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)
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