Pack 2.