From the Ground Up

Preparing MX and 12D data for editing in InfraWorks 360

InfraWorks 360 2016 now supports editing of more complex geometry from imported Civil 3D strings, however there are still some limitations and rules that need to be adhered to in order to edit the IP geometry handles, especially when importing geometry from an external package such as MX or 12D.

Image below showing Imported Road Geometry warning message

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The case in point involves converting MX Genio data into InfraWorks 360, whilst still providing the ability to manipulate that geometry in InfraWorks.

Horizontal Geometry

Here are just a few rules that need to be adhered to in order to achieve the desired results:

• Horizontal alignment needs to be IP method only (no floating curves)
• Cannot have floating curves at the start or end of the alignment string – Inserting a short length of straight at the start/end fixes this
• Cannot have compound or reverse curves – needs a small straight between curves to allow editing in IW360
• Lines need to ‘Not Constrained (Fixed)’, whilst the curves need to be ‘Constrained on Both Sides (Free)’
• Parameter Constraints should be unlocked

To setup an imported MX geometry string for InfraWorks processing, the following steps are required:

• Import alignments into Civil 3D via Genio module (or LandXML)
• Select the alignment and select ‘Alignment Properties’

 

 

 

• In the ‘Point of Intersection’ tab, select ‘By change in alignment direction’

 

 

 

• In the ‘Constraint Editing’ tab, swap the default settings to match the image below
• Check ‘Always perform implied tangency constraint swapping’
• Uncheck ‘Lock all parameter constraints’

 

• Select ‘Geometry editor’ from the context-sensitive ribbon

 

 

• Alignment Grid View

• Lines need to be ‘Not Constrained (Fixed)’, whilst the curves need to be ‘Constrained on Both Sides (Free)’

• When selecting the alignment, note the IP’s are now displayed with a grey triangular grip. Hover over this grip and select ‘Solve PI’.
• The PI is now cyan, indicating we have now converted the line-curve-line to an IP method.
• Repeat this process for all PI’s

 

Grey PI grip before solving                                          Blue PI grip after solving

              

Vertical Geometry

Vertical geometry is similar to horizontal in that the geometry needs to be designed using IP methods (no floating curves)

To setup an imported MX geometry string for InfraWorks processing, the following steps are required:

• In MX, export the vertical geometry as a VERAT file (not VALGN)
• Edit the verat file to remove headers and commas, rename as a *.txt file

Original VERAT file Edited                  VERAT file for Civil 3D (commas removed)

              

• In Civil 3D, from the Home tab in the ribbon, ‘Create Profile from File‘
• Select the edited VERAT file (*.txt)
• Select the alignment to associate the profile to the horizontal

 

• This creates a profile in your profile view, but the type is set to an imported file (which does not allow editing in I360). We need this to be set to a layout profile before importing to InfraWorks 360

 

• In the Prospector, select the alignment and profile, right-click and select ‘Export LandXML…’

 

 

 

 

 

• Write the profile out to a LandXML file, and re-import into a new or existing drawing

 

 

 

 

• On the ‘Insert’ tab on the ribbon, select ‘LandXML’ and select the LandXML file created previously.

 

 

 

 

This creates the vertical geometry that InfraWorks 360 will then be able to read back and allow editing of VIP’s and vertical curve lengths.

We then only need to add the Civil 3D drawing as a data source into InfraWorks 360 and voila’ – editable handles in both horizontal and vertical space.

Regards

Andrew

Civil 3D User Group UK (Save the date)

Tuesday 14th July we will be holding a Civil 3D User group evening meeting in the Autodesk offices in Sheffield

Registration and agenda will go live in the coming weeks.

We are looking to extend our user group and add more locations over this year and returning to Manchester and adding London and Bristol hopefully in September.

The group will be rebranding from MCUG to CUG UK to support this move.

We are always looking for project presentations and those interested in joining the committee to help support more region locations moving forward

We look forward to seeing those users in the North East area of the UK !!

Project Boulder - Flood analysis and simulation for InfraWorks 360

Just released on Labs for your feedback is Project Boulder for flood analysis and simulation

Read the blog from Scott Sheppard on the topic and click the image above for a direct link to join the project

http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/2015/05/project-boulder-for-infraworks-360-available-via-autodesk-labs.html

 

I have done a quick test with the capability and had results in minutes.

I live in Shrewsbury, UK where we have the River Severn run through the town.

The water flows from the Welsh mountains and creates massive flood problems almost every year in Shrewsbury and other locations down its path.

 

This video I run a flood simulation on data provided from the free Ordnance Survey Open data and then compare to a surface where I have combined a topo survey and sonar scan of the river bed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U2cPjJKg7I&feature=youtu.be

 

This video is the shortened version of just the simulation on the accurate surface and against a point cloud of the area (its an old scan, so no colour)

http://youtu.be/EKDpYG9SwHk

/Jack Strongitharm

From the Ground Up - Blog rebrand and new authors

You will have noticed its not just me blogging posts on here recently.

So I refreshed the blog page and below are the two new Autodesk bloggers to bring their experience and skills to this blog.

Andrew Milford – From down under in Australia.  Technical Specialist for Civil Infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand

Cristina Savian – Geospatial Technical Specialist for Northern Europe countries.  Originally from Turin, Italy.

Jack Strongitharm – still stuck with me, Technical Account Manager focused on supporting some of our largest clients in the world for all Autodesk products

/Jack Strongitharm

Civil 3D 2016 – Transitions

Coming from non-Civil 3D background, one of the first things that troubled me when migrating across was a simple earthworks modelling issue – ‘How do I transition a simple batter slope from 2:1 to 5:1 across a range of x metres?’

I mean, this is something that is common practice within the industry, right? One thing I learned early in my design career is that no two linear metres of road are identical.

After some digging around and looking into multiple ways to achieve this, I soon came to discover the absolute marvel that is the ‘Subassembly Composer’ (SC). This program ships with Civil 3D (from 2013 onwards), and simply lets you create (nearly) any kind of subassembly you can possibly imagine – with the added bonus of being able to apply intelligence to these subassemblies.

Here’s how I like to approach this. If you have installed the ANZ Country Kit in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2016, you will notice on the ‘Assemblies ANZ’ tab on the tool palette, there are a few new tools for ‘BatterTransition’ and ‘NumberTransform’ (more to come on that one).

 

This subassembly was written in a few minutes pretty much as a learning tool for myself to get into the SC. It does, however, provide amazing depth and flexibility when you start to consider not only the predefined tools in the toolbox but the ability to use API functionality within the SC and also from the .NET math class.

The key to transitioning a value across the range of a region comes through the expression

((Baseline.Station - Baseline.RegionStart) /(baseline.RegionEnd - Baseline.RegionStart)) * slopei

Where ‘slopei’ is the delta slope value calculated from ‘Value at End’ – ‘Value at Start’

In order to apply the batter subassembly, and not end up with a roadway corridor full of excessive non-necessary regions, I took an approach of firstly building a roadway corridor out to the edge of hinge.

From this point I extract the hinge string using the ‘Create Feature Lines From Corridor’ command from the Home tab on the ribbon, making sure the hinge line extracted maintains a dynamic link to the corridor (and making sure the Smoothing option is turned off as this creates extra vertices around any alignment curves)

Now that the feature string is linked to the mainline corridor, we can go about setting up an additional corridor to handle just the earthworks. To do this we setup a new assembly with a generic ‘LinkWidthAndSlope’ subassembly and set the parameters like below

Point Code – none

Link Codes – none

• Omit Link – Yes (this is critical)

 

 

 

We then attach the ‘BatterTransition’ subassembly to the previous link. We can then change the values to suit our requirements (I’ve used 2:1 to 5:1)

 

 

 

Looking at the whole assembly now, we see our hidden link (which I have relabelled to ‘SubString’) and the batter slope.

We can now create our earthworks corridor and assign some targets as follows (I’ve called the corridor ‘<Corridor> – Batters’ just to keep the roadway and batter corridors close in the prospector).

We just need to ensure that the Width and Elevation targets are set to the hinge string that we created dynamic to the corridor. In the image below, I have set the first range between Stn 700-750. This forces the batter to transition from 2:1 to 5:1 between these stations

As you can see, a smoothly transitioned slope!

To finish off the batter slopes, we simply need to copy the batter transition assembly to create our various types, including constant slopes. In this example I have simply setup a 2:1 constant, a 5:1 constant and a 2:1-5:1 transition.

We now use Civil 3D’s corridor context-sensitive menu to ‘Add Regions’, Copy Regions’, ‘Match Parameters’ and ‘Region Properties’ to add in the rest of the earthworks adjacent to the roadway.

Personally, I have found that copying the initial region using the ‘Copy Region’ command and the changing the region’s assembly using the ‘Region Properties’ to be a much faster way of applying multiple batter slope regions throughout a corridor. This is only due to the new Civil 3D 2015 feature of automatically reassigning similar targets (i.e. I don’t have to go through and assign the hinge feature line targets repeatedly)

Copy Region (2:1 to 5:1 batter slope)           

Region Properties changed to 2:1 constant slope

What I love about this approach is:

1. Once you have a few batters in place, sliding them around is a simple case of selecting a grip and sliding it to its new location (i.e. no dialogs or text editing).
2. Should the mainline corridor move for some reason, that linked feature string we extracted - acting as a subsidiary - will ensure that the batter slope corridor remains linked to the roadway, and we now have a fully dynamic corridor that also offers excellent performance.
3. Separating the batters from the roadway minimises the amount of regions required for the roadway corridor.

Perspective view of a batter transition.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to what the Subassembly Composer can do! Once you start to play around with it, you will soon realise that anything can be modelled within Civil 3D using corridors.

Regards

Andrew

From the Ground Down Under – Greetings from ANZ

Being new to Autodesk, Jack has invited me to post on his blog, which I hope to be able to share with you some tips, tricks and processes from my time spent in the civil infrastructure industry.

Before I begin posting, I thought I’d share a bit about myself first…

I have recently joined Autodesk (just celebrated 1 year) as an Infrastructure Technical Specialist, and am responsible for adoption of Autodesk's Infrastructure Solutions across Australia and New Zealand, with a particular focus on the civil design component.

Prior to joining Autodesk I have spent over 20 years in the civil infrastructure industry as a geometric road designer, having worked for some of the country’s largest consultants working on some of Australia's biggest road projects – from the earliest conceptual planning stages through to the detailed design and beyond.

Having used Autodesk products for over 20 years now (starting with AutoCAD R11), I enjoy diving deep into AutoCAD Civil 3D to develop and automate processes as much as possible through the likes of scripts, AutoLISP and the the .net API.

Regards

Andrew