BIM on the Rocks

My Kids Recognized the Bay Bridge Traffic Configuration

I just got back from spring break in California with my family. Unfortunately, Lynn Allen’s guestroom wasn’t available. Or so she says.

I’m somewhat fascinated with the Bay Area. Perhaps even mildly obsessed.

You know that kid in your neighborhood whose mom was allergic to dogs but he wanted one really badly? He’d spend his afternoons with his face pressed up against the glass at the pet store at the mall? That’s me on car rides in California. I take in the deserts, the oceans, the brightly colored houses in San Francisco, the endless fields of artichokes and strawberries. I stuff real estate leaflets under my mattress. I dream of tidepools.

Of the eternal misty springtime air. Of the undeniably sexy infrastructure.

Then, I pay $4.50 a gallon for gas and that puppy doesn’t seem quite as appealing.

Regardless.

I believe that the only way to really get to know a city is to decline NeverLost, forget a map and let the battery on your iPhone die. All you need to navigate the city is a low resolution tourist map from a fish and chips shop that cuts off a few blocks after Pier 39. This makes for much better exploring!

In one of our unplanned tours around the city, we wound up on the Bay Bridge. Panorama immediately began freaking out, so I assumed she spotted Justin Bieber or some member of the original Star Wars cast walking down the street. It turns out, she recognized the bridge from the Bridge Explorer App for iPhone and iPad. 

Later that day, we gate crashed LucasFilm Headquarters to visit the Yoda Fountain.

Panorama: Can I meet George Lucas?

Me: No.

Panorama: What if we tell him that I’m a really big fan?

Me: …

On the way out of the Presidio, we once again wound up driving in circles. Then, I saw it! Doyle Drive! My own personal infrastructure Justin Bieber. I’ve worked on so many presentations that included simulations of this road project that I knew exactly where we were and how to get back on Highway One.

 

My only regret is that I didn’t have my husband stop the car so I could frogger across traffic and get my picture taken with the lane closure signs.

These experiences made me think about how we as civil engineers can contribute to telling the project story. What is the impact of public understanding? What if they know why the project is important, how construction will impact their daily commute and how to navigate the new design?

Consider this Autodesk Success Story from American Structurepoint:

From American Structurepoint’s perspective, model-based design processes were essential for the success of the project. “The ability to visualize our design and then communicate that vision to the project stakeholders was the true value of these tools on the Keystone Parkway project,” says Canfield. “Without that vision, this project would not have become a reality.”

Related posts on this blog:

We Must Get Better at Telling Our Story

Highway Earthquake Simulation and Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure

If you aren’t already familiar with the visualizations, simulations and media available for Presidio Parkway and the Bay Bridge, check out the project pages.

Presidio Parkway Press Center (Videos Library) or on YouTube.

Bay Bridge 360

MassDOT Civil 3D Standards Posted

A few months ago, I posted that MassDOT Requires Submittals in Civil 3D Starting 1-1-2012.

MassDOT has now posted their Civil 3D template, assemblies, survey guidelines and other CAD standards to their website.

I had a quick look at the styles in the template. Here is a capture of some of the alignment styles that they’ve built. I am thinking back to my days doing consulting work and I’m a bit jealous. It’s great to have a starting point to match submittal requirements.

There is also a nice library of prebuild road assemblies.

In addition to MassDOT, you should also check out the information about other DOTs that are allowing or requiring Civil 3D. We’ve created some landing pages to help users locate important news, templates, design standards, screencasts and more.

Florida DOT (FDOT) Autodesk News

Wisconsin DOT (WisDOT) Autodesk News

Caltrans Autodesk News

MassDOT Requires Submittals in Civil 3D Starting 1-1-2012

I was reading one of our channel partner blogs, MicroBIM over at Microdesk, and saw the news: MassDOT will soon require Civil 3D files for project deliverables.

Rick Reid and the team at Microdesk worked with MassDOT on developing a new CAD standard to assist with the transition.

Rick posted a video version of his MassDOT CAD Standards presentation

MassDOT CAD Standard from Microdesk on Vimeo.

There is some more cool stuff coming online later this week, so we’ll revisit the roads, highways and department of transportation subject in a few days.

In the meantime, go check out the MassDOT youtube channel. Another great use of social media to keep the public informed and “tell your story”.

Using AutoCAD Properties to Change Subassembly Parameters

The great thing about corridor models is that you can build them before you have a lot of information. Let’s say you don’t have your lane width nailed down yet. No big deal, just adjust it later. The problem comes when you have a lot of assemblies- especially when working around intersections, etc.

You’ve probably noticed that with each release of Civil 3D, you can do more and more with the AutoCAD Properties dialog. Instead of going into the Assembly or Subassembly properties for each and every one of these lanes, I can select them all and under the Advanced area change their width. They will all update, then I just quickly rebuild my corridors.

Civil 3D and a New Zealand Airport

I’ve introduced you to my friend Peter Thomson a few times. He’s the dashing voice behind this youtube video on a workflow for creating a rising main (or forcemain) using Civil 3D.  and I attended his class last year at TeamBlue22’s Civil 3D University in Auckland.

Last week, Peter sent me some pictures of an airport Runway End Safety Area (RESA), his team worked on with Civil 3D 2008.

My first thought when I looked at the photograph was… Man. New Zealand is so ugly. Once I was able to look past the breathtaking mountains and interesting topography, I narrowed my focus to the terraced RESA area at the end of the runway.

From Peter:

A short distance from Queenstown lies Frankton where the Queenstown International Airport is located. Civil Aviation rules have stated that the runway needs to have a 90m x 90m Runway End Safety Area (RESA), a grassed, flat area at both ends of the runway.  MWH NZ Ltd was one of a group of consultants engaged to effect the construction of the RESA at the eastern end of the runway.

A feature at this end is a 45m high terrace sloping down from the runway to the Shotover River Delta. The construction of the RESA is combined with providing for the accommodation of a future local road around the end of the RESA. The result is a benched fill of around 800,000m3 containing various fill elements which have all been modeled in C3D. MWH at that time was using a C3D add-on software package called Advanced Road Design (called Corridor-EZY in the US) and this was used to build the surface model of the RESA.

Sub-surface layers were modeled using feature lines by extracting contours from working design surfaces. This also enabled sub-surface volumes to be calculated quite easily.

All in all, C3D has proven to be a valued tool in the documentation of this high-profile project where the construction of the RESA must proceed without disturbing the operation of the airport.

On an interesting side note, Justin Ralston (Airey Consultants) is a design engineer working on an adjacent development project where fill for the RESA is being extracted. I actually “met” Justin on the C3D Discussion Forum some years ago and we have struck up a useful association with C3D where we both enjoy teasing Dana on an on-going basis to give us what we are looking for in C3D future releases. We finally all met in person at the New Zealand version of C3D University last September in Auckland.

Peter also told me that all of the surfaces were exported to LandXML for use in machine control. Excellent!

I am pretty sure I talked Peter into submitting an AU class proposal this year- I can’t wait to see what he has to offer. Hopefully I can talk him into coming to Las Vegas and meeting more of those contacts from the Discussion Groups. (Also, giving him an opportunity to tease me more.)

Learn more about worldwide projects at MWH on their project search page.

Redesigning (and Rethinking) Urban Streets

The other day I was reading Streetfilms, which is a great blog about transportation and has lots of clever videos, such as a clay animation that explains how chicanes work.

I came across a video about how Paris has reengineered some of their streets to blend cars, pedestrians, bicycles and other sorts of traffic. They have found when they eliminate curbs, use cobblestones, change alignments and improve signage to force everyone to pay attention, move more slowly and more consciously. I noticed this a few years ago on a trip.

I took these picture in Paris in 2007 as part of my typical boring travel photography. You know- curbs, gutters, bike lanes, stormwater ponds, concrete trucks. (See the whole set from my trip to Paris on flickr.)

A physically separated bike lane area that blends with the road and sidewalk without curbs:

A separate bus lane:

My mind is full of ideas about how these sorts of rehabilitation, streetscape and redesign projects could be done with corridor models, offset alignments and other tools in Civil 3D. Its interesting to think about how many more iterations we could work through and be able to understand the design and tell the story before the project begins construction.

Have you used Civil 3D to help with a traffic calming project? An urban rehabilitation? Tell me about it in the comments!

You might also like to read:

More Traffic Calming posts on Streetfilms

My post about the free bicycles in Paris- the "Vélo Liberté" or Vélib' program

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.

Last Chance to Register for Autodesk Virtual Event

You might have seen my posts about the Autodesk Seize the Opportunity Virtual Event on April 19, including the one where I had some screen captures from Jerry’s session called On the Road to Success: Autodesk Solutions for Roads and Highways.

The event is Monday, April 19, 2010- so if you haven’t already registered, head over and register now.

If you are looking for more detail, here is a pdf of the full Seize the Opportunity Event agenda.

Learn more about AutoCAD Civil 3D at www.autodesk.com/civil3d.

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.

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