BIM on the Rocks

A Master Planned Community in Three (or One Hundred?) Acts

I really enjoy listening to This American Life. They tend to break up their show into acts. I also like reading Girl’s Gone Child. She is breaking up the story of her new twins into acts. Since it is Thursday afternoon and I am out of original ideas, I’m going to steal theirs.

If you’ve ever worked on a master planned community, (or an area structure plan, or neighborhood design report, or zoning change application) you can relate to the idea of the project happening in pieces. Maybe you start on paper or you get some paper from the planner (as I mentioned the other day.)

Then the client or the planner comes back and says that they want something more iconic. Or curvy. Or whatever.

So you get it into Map 3D and build some basemap information. Then you evolve into Civil 3D, and maybe take it out to Impression for some super early 2D sketching. It’s still rough, but you figure you are starting to get a better handle on it.

And just when you think you really know what you are doing, the architect comes to you with the concepts of the buildings, or residential products, or single family homes.

Then the environmental agency says there is no way you are getting approved for a zoning change without a stream restoration. And the transportation planner at the DOT says you need a new connection to the light rail system and a much better entrance to the arterial road.

And you have no idea what that all really means. How much room does a hospital really take up? You know the footprint, but what does that mean in 3D? How tall should the condos be? What is the implication of having lanes with parking behind vs. recessed garages?

Arnab and I have been working on a master plan as a team along with some external engineers and architects. The process has been greatly improved by using Infrastructure Modeler. I know, I work for Autodesk. I have to say that. But… really. I cannot tell you how useful it has been for communication with each other. The “Oh, I see it now!” moments of clarity happen daily. Sometimes hourly. Or minute-ly.

We’ve changed our minds completely several times when it was still early enough to change. We’ve added things, tried things, erased whole villages and tried again.

I will do my best to document the process over the next few weeks in as many acts as it takes, because it is a story worth telling. A story of starting rough and tweaking, changing, evolving. About not fretting over perfect just yet because you are busy being a hungry caterpillar in the hopes of someday becoming a butterfly. Or maybe a luna moth. That has yet to be determined.

Short Tutorial Posted for Civil 3D 2012 Bid Express Extension

I made a short video showing how to use the new Bid Express Extension. The main idea here is that you are connecting Civil 3D objects to real state pay items and current cost information. Even if your state isn’t on the list, connecting to pricing information can give you a much better idea of how much a project alternative will cost.

The video shows you how to connect to a state pay item list, assign the pay items to objects and gather pricing data. Then, I make a small change to the model (change the lane width from 12’ to 10’) to see how the total cost of the project changes.

For those of you who don’t have youtube access, you can download the video here:

Download AutoCAD_Civil_3D_2012_Bid_Express_Extension_Tutorial.mp4 (12981.5K)

Short introduction tutorial for the Civil 3D 2012 Bid Express Extension

CE News Webcast: BIM and Sustainability for Roadway Drainage Design

If you work in a firm where the project managers don’t quite understand what BIM means for your road, highway and drainage work, this is the webcast you’ll want them to see.

Round everyone up on October 21, 2010 at 1:00PM EDT for BIM and Sustainability for Roadway Drainage Design with James Wedding, P.E.

This webcast won’t go into technical nitty gritty- it is focused on understanding how a change in process can bring more value to your designs. What are your clients demanding? Who is getting the work these days? Can you give more value for the same effort?

If that isn’t enough to persuade them to tune in, you could mention that watching the webcast live earns continuing education credits. (See www.stagnitomedia.com/cedu/ for more information.)

Looking for a webcast geared towards Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis specifically? Check out this archived CE News webcast with Chris Maeder, M.S., P.E.

Automation Innovations in Stormwater Modeling

Automation innovations in Autodesk’s recently released water resource engineering software allows civil engineers to more efficiently and economically complete stormwater analysis and design projects. This presentation showcases a stormwater project in which a major engineering firm was able to complete a 30 square mile metropolitan stormwater management plan in half of the time that it would normally have taken.

⇒ Click here to view the archived presentation!
⇒ NEW! Click here to view the Water Infrastructure Design & Management Whitepaper!

For more information about Autodesk products and drainage:

BIM on the Rocks posts about Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis

Technical orientations to Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis in a youtube playlist

Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis Users Guide (pdf - 37237Kb)

Autodesk Stormwater Discussion Group

Snippets from the Upcoming Seize the Opportunity Virtual Event

Last week I wrote about the Autodesk Seize the Opportunity Virtual Event on April 19. On Friday, I was talking to Jerry and he shared some more details about his session called On the Road to Success: Autodesk Solutions for Roads and Highways. The session is focused on using Civil 3D for a road project, but also incorporates tools from Map 3D and Navisworks to tell the entire story.

(As a side note, don’t you love this rendering of an interchange? I’m not sure what kind of interchange it is, but I’ll bet you could find it at The Infrastructurist in their posts Don't Pluck the Clover Leaf or What's a Double Trumpet? (A Field Guide to Interchanges). That image was created from a Civil 3D model that the Benelux Users group built for us. We call those type of images “Heroic Imagery”. I need to remember to write up a blog post about the making of heroic imagery. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll get a headache.)

Jerry will show how to use tools from Map 3D, Civil 3D and Navisworks for planning and design.

I am really glad to see more examples of using geospatial data in infrastructure planning. Jerry will show using data about level of service, accidents, flooding and more to identify locations for potential intersection improvements. I think what is important to keep in mind is that even if you don’t have data readily available in your area with traffic or transportation information, it’s pretty straightforward to combine graphical data from raster imagery or CAD files with traffic data and reports to make your own Map 3D layers. The power you get for exhibit creation and analysis is worth the time invested. Better yet- next time you hire a traffic firm to do a TIS, ask them how they create their exhibits and work together on finding a way to keep the data alive.

More of us need to spend time in that planning and conceptual design space. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about Conceptual Road Design Ideas where I created a simple corridor style to show the extents of a roadway grading. What about combining that with more geospatial data? For example, I could extract the boundary from my corridor surface and convert it into a Map 3D object. Then I combine that with parcel information, land use information, flood zones, etc. and be working up reports on who will be impacted or what kind of risk might be involved with a given design alternative. There are some neat new features for Map 3D 2011- check out Murph’s blog post for some commentary.

Jerry is also planning on showing an intersection model, and highlighting new features for roads and highways- such as corridor improvements.

By combining the Civil 3D model with a point cloud of an overpass bridge, Jerry will do some clearance checks. You can also use point clouds for clash detection in Navisworks.

Karen did a neat demo using this same point cloud right in Civil 3D. She creates an elevation analysis with the bridge scan to check for height requirements.

Jerry delivers a great presentation- always full of the right combination of technical how-to and thought provoking ideas. Register today for Autodesk Seize the Opportunity Virtual Event on April 19.

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.)