How a Design Check Set Can Make Life Easier

I wrote about design criteria before, but I never explained how to use them. They’ve been around for a few releases now, and I think that the knee-jerk reaction to seeing them is- “That’s cool, but what if I don’t care about ~insert gov’t design standard here~ criteria?”

If you mostly do local roads, or maybe even stream design, with alignments, you can make a simple Design Check Set that just gives you a visual cue when you need to go back and refine a curve.

I used to get a lot of eye rolling when I would demonstrate alignments to customers. They’d say- “nobody ever just whips a road in like that.” And my answer, as you maybe have heard before, was “Why the heck not?”

1. because it was too hard
2. because it was too hard to draft
3. because it wasn’t “real”
4. because the engineer would change their mind
5. because the county would never approve it
6. because I don’t start until I have it all figured out
7. because I’d just have to go back and fix it
8. etc
9. whine
10. excuses

Whip it in. Get the visual warning you need to go back and check your radii or tangent length. Make the change. Continue to refine it once those comments and constraints start coming in. In the immortal words of Yo Gabba Gabba, “Try it! You’ll like it!”

Just go into the Alignment Design Check Set and make a few parameters for Radius, Tangent length, etc. This one would mean “Radius must be greater than or equal to 70 meters”

When you violate the check, you’ll get a warning symbol. Once you make the edit- either by gripping (more eye rolling there) or using the tabular editor (now she’s talking hard numbers!!) the warning symbol will disappear.

So instead of spending time going back and checking 400X whether or not your curves meet minimum requirements, you can focus on adjusting the roadway to get maximum lot yield, or working with the stream centerline to ensure it doesn’t encroach on the property next door.

There are so many balls in the air when wokring with a design, the more things you can set up to give you a visual cue, the better.

If you want to get snazzy, you can add IF statements and conditions (see Help or the Online Users Guide for samples, like below.)

You can find the Rule Based Design with Civil 3D whitepaper on this page.

Comments

[tony]

great post. I am doing the street design for a massive subd and I have been creating my own street design criteria. The corridor is one mile long with several side roads. The new visibility features will also come in handy. Knowning city standard sight distance and the minimum k values will be very helpful. I think everyone should be using this. Once again great post.

[Avijit Jana]

Its a Essential post that would have noticed before when the Design Check introduced in Civil3D.

I Enjoyed the usability of Design Check ( hor & Ver element geometry with speed )at the time of Reviewing/Checking the Design for an Independent Engineer.

its too easy to understand & too simpler to execute.