BIM on the Rocks

Join Jerry Bartels For Accelerate Survey Workflows Thursday 2-23

I always enjoy learning something new from Jerry. Here he is teaching Karen how to turn on her new laptop in Manchester last year. (Which reminds me that I still love the idea of an Autodesk Reality Show called “Technical Specialist Swap” )

There is still time to sign up for Jerry’s webcast tomorrow!

Webcast - Accelerate Survey Workflows

Date & Time: Thursday, February 23, 2012, 10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. PST

The techniques for survey are easy to implement, and survey data can be seamlessly transferred from field data applications into virtual design and construction models for display, reduction, management, and design. In this webcast presentation, civil engineering and survey professionals will learn how quickly and easily they can implement the survey specific functionality within the Autodesk infrastructure design solutions. Join us and learn how to accelerate your survey workflows to increase productivity and profitability.

Jerry Bartels, Autodesk Technical Specialist, will be your host at this webcast.  Here’s what he’ll cover:

• Site Investigation
• Leveraging GIS Resources
• Data Collection
• Importing into AutoCAD Civil 3D
• Survey Tools
• Annotation
• Collaborating with Others

If you love learning from Jerry as much as I do, check out some of these other resources:

Why Would Visualization Matter On Government Projects? (The post where I compare him to Papa Smurf)

CI5356 (from AU 2011)
It's About Time: Migrating from AutoCAD® Land Desktop to AutoCAD Civil 3D®

CV234-3P (from AU 2010)
"Field to Finish": Sculpting a Better Figure

Help Dana Design a Road from Point A to Point B

You know you’ve always wanted to tell me what to do! Here is your chance.

This short video introduces a design scenario that I will work through over the next few weeks. I need to get a road from Point A to Point B!

The first exercise is to work through some early designs to make a decision- do I design a road that goes over the hills or around the hills?

Interactive Adventures in Civil Engineering with Dana, PE: Episode 1

Post your comments here or on youtube and I will get Episode 2 posted on Friday.

You might want to check out information about Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler and Project Silverstar to help you decide what my next step should be.

Conceptual Design for Transportation with Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (youtube)

Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler vBook Tutorials

Project Silverstar (Profile Optimization) on Autodesk Labs

Project Silverstar Tutorial 1 (youtube)

Project Silverstar Tutorial 2 (youtube)

Editing Surface Build Order

I’m working on this project that involves a lot of composite surfaces. You know when you paste one surface into another, the newly added surface replaces TIN everywhere on the original surface. This means that the order you paste surfaces together is very important.

This morning, I found a mistake that I made. My pasting order was wrong, so my intersections didn’t come through.

A few releases ago, Civil 3D got a new tool in the Surface Properties dialog that lets you switch the order of build operations. This includes pasting. No need to delete and re-add, simply adjust the stack and rebuild.

 

Much better!

Revisiting Thoughts on Vault in the Civil Workflow

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been spending time with our data management team. Part of what we are doing is taking another look at how data moves through a Civil Engineering project.

We’ve been talking about the reports, analysis, plotted sets, excel files, images, correspondence, transmittals, and other glorious bits and pieces that go along with the “real work”. We’ve also been digging into the mechanics of how the “real work” is shared.

Back in Civil 3D 2006, we were faced for the first time with rethinking how we shared data with data shortcuts. When Civil 3D 2007 came along, it brought with it the possibility of using Vault (who can forget the landmark post in July 2006 from James “Why is Vault Better?”).

At that point, we really had to think about how we worked. How we split our projects. If we were going to move forward with model based design, it was going to require more than just a new box of software.

In those early days we didn’t know what we wanted yet. We started with a modified LDT or CAD style workflow- a mix of XREFs, minor data sharing, and tentative breaks from the normal process.

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote in 2008:

Here is how it worked: we’d do most, if not all, of our modeling in one master base plan. We’d set up our styles to match our current forms of layer control and label in this model drawing. Then, we’d XREF this model into sheet drawings, where we would cut viewports and create layouts. While some people can get out of control with layouts, most people keep it around 5-10 layouts per drawing, with drawings broken up into “families” (all of the sanitary sheets in one, all of the grading sheets in another, etc.)

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it was the software, and we learned how to deal with that. But if we are really honest with ourselves, sometimes the problem was between the seat and the keyboard. If we wanted to dig into the real power of the Civil 3D model, we probably had to do more than just swap XREFs for DREFs. We needed to look deeper and change the way we think and the way our teams interact.

I came up with something vague like this:

I remember when the Civil 3D 2008 with Vault whitepaper came out. I remember we took a look at its proposed file structure and immediately freaked out. A single drawing for an individual object? Seriously? Where are my smelling salts!

Three levels of drawings?? Why would I need that when I can just have two base drawings and XREF the whole caboodle together and have forty layout tabs?

Three years later, everything is the same and everything is different. We’ve come a long way as Civil 3D users. We’ve begun to stop resisting the idea of BIM. Our workflows have matured, and while data shortcuts are great, we have the nagging feeling that there might be something more to take us to the next level. Maybe we don’t really need forty giant surfaces in one drawing. Maybe it would be easier to share work with another office. Just maybe….

I was amazed this morning when I sat down to read that Civil 3D 2008 with Vault whitepaper that some of it actually made sense and some of it gave me ideas on how to fill in the gaps in my personal workflow. I suppose after four years (or is it five?) of working in a model based world, I am beginning to get it.

I’ll be spending a lot of my time on this over the next year- so I want to know your thoughts. Please comment on what has worked for you. If you have a documented file organization or data sharing plan for your office, I’d love to see it. Feel free to email me (first.last@autodesk.com) with your documents, visios, pdfs, jpgs, etc. that map out workflow. Tell me what has resonated and what hasn’t been easy for users to digest.

We’ve all come a long way since Civil 3D 2007. Many who took the plunge couldn’t imagine working any other way. Mark Spatz recently posted this on Civil3D.com:

As of today we are up to 303 Civil 3D projects in Vault, company wide, and we just passed our one-year hallmark of our Civil 3D rollout.

Read more of Mark’s thoughts on Vault at: Civil3D.com: Vault Articles and also check out the great technical material at Being Civil: Vault Articles.

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

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.)

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

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

A few weeks ago I posted about Overlay Analysis for Floodplain Study. Now, let’s look at some other tools you can use for floodplain studies, wetlands work, urban planning and other tasks where you need to create both exhibits and detailed reports about buffers.

This demonstration begins with county parcels, road centerlines and stream centerlines. Many states regulate what types of construction are permitted within a certain distance from a wetlands area, which includes streams. There are plenty of other situations where this is useful- Which property owners must be notified about a new waste transfer station, or a zoning change? What types of land uses are within a certain buffer around sensitive open space? or How many homes are within walking distance to a school?

I’ve recorded a short video showing Stream Buffer Analysis using the tools in Map 3D 2010, which are also included in Civil 3D 2010. (I use Civil 3D in the video.)

 

Here is a summary of the tasks shown:

1. Parcels, roads, stream centerlines are in the drawing through an FDO connection.

2. Use Feature Buffer tool. Choose the blue stream centerlines.

3. Create a buffer distance of 100 feet.

4. A new layer is created for the buffer.

5. Drag and drop a land cover layer into the drawing.

6. Create a theme that colors each land use uniquely.

7. Add a legend.

8. Create a layout border for your exhibit.

Ideas to take this further:

The buffer is a layer like any other through in the display manager. Use the query, overlay, and any other techniques to report, theme and understand the information before you.

Do an overlay between a watershed layer and the land use layer to come up with some conceptual runoff coefficients for preliminary rational method calculations, or other watershed exercises.

I’d love to hear what you are working on and where you might find this useful.

Don't Forget the WisDOT Webcast Thursday

Just a quick reminder to tune in Thursday, 6-11-2009 at 10AM PDT (that means 1PM CDT and 2PM EDT).

If you haven't already registered, you can sign up for WisDOT Plan Production Workflow here.

WisDOT Corridor Building Workflow Webcast Thurs 5-7-2009

This Thursday, May 7, 2009  at 2PM EDT (11AM PDT), Karen Weiss will be hosting Brad Hollister from WisDOT.

Wisconsin DOT Webcast: Corridor Modeling with AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Karen will work with Brad to learn about WisDOT corridor modeling workflows, WisDOT custom subassemblies, corridor object codes, and their implementation project in general. 

Brad will demo an urban corridor model concept, a rural 4-Lane Divided corridor model concept, and a corridor refinement technique that uses PLine targeting on the daylight link to smooth out steep-to-flat slope transitions on backslopes and fill slopes.

You can register for tomorrow's webcast here.

Go ahead and register for all of the future Civil 3D related webcasts at www.autodesk.com/civil-webcasts

Also of note for those of you in the Wisconsin area- the Wisconsin Geospatial User Group is hosting a conference on June 1 that will include a ton of Civil 3D classes. Karen Weiss, our transportation TMM, will be presenting along with several other Autodeskers. You can register for WGUG event here.