BIM on the Rocks

The Greatest Review Comment

If you’ve taken my AU classes before, you know that I always point out that the reviews are important to me. When the evaluations were done on paper, it would take a few months to see the results. Now with online surveys, we can track our progress right away. As scary as they are sometimes, the reviews have helped me a great deal as a speaker. I always take them seriously.

One comment I received this year was a bit tough to swallow at first, but the more I thought about it the more excited I became.

The comment was from my Stream Modeling class and it referred to the savvy of the audience- that much of the audience seemed to have experience building this type of complex corridor model. Meaning- more experience than I have building them.

While I could dwell on the fact that I don’t build many stream models for construction purposes anymore, I thought about it a bit differently. When I started working with Civil 3D and seeing its possibilities, I knew it could change the way design was done. When I taught my first stream modeling class at AU 2006, and then did a guest Friday webcast called: Civil 3D for Streams, Ponds and More Webcast (from February 2007), my goal was to change people’s minds about corridor modeling.

Seeing so many people doing so many amazing projects with Civil 3D makes me excited. I’m excited to see that change is happening and that inertia isn’t holding us back. In 2006, there was nobody in my stream class that had done a stream restoration design using a corridor model. In 2009, I might have been the least experienced stream modeler in the room- though many of the other comments give me confidence that everyone picked up something from the class material.

I couldn’t ask for more.

 

Related posts:

Civil 3D Success Stories- Stream Restoration

Civil 3D Surfaces for Riverbed Elevations

Overlay Analysis for Floodplain Study

Leveraging a Temporary Corridor for Stream Projects

Civil 3D Surfaces for Riverbed Elevations

I’ve mentioned before that Civil 3D surfaces aren’t just for ground elevations. You can use them for certain geologic data, borehole data, stormwater infiltration values, and even lighting analysis results.

One use I stumbled upon over the weekend was sediment transport along a river bottom. If you have hydrographic survey, soundings, or other information about movement of sediment along a levee or near a bridge, you can build a Civil 3D surface from it and create an elevation analysis.

Combined with other geospatial data and aerial imagery, you can make some very easy to understand exhibits. Also, if you have baseline data, you can do things like volume calculations between the two surfaces to understand how much sediment has been washed in or out, create dynamic labels of depth, elevation, difference between two surfaces, etc.

Consider some other uses:

1. A series of measurements after large storm events to track beach erosion or bridge scour then make an exhibit showing the progression
2. Daily survey of landfill or stockpile to estimate how much material has been hauled
3. Groundwater surfaces created from measurements at various times of year, during drought and after heavy rain season; or before/after new development/wells

Resources

Geological Rock Quantities with Civil 3D I, Geological Rock Quantities with Civil 3D II, Geological Rock Quantities with Civil 3D III

Create Elevation Analysis Part I and Part II from Retrieve Technologies

Visualize Your Surface Analysis: Make a 3D display of the colorful elevation analysis

.ctb Party Tricks for Surface Analysis- Getting "hatch" patterns in a surface analysis

Using Dynamic Blocks to show boreholes in profile (long section) From The Civil 3D Experience

Leveraging a Temporary Corridor for Stream Projects

I’m teaching CV118-4 Modeling Rivers, Channels, and Streams With AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2010 this year at Autodesk University. I spent some time this weekend working on some new datasets and trying out new techniques.

(I’ve taught a similar class in the past: Modeling Floodplains and Designing Stream Corridors with Civil 3D® at AU 2006) 

The stream I was working on had two types of a sections. A riffle section with a v-shaped bottom:

And a pool section with a flat bottom and one side that “kicked out” on the inside of the curve.

 

The engineer who designed the restoration provided a meandering centerline and profiles for both stream bottom and bankfull elevation. I used alignment labels that referenced PVI locations to mark things out in plan. You can snap to lines that you build into these labels, which is handy.

Using the typical sections and my alignment labels as a guide, I created alignments that trace the path of the bankfull location. I used this as a target a bit later.

 

Something I had always struggled with in my previous stream models was that these targets become longer than the stream centerline. The bankfull profile was drawn on the profile view for the stream centerlines. If you have ever tried to hook an alignment to a profile that was too short, you know that it drops down to zero once it runs out of stations. Plus, it may not match up station numbers properly.

I borrowed a solution from a post I did about road widenings. I made a flat assembly.

Then, I made a quick corridor that hooked the flat assembly along the centerline alignment and the bankfull profile. I made a surface from this assembly and sampled my bankfull alignments against that surface. Bang. I have long-enough profiles. I used these profiles as-is, but if you wanted to you could retrace them with layout profiles or use them as a guide for other aspects of the design.

Now that all of my alignments have corresponding profiles, I simply make a corridor where the bankfull points on a simple assembly target the left and right bankfull elevations.

The result is almost right. If both the riffle and pool sections had v-shaped bottoms with the same side slopes, we’d be done. You can see in the image below that the corridor has a steady bottom section. We didn’t give the lower links anything to target so that they stretched, flattened, etc. This particular combination is difficult because not only does it move from flat to v-shaped, but it also goes from being less than a foot deep to over three feet deep in the pools.

There are a few ways to approach this. I tried about 700 of them yesterday and today. Some of them are more elegant than others. One solution was to make another set of alignments and profiles that follow the path and target them.

I’d rather not have to do this- its a lot of working making those transitions. Yes, once the model is built it gets easy and edits are a breeze, but I know there is some way to build some more intelligence into my assembly so that it “reads” the situation. I’ve been trying things with regions, link-to-marked-point, and more. If you’ve used something that works well for a road or channel project, let me know- I’d love to hear it.

Other posts about streams:

Overlay Analysis in Map 3D 2010 for Floodplain Study

Stream Buffer Analysis with Map 3D 2010 (and Civil 3D 2010)

Civil 3D Success Stories: Stream Restoration

Overlay Analysis in Map 3D 2010 for Floodplain Study

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few months digging through the FEMA Guidelines and Specifications for Flood Hazard Mapping Partners. (And quite a few other sample documents and regulations.)

I’ve been learning about how different water resources projects come together- of course from a hydrology/hydraulic analysis perspective, but also from an exhibit and study perspective. I remember that the stormwater management and drainage reports that I did were largely an exercise in collecting data, creating maps, creating exhibits, documenting what we found… THEN taking it to the next level and crunching the numbers.

One exercise that often has to be done for flood studies is to identify parcels that are located within certain flood zones. This same idea also applies to a broad range of water resources, environmental, civil engineering, land planning, etc. projects. Thinking about finding certain land uses within a watershed, or parcels in a special zoning area, or green space within a municipal boundary.

You’ve been able to do an overlay between map topologies in Map 3D (and Civil 3D which is built on Map 3D) for a few years now, but I just learned how to do an overlay with data connected through the FDO.

You can find the command if you switch to one of the geospatial workspaces. This one is from the Task-based geospatial workspace.

I’ve recorded a short video showing the process.

Here is a summary of the tasks shown:

1. Drag and drop a .shp with county parcels into the drawing

2. Stylize the parcels to be a light gray, line-only style.

3. Drag and drop a .shp with floodplain information

4. Create a theme for the flood zones, then query only the zones I am most interested in.

5. Create a Feature Overlay to overlay parcel polygons with floodplain polygons.

6. Looking at the resulting overlay information noticing that the information about the parcels is now merged with the information about the flood zones.

Ways to take this further:

-Export the overlay table to .csv and taking the information into excel for further sorting and calculations, graphs, charts, summaries, trends, etc. (select all first)

-Create a layout tab, insert your appropriate sheet sized title block and build report exhibits

-Add aerial imagery, school locations, and any other information you need to study as part of due diligence, flood study, watershed study, etc.

-Export or convert critical polygons into AutoCAD objects either by exporting your map to dwg…

or using the Extract Feature from Geometry

Then use AECLINEWORKSHRINKWRAP to make a bounding polyline for things like… building a flood elevation surface to show on profiles and sections.

Thoughts on this? What types of exhibits to do you make that you don’t know how to get Civil 3D or Map 3D to do for you? What type of analysis do you still do by hand when it comes to preparing and overlaying data? What other types of reports do you create that could take advantage of this?

Wastewater: Tools to Help Layout Sanitary Pipelines

**Edited 6-3-2009- Thanks so much Josh and Leo for your help setting me straight**

You've probably picked up from my last few posts that I have wastewater on the brain. I've been building some materials to explore how Civil 3D and Navisworks (as well as other tools) can come together to better support this industry. The combination of tighter discharge regulations and infrastructure stimulus money is keeping this sector very busy even during the downturn.

I mentioned working with Hazen and Sawyer to learn about their workflow. One terrific resource that Josh Farmer of Hazen and Sawyer pointed me to is the Autodesk University 2008 class that he presented along with Leo Lavayen from Advanced Solutions. The class was recorded, so you can stream or download the video. There is also a pipe catalog and sample drawing you can download.

The class focuses on a real project scenario, and the first design challenge that they encounter is identifying the horizontal route for the sewer pipeline. For preliminary work we've talked about using a polyline, or maybe even a Civil 3D alignment. These work very well, but you'll need a way to ensure that the route is laid out to match standard construction practices- such as bend angles and allowable deflection.

Since Civil 3D is built on AutoCAD, you can use tools like dynamic blocks to enhance the design workflow. The sample drawing includes one idea. It's a dynamic block showing a typical range of industry standard bends.

Use the polylines to conceptually sketch where you'd like the pipe to go. Since pressure systems don't have nodes like gravity systems, you'll need to find ways to eliminate the vertices as the design progresses by replacing them with bends or using allowable pipe deflection. (To remind myself what bends look like and how they connect to pipes, I pulled up some standard details from American Ductile Iron Pipe.)

Place the block at your polyline (or alignment, or pipe network) vertices, and check your design.

I can see that my first attempt at a bend doesn't match any standard angles, so I can simply edit my pipe run to fall right on 45 or 22.5, whichever makes more sense.

I recorded a very short video showing how this block works.

 

 

While playing with this block, I thought about a few things. Maybe there is a way you could build something similar into an alignment PI marker style. It wouldn't have the dynamic stretchy parts, but you could probably set it up to rotate along with the lead pipe. This is just one example of how you can leverage styles to work with your design. It may not be something you ever print, it's just to make your design job easier.

When searching for a good link for Leo, I noticed that Advanced Solutions is holding a few workshops this month that looked interesting. Civil 3D Implementation Workshop (6-5-2009 Cary, NC) and BIM for Construction (6-23-2009 Pittsburgh, PA). They also work with lots of Civil 3D and Revit (and other) user groups.

Related links:

Getting the Most of Piping in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 (AU Online- Register for access to view/download)

Forcemains and Gas Lines and Water Mains (Oh My!)

Getting Excited About Wastewater

We Must Get Better at Telling Our Story

Using GIS Data in Civil 3D 2010 (Soil Analysis for Site Selection)

Civil 3D 2010: Profile Hatch

I am working on a 30 minute overview demo for some events next week, and I was thinking that I need to record it (helps me practice) and post it up on youtube. Look for that later tonight or tomorrow depending on how long it takes me to get through Target with Panorama and Prospector.

Also- Jerry and Lucy are doing a webcast tomorrow on the Civil 3D 2010 User Interface. Sign up for all of the upcoming webcasts while you are there.

One small thing that is new in Civil 3D 2010 that I really adore is profile hatch. How many times have you needed to show an area of cut or fill, or perhaps you wanted to hatch the space under the groundwater elevation, or show geological subsurfaces?

There is a new tab in Profile View properties that allows you to select profiles and create hatches between them. The tool uses shape styles- the same ones for assemblies and corridors- to control the color and fill.

The result is a dynamic hatched area that can bring some visual impact to your profile views.

I need to also wrap up our series on geological subsurfaces. If I go through many more "Parts", Mr. Zeeben will start picking on me. (Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part XXIV)

Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part II

The other day I talked about how we used a flat subassembly and some rock data to create surfaces that approximate different rock layers. Today, I will show you how we used that information to come up with some quantities of the different types of material that needed to be removed.

The goal of the project was to minimize the amount of blasting that needed to be done in order to install public sewers for an existing town. We had to find the optimal layout, and explore the possibility of using lift stations and forcemains if necessary.

There are a few ways you could do this. First, we tried using pipe networks and pipe rules to lay out the system, but we found it to be too much detail at this stage of the game. Pipe networks are wonderful things, but they aren't designed for being super flexible during early conceptual design. So after a few tries, we settled on a workflow where we made alignment styles that looked like pipes. A few weeks ago I wrote about using alignments and profiles to make pressure and conceptual pipe networks. This is the project where I began using this technique.

Since the rock corridors we made didn't necessary follow the same paths as our sewer layouts (and those 1:1 profiles were a bit hard to read), we sampled the rock surfaces on to our pipe profile views. This helped us stay out of the toughest areas.

Once we had the alignments and profiles made, we created a corridor using the pipe trench subassembly.

 

This was back in Civil 3D 2007, so there were only two options, and both of them needed to be hooked onto a profile. (This also contributed to why we used the profile technique instead of pipe networks- to reduce redundancy).

(If you'd like to see more examples of pipe depth screen shots, my original flickr set that I created when proposing this project is still around. Holy wow- September 2006. That was a CRAZY month.)

From these corridors, we could build a pipe trench surface, then compare the trench surface against the different depths of rock. I'll spell out that process in a day or two.

Civil 3D 2009 subscription customers can download pipe trench corridors that actually latch onto the pipes themselves.

If you'd like to download them, go to the Subscription Center and log in. If you are not sure if you are on subscription, or you don't know your login information, check with your CAD manager, or call your reseller.

Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part I

There are tons of ways to incorporate geotechnical and geological in your Civil 3D work. I have done a few different projects using a variety of techniques depending on what type of data it was, what the engineer was trying to learn, and what type of data that the geological professional could deliver.

As with anything I write about, my goal is not to give you a specific step by step that works in every situation. I want you to get creative and think of ways to work with what you have and what you can get.

So the project was a sewer retrofit. An entire township was served with private septic systems and needed sewers. The trouble was that there were several layers of rock under the existing roads. Our job was to create a pipe layout that minimized the amount of rock to be removed. There were different costs associated with the removal of the different layers of rock.

The geologist did seismic refraction (or if you really want to geek out you can read this article about seismic refraction). I talked to him on the phone and tried every which way to figure out how to bring the data over- asked about ascii, asked about landxml... but it turned out our only option was dxf that showed the horizontal path of the seismic equipment, and their corresponding profiles.

Here is an example of one of the profiles:

This is a 1:1 profile, in dxf form. Those black blotches are text- but not even real text. Just fragments and primitives.In my head I was thinking... well, it was something like "How am I supposed to do anything with this lovely stuff?".

So the idea I came up with was to make alignments from the horizontal paths, then sample a profile view against an EG that I had for the area. Then, I traced the critical profiles using a layout profile, and erased the dxf geometry, so I wound up with something like this:

Next, I made an assembly. Now, I talked to the geologist about how wide I could assume this layer of rock was. They told me what was reasonable and that is how I built the assembly.

Next, I created corridors from the equipment paths plus the critical rock profiles:

 

From these corridors, I could build rock surfaces for sampling on to my pipe profiles and creating quantity reports based on pipe trenching.

I'll show you how I did the pipe trenching tomorrow, and then the quantity reports later this week.

Environmental Projects and Civil 3D

You've probably picked up over the past few weeks (if not the past few years) that I've seen success using Civil 3D for environmental projects- such as water resources (dams, rivers, flood studies, watershed studies and similar); site remediation, landfill design, and many other applications that involve surface water and earth moving especially.

I'll be featuring techniques and sample works every week- and would love your feedback.

Success Stories of Environmental Engineering and Geosciences Projects:

The two stream restoration stories (Timmons and McKim)

Dredging International

Rana Creek Restoration Ecology 

Swanson Hydrology & Geomorphology

Environmental Engineering and Geosciences in the News:

My Delicious Links tagged "ENVIRONMENTAL"

The Stimulus Plan: How to Spend $787 Billion

EPA Information Related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

ENR's Environmental Headlines

New Civil Engineer (NCE) Environmental Headlines

New Civil Engineer (NCE) Water Resources Headlines

I'll be heading to One Team Conference and One Team University very early tomorrow morning. One Team is when we get together with our partners from around the world and get up to date on the coming release. It's very exciting and a chance for me to find out how Civil 3D is being used everywhere.

I'll be all over the place tomorrow, and helping out with classes on Wednesday, then teaching on Thursday. If you are going to be there- be sure to sign up for my sessions- you won't be disappointed. But before then- there is a mountain of laundry to climb and about two gallons worth of hairspray and cosmetics that I must cram into a quart baggie.

Civil 3D Success Stories: Stream Restoration

There are two new success stories posted for Civil 3D on the subject of stream restoration:

Timmons Group

McKim & Creed

Stream restoration is a subject near to my heart. When Panorama was born, I left my job as a consulting engineer. I knew I needed some kind of work, but I wasn't sure exactly what I could do around the schedule of a very small baby. One idea was that I could chase Canada geese off of the runway at the Laurel Airport. Unfortunately, that didn't pay well enough. So... I started teaching Land Desktop classes a few times a month for a reseller, and picked up some freelance CAD work.

In my freelance CAD work, I would take on anything people could throw my way. One of my clients asked if I could help with the drafting of a stream restoration. I had no idea what that meant, but I figured I could do it. I took one look at the intricate profile and difficult contouring and knew that there is no way I was interested in doing that by hand. So I pulled out my Land Desktop manual and made friends with the Cross Section menu. It was tricky, but worked really well.

 

When Civil 3D came along, my heart began to race... A corridor model would make that stream SO MUCH EASIER to model, so I tried it and it was great. At Autodesk University in November 2006, I taught Modeling Floodplains and Designing Stream Corridors with Civil 3D (you can still get the paper from AU Online- be kind, it was my first year writing AU papers!) A few months later, I was a guest presenter at the Friday Webcasts and did a session called Civil 3D for Streams, Ponds and More Webcast (from February 2007)

Last fall, my friend Eric asked if I could have a quick call with his team at the Timmons Group about using corridors for stream restoration modeling and exporting river data to HEC-RAS. We spent about an hour together over the web, and even though I couldn't see their faces, I could tell that many lightbulbs were turning on. They took it further than I ever have- and I am truly impressed with their work. While I always knew that building such a model was a huge time saver, I was very excited to read their success story and see the tangible business results.

Currently, the firm’s environmental services practice is on track to complete phase two of the Magnolia Green project on schedule and within budget. "As a firm, we have already completed 10 projects with Civil 3D—5 within our department alone," says Chris Dodson, Environmental Services Manager, Timmons Group. "Over the next few years, our entire firm will make the switch." 

I will definitely write more about this- it is one of my favorite uses for Civil 3D