BIM on the Rocks

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

Highway Earthquake Simulation and Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure

In another great act of civil engineering storytelling, the Washington State DOT has posted a video that shows what would happen to State Route 99 and the adjacent seawall in seismic event.

Can you think of a more effective way to get stateholder buy-in, understand your design, and educate the public? This video has had a whopping 92,000+ views in six days. How are your clients reaching people?

I found the video while checking out the Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure website to read an article by our own Karen Weiss, PE: Trusting 3D Roadway modeling to Tackle a Tricky Intersection. The article profiles the El Dorado County, California DOT and their use of Civil 3D. An excerpt:

Due to the dynamic nature of the model, modifications to the alignment or profile instantly updated the corridor and its associated daylight lines. As a result, the impacts of the changes were readily apparent, allowing the team to utilize as much of the available right-of-way as possible, avoid environmental issues, and clear existing utilities — optimizing the design all within a virtual environment.

That really is the true meaning of BIM- work through your alternatives and understand your design many times before finding the one that makes the most sense.

You may remember Karen from her work on the WisDOT webcast series. You can catch up on the WisDOT series by viewing these archived webcasts:

AutoCAD Civil 3D Customer Showcase- Wisconsin Department of Transportation

WisDOT and Corridor Building with AutoCAD Civil 3D

WisDOT Survey Workflow with AutoCAD Civil 3D

WisDOT Design Workflow, Data and Project Management

Other archived and upcoming transportation and road design related webcasts and resources can be found here.

Register for the WisDOT Plan Production Workflow Webcast- Thurs 6-11-2009 2PM EDT

I've written about how open the Wisconsin DOT has been about their implementation plans for Civil 3D. It's been tremendously valuable to check out the beta version of their template, learn about how a DOT comes to the decision to use Civil 3D, dig into their survey, data management and corridor modeling workflows.

This week, my colleague, Karen Weiss, PE, will sit down with WisDOT once again to explore their plans for producing construction documents from the Civil 3D model.

Wisconsin DOT Webcast: Plan Production Workflow with AutoCAD Civil 3D

Date & Time: Thursday, June 11, 2009, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. CDT

(2PM EDT, 10AM PDT)

Description:

Join us for this new series of webcasts where you will see how the Wisconsin Department of Transportation has improved their workflow by moving to AutoCAD® Civil 3D®.

Webcast #4: Plan Production Workflow
See the methodologies used by WisDOT to generate cross section, plan, and profile sheets. Included will be a brief discussion covering:

• Matching style development to previously accepted standards
• Use of xrefs and data shortcuts to synchronize production sheets with model updates
• Sheet layouts used in the sheet set manager

Register here:

Wisconsin DOT Webcast Series: Plan Production Workflow

You can catch up on the WisDOT series by viewing these archived webcasts:

AutoCAD Civil 3D Customer Showcase- Wisconsin Department of Transportation

WisDOT and Corridor Building with AutoCAD Civil 3D

WisDOT Survey Workflow with AutoCAD Civil 3D

WisDOT Design Workflow, Data and Project Management

Other archived and upcoming transportation and road design related webcasts and resources can be found here.

When Shovel Ready is More Than Just a Buzzword

I spent my weekend doing what I normally do- ignoring housework, taking the kids to the park for a hike, playing in the sand table, making chalk drawings, and of course, kicking back with some old friends and talking Civil 3D.

Saturday, I spent some time with friends who typically do land development projects. In recent months, they've worked to reinvent themselves a bit. One type of project that has come their way is to provide support for construction of some road projects.

They showed me the plans for a interchange realignment- some new ramps, some detours, a bridge, etc. I asked what they might get for data and they said none. The paper plans were the "official" plans and the transportation authority wasn't willing to share more. The project had been on the books for a few years as well, so even if electronic information existed, it would probably be hard to a) find it b) make sure it was accurate c) figure out how to translate its format.

Highway project.... been designed for a few years... ready for construction... Holy Crow! This is an actual shovel ready project! It isn't just a buzzword or some abstract government idea- this is real. In my part of the world. Affecting people that I know and love! While I don't have any details on if this particular example is truly funded by the famous stimulus package, the challenge is the same.

Of course, people have been laying out construction projects based on paper plans for years (probably centuries), but having a true model gives us so many more options. Instead of strictly being limited to the skeleton of data points spelled out on the plan, we can provide the field crews with more robust information. It could start out as simple as supplemental shots along a curb, but the ultimate goal is a complete model that could be used by machine control grading.

Someone once explained the appeal of 3D scanning to create a point cloud to me like this: when you scan the area, you get to bring the site home with you then create the survey however you want. You get to decide what is important while not having to dodge oncoming cars and swap mosquitos. You can make a million trips back to the site for more data without leaving your desk. That is how I see a complete model for construction purposes- it may seem like overkill at first, but the incredible flexibility it gives you will probably make it worth it. Not to mention using tools like Navisworks to schedule the project, locate conflicts and really gain familiarity with a project that has accumulated some dust in the past few years.

The questions came from trying to figure out the best way to turn these paper plans into a Civil 3D model, and as far as I can tell, the best answer is just to rebuild it one step at a time using the most robust tools available. it might be tempting to tackle something like the plan shown below with feature lines or points, but it is very likely worth the investment to use a corridor for at least a portion of it. Chances are excellent there will be redesign needed somewhere, or conflicts discovered- and you will be cursing yourself for not investing the time in building it properly. 

While my friends realized that building something like this (or more likely something even more complex) was going to take days, if not weeks- they knew it would be worth it. They also thought it would improve their Civil 3D skills a great deal because it is an exercise in modeling something that is already locked down. They could learn how to build the model properly and see how it interacted- but not been bogged down trying to master complex design techniques and iterations at the same time.

I'm going to be spending more time thinking about this over the next few weeks and months- and I would love to hear from you about your experiences.

Has your firm taken on new things? How do you turn paper plans into something the field staff can use for layout and construction? Have you taken shortcuts when recreating the project and regretted it? What is worth doing and what isn't? Comment here, or drop me an email.

Related: Find the Problems Before Picking Up the Shovel

Find the Problems Before Picking Up the Shovel

About a week ago, some of my colleagues, Steve Stanfill and David Fagerman were featured on NPR's morning edition in a story called "Virtual Shovel-Ready Projects Get Stimulus Money".Yesterday, I caught a spot on Boston local news called "Autodesk Helps States Spend Stimulus Dollars" (embedded below) that featured interviews with Rich Humphrey and Terry Bennett in our Manchester office. (It also features shots of my absolute favorite conference room in the world- Monadock. So many good memories sitting in the windows there wishing I could be an Autodesker, too. I guess dreams do come true.)

 

One thing that Terry said is this spot really stuck with me. He said something about making your mistakes on the computer instead of in the field.

It reminded me of when I was an athlete and they would coach us on visualize the game or the race. We'd imagine as many possible scenarios as we could and how we'd react. This way, there would be fewer surprises because we'd know what to do in 80% of the cases that came up in an actual game. We'd also imagine things like- what if I am not feeling well that day, or what if I had just taken a ball to the gut before the whistle? You can't imagine everything, but if your mind is relaxed for part of the game, you can tackle the rest a lot easier.

Building your project in Civil 3D gives you a lot of that feedback by itself. You can see a conflict, have all of the constraints and iterate your design. What about taking it a step further? You know how I feel about Civil Engineers as storytellers, but in addition to communicating our intent, visualizations and models give us the chance to experience the construction many times before the bulldozers do their thing

Consider this video (by Paul Walker, our team Navisworks specialist, narrated by Karen Weiss, P.E. our team transportation engineer). In this video you see Civil 3D information, such as roads and pipes, combined with information from other sources. Navisworks brings in many different types of files from many platforms, so you can aggregate data from your team, the public utility, architects, structural engineers, microstation files from the DOT, etc.

(You can hear more from Karen if you sign up for the CE News webcast on June 17 at 2PM EDT)

Another good example of Navisworks used in a Civil context is Jack Strongitharm's video showing a Civil 3D road model in Navisworks.

My head is swimming with possible uses outside of the obvious clash detection. One thing I'm thinking about is SWPPP violation. What if you could watch your construction phasing in real time to see if it actually made sense? What would you run into that might effect your erosion control plan? Wouldn't it make more sense to change your sequence of construction before someone runs into it in the field?

I'd love to hear what you think- What do you run into in the field that you know you could have avoiding just by seeing it virtually first?

Don't Forget: WisDOT Workflow Webcast Thursday!

The other day I told you about the WisDOT Civil 3D workflow webcast that will highlight drawing and data management. Don't forget to sign up and tune in.

Wisconsin DOT Webcast Series: Design Workflow & Data Project Management

Thursday, April 2, 2009 11:00 - 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time (That’s 2PM Eastern-DBP)

Join us for this series of webcasts where you will see how the Wisconsin Department of Transportation has improved their workflow by moving to AutoCAD® Civil 3D®. Hosted by WisDOT, you'll get hands on demonstrations of how AutoCAD Civil 3D from Autodesk is helping with: Survey Workflow, Design Workflow, Data and Project Management, and more.

In this webcast, you'll learn how WisDOT leverages the power of data shortcuts to help project teams manage design changes. Topics include: Project folder structure, standard naming conventions for data elements and drawings, and an overall project/data management plan for roadway design.

WisDOT Civil 3D Workflow Webcast Thursday 4-2-2009

I’ve really enjoyed the WisDOT webcast series, especially when I found out that they are sharing their Civil 3D templates and their implementation story in real-time.

In my opinion, one of the biggest gaps in the Civil 3D public knowledge pool is data and drawing management and organization, especially for large projects.

This week’s WisDOT webcast will go through, in detail, their plans for how drawings will be arranged, how work will be split up between multiple project team members for design, drafting, and analysis. I am very excited about this because I think it will spur a lot of conversation about what has been working for other firms, and give highway, road and transportation systems implementations a sound starting point.

Wisconsin DOT Webcast Series: Design Workflow & Data Project Management

Thursday, April 2, 2009 11:00 - 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time (That’s 2PM Eastern-DBP)

Join us for this series of webcasts where you will see how the Wisconsin Department of Transportation has improved their workflow by moving to AutoCAD® Civil 3D®. Hosted by WisDOT, you'll get hands on demonstrations of how AutoCAD Civil 3D from Autodesk is helping with: Survey Workflow, Design Workflow, Data and Project Management, and more.

In this webcast, you'll learn how WisDOT leverages the power of data shortcuts to help project teams manage design changes. Topics include: Project folder structure, standard naming conventions for data elements and drawings, and an overall project/data management plan for roadway design.

Road Design Series — Corridor Modeling with AutoCAD Civil 3D

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Join this webcast presentation and learn how AutoCAD Civil 3D includes a combination of easy-to-use cross-sectional components called subassemblies to deliver a unique approach to create intelligent models of roads and other transportation systems.

See more upcoming Civil Engineering webcasts at www.autodesk.com/civil-webcasts.

Also note that when you sign up, if you click “Add to Calendar” then say “Open”, it will make an Outlook entry for you that includes the link- so you’ll never forget about a webcast you’ve signed up for again! So go ahead and sign up for all of the upcoming webcasts now.

Using Temporary Corridors and Surfaces to Drive Design

I've seen a few people use this technique, but I have never really gotten my head around it until this week. I spent some time digging into Jack's papers on roundabouts from a few years ago, Jack's AU class and watching Sean's AU class on roundabouts and grading. They both use the idea of creating a temporary corridor which can then be used to drive design.

Anyone who has build a few corridors and knows how to use targets can usually map out a plan for modeling something somewhat complicated. It all comes down to how many alignments and profiles your are willing to manually create, design and babysit during edits. But what if you could make some dynamic pieces that gave you the information so you could either trace it, or target those pieces directly?

Let's look at a simple example. A bump out along a road needs to be graded at 2%. Now, I could probably pretty quickly make a profile that was 2% higher than my centerline profile, but what happens if I wanted to change it later? Plus, my target alignment has a widening, so it is stationed differently from my main alignment which can be annoying to manage and hard to visualize in your head.

One way to get started is to make a new assembly that is a copy of the one you will use on the final road corridor, only it has a LinkWidthAndSlope subassembly on one side that goes up at 2%.

 

When I build the temporary corridor, it looks like this:

Now, I make a surface from this corridor and sample it on to a profile view. Probably best to put it on its own profile view so you can see it fully stretched out, but you could also sample it on to the centerline profile view if you wanted.

Now, build an assembly for that region with the appropriate transition lane.

And build the final corridor using the offset alignment and the sampled surface profile as targets.

The nice thing about this is that if there is a change to your road centerline profile, you simply rebuild the temporary corridor and make sure the temporary corridor surface rebuilds, then rebuild your final corridor. Since it is targeting that dynamic surface profile, everything will update. Also, if you wanted to use 3% instead of 2%, you could just adjust the link in the subassembly.

The possibilities here are endless when you think of all of the manual profile chasing you do in your work- how much of it can we eliminate this way?

While this technique works in Civil 3D 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009... Civil 3D 2010 makes it even more fun with dynamic offset alignments and widenings Here's my first attempt at an animated gif to show you how cool these are: 

AutoCAD Skills for Civil Work: Traffic Control

As hard as it is for me to admit, there are some things that you just can't build a Civil 3D model to handle. Take for example Traffic Control Plans. These are the plans we put together to show how lanes will be closed, where flaggers will be positioned, and how construction will be phases. There are a lot of notes, details, tables and hatching.

You'll certainly build a corridor for your road improvements, and if you are really slick you can get code set styles to deliver nice linework, but the actual configuration of signage, barriers and traffic arrows will probably be done with AutoCAD blocks and labeling. Since both AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD Civil are built on AutoCAD, you're in luck.

A few years back when I first saw dynamic blocks, I thought "Those are cool. But they seem to be most useful for architects". That's not true at all! It just so happens that most of the examples they show at the big roadshows and online demos seem to be architectural. Well, I am here to debunk the myths and show you how Civil Engineering plans can leverage dynamic blocks, too.

The image below shows a dynamic block for some lane striping and arrows. The block has been defined to include stretching parameters and rotation parameters- so that you can make it as long as you need and have it come in at any angle.

In this short clip, I used a tool palette loaded with a hatch pattern, a few attributed blocks and several dynamic blocks. My favorites are the orange cones that stretch!

The blocks used in this post were created by Philip Blaich of LiveMore Co. and can be purchased for a very reasonable price (about $20 for one user) from his website  I've been very impressed with the quality of these blocks- they've provided me with a lot of inspiration for building my own library for things like Erosion Control devices. I'm glad I grabbed a set for myself.

Learn more about using code sets for linework creation:

The Civil Side: Making Corridors Work for You - May 2008

Learn more about composing your own dynamic blocks:

Creating Dynamic Blocks in AutoCAD 2006 (and above) Webcast

Other AutoCAD webcasts on tables, fields, tool palettes, and more.

Autodesk University 2008 Classes on Dynamic Blocks (will require login):

Hands-On Introduction to Dynamic Blocks in AutoCAD® (Handout Only- but its very good)
The Dos and Don'ts of Dynamic Blocks - Revealed! (Handout and Screencast)

There is also an Autodesk Discussion Forum dedicated to dynamic blocks- take your ideas and seek feedback to other people like yourself.

The Road Ahead: The Best Civil 3D Overview I've Seen

I realize that a few other Civil 3D bloggers, such as Scott at Paving the Way, Jack and Ove at From the Ground Up and Angel's Civil 3D Thoughts, have already linked to The Road Ahead. I try not to duplicate too much material, but this one is just so much fun, I couldn't resist!

The Road Ahead is a narrated video that goes through key Civil 3D benefits such as Integrating Geospatial Data, Design Changes, Data Sharing, Corridor Modeling, Plans Production, and Interference Checking. If you have been looking to get a feel for the power of Civil 3D, this is the video to watch. If you are trying to convince your company leadership that Civil 3D is the future, this is the video to put up on the conference room screen during lunch. Personally, I can't stop watching it. But I am a geek that way.

In fact, I am such a geek that I happened to have the raw demonstration videos (no narration) used to create The Road Ahead, and I've uploaded some of them up to youtube.