BIM on the Rocks

New Year’s Do-Over

Tomorrow is February 1, but I am going to start my year over. Taking a mulligan on the month of January. I am not sure how, but I completely missed the start of the New Year. I’m not just talking about the normal New Year that falls about a month ago, but the New Year of the CAD Calendar which begins the day after you get home from AU. (Let’s be honest- the Monday after you get home from AU.)

I did pretty well with my list from last year, and crossed off a few items that had carried over from 2008. I figured since the baby was turning two in 2009, it was probably pretty safe to stop gaining a pound a week like my doctor had recommended in 2007. I managed to lose about half of what I’d like to, and got into the habit of exercising. I passed the P.E. in October (after a bit of a false start in April.) It still feels a little strange writing Dana Probert, P.E., but I’m getting used to it.

I read a ton of books, listened to a ton of books, went camping, did crafts with the kids, threw endless tennis balls into the lake for my dogs and even turned off twitter now and again. I had some once in a lifetime opportunities to visit new places like Frankfurt, Prague, Australia and New Zealand. I took a short trip to Raleigh to see Hazen and Sawyer and came back with a full moleskine and a totally new view of BIM in the Civil and Wastewater space.

We managed to finally buy a bigger house- which means the tech bucket of stuff and stacks of obsolete laptops now have their own room instead of doubling as end tables. (Speaking of which, if you are looking for a place to live near Millsboro, Delaware, you can rent my old house Here’s a map. Your office could be in the very room where I wrote my parts of Mastering Civil 3D 2008, Mastering Civil 3D 2009, Introducing Civil 3D 2009 and the blog post that started all this hoopla. Think about it.)

Sometime around October, I developed a case of the “just get through”s. If I could just get through finding a house I can afford. If I can get through getting the banks to accept our short sale offer. If I can just get through another delayed closing… Thanksgiving… Autodesk University… One more trip to Manchester… Christmas… etc.. etc.. then things will calm down. Only then could I neatly tie 2009 with a pretty bow, stick it under the tree, open it up and enjoy it for the crazy roller coast ride that it was.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Everything that was in the air as I juggled what seemed like a million important things came together neatly, but right before Christmas we got some news that came from nowhere. Here I was thinking I had it all figured out, and really, I now wonder if I have ever really known anything. All of the drama of work, moving, preparation for holidays, and whatever else all suddenly seemed incredibly superficial and easy.

So after a few weeks on autopilot- working at making the new house a home, getting the old place adopted by a new family, enjoying the first winter I’ve had on the Eastern Shore where we could build not one, not two but THREE non-muddy snowmen, and gearing up for the Spring software frenzy, I am finally ready to embrace 2010.

Louisa’s resolution list the other day reminded me of all goals I want to accomplish this year from a career perspective.

So here goes…

1. Ask myself every week- Am I serving my personal mission? What can I do to stay on course?
2. Read as much as I can. And finish David Copperfield already!
3. Blog more (3 a week). Record more narrated demonstrations and tutorials to post to youtube (1 per week).
4. Under no circumstances will I allow myself to be talked into teaching more than one class at AU. Yeah right.
5. Spend time each day digging into subjects like stormwater management, flood analysis, wastewater collection
6. Attend as many industry conferences (like StormCon) and ULI local events as possible.
7. Work through one 3DS Max Design and/or Dynamite VSP tutorial per week.
8. Listen more, talk less.
9. More turtle, less hare.
10. Never forget my security badge when I go on a trip to an Autodesk office.

Using a Pipe Network Tools to Create a Rising Main

What’s that? The Spanish Main? No, a rising main. In the US, we’d say a forcemain, or pressure pipe.

One of my top 100 New Zealanders of all time, Peter Thomson of MWH (as featured in Peter Thomson on Pipes) sent me a video yesterday showing his technique for creating a rising main. I met Peter in person (finally!) at teamblue22’s Civil 3D University this summer.

Some notes about this video:

1. He uses Civil 3D 2008, but we will forgive him for that.
2. He says “Long Section” when we really know he means Profile. (cough)
3. His styles are worth noticing
4. I could listen to this video all day long. In fact, I listened it most of today on repeat.

Peter’s method is just one of many workflows floating around in practice today. Also check out:

Using a corridor to model forcemains and pressure pipe

Wastewater: Tools to Help Layout Sanitary Pipelines

Make Profile Views and Labels for the Designer

When I worked in engineering firms, we were discouraged from making design marks in the CAD files. I remember several occasions where I used polylines to measure out areas, made extra alignments to get a better view of the surface and created endless “_Dana-test” layers in the base plan. It would usually only take a few minutes before the CAD manager was over at my desk with his/her fingers jabbing towards my eyes.

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the things I always wanted to do was make one big long profile that followed the whole run of water down to my outlet. This would have been a lot of work, so instead we just cut our little perfect 24X36 profiles and worked there- wasting plenty of time and brainpower that could have been used to optimize the design. Instead, I spent it fiddling with perfect labels and keeping a big stack of notes on paper next to my keyboard.

This is a project I did a few years ago with some clients (forgive the really bad screen colors, I decided to give my color OCD the day off today):

The profiles for review and construction would be cut along the streets, but since the site had huge fall from north to south, and where the connection points were and things like that- the main controlling line followed a path something like this:

 

Before I even figured out where my exhibit or plan/profile sheet profile views would be cut, I made a series of long alignments that followed my probable pipe locations, and began working in very large profile views that would make the CAD managers of yore burn a hole through their desk with the electric eraser.

It is a lot easier to get used to the graphical and model style design and editing in Civil 3D if you take advantage of looking at things from different angles. I had been trained to design pipes in spreadsheet form, and I still do sometimes. One thing I really wanted the Prospector and Panorama windows to do was to act like a spreadsheet and it made me mad that they didn’t. That was, until I had the “OH YEAH” moment of making as many big, long, giant pipe profile views as I wanted and tweaking slopes and inverts there.

Once I cut my little paper sized profile views that followed the road alignments, any changed I make in the big, long, giant profile view carry over immediately.

Civil 3D can have multiple profile views for the same alignment- like these two examples. I needed one exhibit to have detailed labels and light linework for the bedrock depths and another to be more of an exhibit for the bedrock. Note that not only are there different labels, grid frequencies, etc. but also different vertical scales.

I created the above hatched profile view using Civil 3D 2010: Profile Hatch and the surfaces I made in: Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part I and Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part II .

Don’t forget to take advantage of labels every place you can. The old days of CAD management meant that labeling got in the way. Now, you can data shortcut in your model information and have your own private sandbox for making labels that tell you the designer what to do. Same with styles, colors, etc. When I did this project, I made a little flickr album with some pipe labeling and trenching ideas.

Other ideas for labels you can add:

Making hydraulic calculation labels from Tony's Civil 3D World

More to come on this, along with some specific steps on creating some of these labels.

Watching the Model React

Yesterday I wrote a short post about taking advantage of Set Viewports to split your screen. I found a video I recorded last year for another project that really tells the story about how you can see the model in action if you work this way. Now of course these are simplified examples, but I really want you to think about how you work right now. Do you find ways to “see” what is happening? Do you take advantage of getting that live feedback on volumes, quantities, elevations?

I’m working on a post that talks about something I used in Civil 3D in practice that isn’t quite as pretty, but incredibly useful.

In a lot of jurisdictions, you show your pipe profiles along a road centerline. This might be good for review and construction, but it stinks for design.

You have a network like this and you wind up cutting your profiles like so:

When you really want to design along your most critical trunk or other long stretches. Something like this:

To make it worse, you usually wind up making those profiles the perfect size to fit on 24X36 paper.

I will write more about it tomorrow around lunchtime. I have a date to watch last night’s LOST here in a few, and tomorrow morning is pet day at kindergarten. I have to get up early and figure out which of my dogs is likely to do the least amount of damage to a room full of five year olds.

Splitting Your Screen

When working with Civil 3D, it is often incredibly useful to split your screen into two or more viewports. Now, for many of you this is something you’ve been doing for years, but whenever I teach a class or give a talk I always have one person shyly raise their hand and ask about. So just in case there are folks out there who don’t know how to split their screen, here’s how:

Switch to the View tab, and pull down Set Viewports.

 

While you can use Civil 3D and keep working the same way you always have, it is more effective (and far more fun) to start seeing that design model in action. When you split your screen, you can work through more design options and actually see your results.

Don’t limit yourself to labels, styles, profiles and sections that will just appear on your finished plans. Why not make some that help you as the designer do your job better? Give you more feedback? Then, the “pretty” ones that plot will update at the same time either in the current drawing or use data shortcuts or Vault to feed the sheet drawings. Tomorrow, I’ll have an example of this in action with pipe networks.

Also learn about:

Using Named Views

More Conceptual Design: Using Surface Analysis for Pole Placement

Yesterday I talked about how I was working on some visuals to accompany a story for Public Works (magazine and online) about how El Dorado County DOT uses Civil 3D. One thing the story talks about is how Civil 3D helped the DOT figure out where to place utility poles.

Now, I am not going to claim that I know all of the complicated details involved in utility pole placement, so my example is simplified and designed to give you some ideas on how to leverage Civil 3D tools in your design process. You could be trying to optimize the placement of poles to avoid steep slopes, showing the impact of a new project on existing homes, or identifying street signs that will need to be replaced. Or almost anything else.

Using the corridor and conceptual existing ground from yesterday, I ran a surface slope analysis on my corridor surface. Let’s say I wanted to avoid placing poles in areas that exceeded a certain slope. In the image below, the green areas would be ideal placement locations. With my screen split between plan, profile and section, I can place 3D pole blocks in plan, then use objection to project the pole block onto my section view. I can work through several alternatives, moving the poles and/or changing my road design and the model will update to show me my progress.

Related Links:

Road Design Basics with Civil 3D Whitepaper

Road Reconstruction with Civil 3D Whitepaper

Rule-Based Road Design with Civil 3D Whitepaper 

Creating a Surface Analysis in Civil 3D

Visualize Your Surface Analysis (I used conceptual visual style in the capture above)

Civil 3D 2010 Object Projection to Profile and Section

Conceptual Road Design Ideas

Last week I was working on some visuals to accompany a story for Public Works (magazine and online) about how El Dorado County DOT uses Civil 3D, and it gave me some ideas for conceptual road design.

For many road projects, the engineer must work through several alternatives very early in the process and present them to a seemingly infinite number of stakeholders. They work with transportation planners, local elected officials, other agencies… and of course an endless stream of public workshops, public hearings, council hearings, etc. There are many documents to create- Environmental Impact Studies, Traffic Impact Studies, Regional Planning documents, and more.

A quick internet search led me to some sample exhibits for major projects that provided a lot of food for thought on how we can use Civil 3D to understand each alternative better and give the stakeholders more information to help make their decisions. The MoDOT website had some particularly easy to find exhibits (note that I do not know what they used to create these exhibits, they are just publicly available examples to get ideas from.)

An exhibit showing a preferred alternative

An exhibit showing impacts, land owners and right of way

Here are just a few ideas to get us thinking:

I started out with a terrain model. Depending on how conceptual you want to be, you could just grab a surface from Google Earth, download some contour shape data or a DEM, use aerial topography or surveyed information. I created a simple basemap using GIS information. I also made a first draft centerline and used the offset alignment command to make two dynamic 50’ offsets. These represent a minimum distance to utility poles in my case, but could be anything- think about required right of way, drainage offsets, noise buffers, anything that moves with the road centerline.

The resulting model looks like this in plan view:

Here is a closer look:

I built a simple corridor using a typical road cross section- you could start with anything knowing that it will be refined later. Then, I created a code set that hatches everything in the corridor in plan view with solid yellow. I took out the visibility for links, points and feature lines in plan for this code set because I just want to see the limits of the corridor’s impact- and play around with the road alignment to stay within the existing right of way.

As I iterate through horizontal layout, I can get immediate feedback on how my corridor will respond- and where I violate the limits of my existing right of way.

You could also split your view to see plan (or better yet 3D) and profile simultaneously as you work through the options. Note the profile criteria set violation marker in the profile view below. You could also have a mass haul diagram, QTO or volume calculation giving immediate feedback to approximate quantities and impacts at the conceptual stage. Check out the Transportation: Road Design Whitepaper series for more information about building road corridors and using criteria based design.

Since you know that I feel Civil Engineers don’t take advantage of conceptual design enough, I’ll be talking about this more. What are your thoughts? Do you create exhibits and concepts like this? What tools do you use?

Related Links:

El Dorado County DOT: Trusting 3D roadway modeling to tackle a tricky intersection by Karen Weiss, PE

Acquiring, Converting, and Using DEM Downloads in Civil 3D from The CAD Geek

Using GIS Data in Civil 3D 2010

Civil 3D 2010- Offset Alignments from Christopher Fugitt at Civil 3D Reminders

Focus on Something Small… That Works

If you follow me on twitter, you might have picked up that I was visiting our AEC Headquarters near Boston yesterday. At the airport, I pulled out my latest issue of Fast Company. I typically have a personal rule that I don’t read Urban Land nor Fast Company after 7PM because they get my mind racing and I wind up not sleeping. Since I had just had a double shot peppermint mocha, I figured I’d be up anyway.

This month, there was an excerpt from Switch by Dan and Chip Heath (the guys who wrote Made to Stick). The article is called “How to Change When Change is Hard” and it reminded me so much of the struggle to change civil engineering (or any) design process from a traditional, linear workflow to a dynamic, model based (BIM) workflow.

The idea is that you find something that is already working in your organization or in your process. Once you find that one small thing, work on doing it more. Amplifying the results. Repeating the formula. While there is certainly value in understanding why your organization as a whole might be stagnating, finding some way to begin to see even small results immediately can bring things together faster.

This idea reminded me of Angel Espinoza’s “Civil 3D on a Dime” and Jerry Bartel’s “Rolling Deployment” sessions. These webcasts focused on finding a tool or two in Civil 3D that could change your work immediately- even if you didn’t stop using Land Desktop. If the box is on your shelf, you might as well have it work for you.

This has really gotten me thinking- and since the holidays brought me a bit of winter writer’s block, perhaps this will be a good series to get me back in the blogging grove.

In the meantime, check out archived webcasts from Angel and Jerry.

Civil 3D on a Dime

Rolling Deployment Series: Surface Construction with AutoCAD Civil 3D

Rolling Deployment Series: Earthwork

Rolling Deployment Series: Parcels

Rolling Deployment Series: Points

Rolling Deployment Series: Survey & Conclusion

(For more great information, or if those links become broken, here is a complete list of archived webcasts organized by subject.)

Autodesk Acquires Dynamite VSP

You've heard Jack and I mention Dynamite VSP a few times in the past- it is a terrific way to link Civil Engineering data with 3DS Max Design to "tell our story" at any stage of the project. Visualization isn't just for the end of a project- its for every stage. Visualization helps the designers understand the project, the regulators, key stakeholders and the public.

Learn more about the acquistion here: www.autodesk.com/dynamite

One of my favorite stories about visualization for Civil Engineering is the Scott Wilson Story. The team at Scott Wilson designs highways and interchanges and use visualization tools to show people exactly how the project will impact them.

There is a video on the Autodesk YouTube channel showing an overview of Dynamite VSP.

If you are looking for a more detailed step-by-step demonstration and paper on using Dynamite VSP with Civil 3D, check out Bruce Harfield and Jack Strongitharm's class at AU 2009 Producing Compelling Visualization for Civil Engineering Project Proposals. There is a podcast, screencast, handout, powerpoint and movie that you can download.

And of course, our friends at the Benelux Civil 3D Users group do amazing things with Civil 3D and Dynamite VSP.

Some related posts about getting better at telling the civil engineering story:

http://bimontherocks.typepad.com/my_weblog/visualization/