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Water Runs Downhill...Your Network Should Too.

OK, so I was remiss the other night, thought I had posted this a long time ago. I'm not going to go too far into it, but as always, a couple of statements. 1. My pipe rules are set up with mins/maxes, etc. 2. I don't know everything under the sun about how pipe rules are calculating. I thought I understood it pretty well, then attempting to write them up with pictures, I couldn't make it do what I thought it did. Clear as mud, right? So, here's what happens when you work from Top to Bottom when laying out your pipe network:

Everything looks pretty good. The pipe lays out the first pipe on the right, sets the depth, sets the structure. The next pipe starts from there and goes downhill. Cool. Now, here's what happens when I go from bottom to top:

This looks OK I guess...until you look a bit closer. Something's not quite right at that junction...

Hey, wait a minute, I wanted the water to DRAIN in my system. Now, I know there's probably a simple reason for this, and I could probably fix it with some tweaking of rules. But for my money, it's just easier to work top to bottom.

Areas of Contours for Stormwater Calculations (for now)

I am working out the kinks in my stage storage table (to be unveiled at AU this year during my SWM class), so for now here is a quick-n-simple way to get your contour areas out of your ponds. This is also a great tool to use during your Civil 3D transition, because it is actually labeling a regular polyline. So until you break the drawing-your-own-contours habit, you can use this to help automate your labeling. The procedure below is a variation on the theme of Labeling Polyline "Contours" and Other Lines in Civil 3D More to come on this subject- but this will get you started. Not a lot of words in here, so let me know if you get hung up. First you need a Pond Surface. Then... DEFINE USER CONTOURS UNDER SURFACE PROPERTIES COPY YOUR SURFACE EXPLODE (yes I said it ) YOUR POND TWICE MAKE A LINE LABEL STYLE LABEL AND DRAG OFF

Corridor Daze

I think I have finally beaten the corridor monster to death. Here is the larger of the two projects I am working on, I finally have a complete corridor that matches the project manager's design intentions. 52 Baselines in one Corridor. It was an experiment that had me doubting at one point until i figured out where my drawing hangups were coming from (see yesterday's post about performance). I would do it again. I will comment on the pros and cons some other time. Now I have to finish the pipes for this beast.

Creating Pipes, Part Piggyback

Since Dana was kind enough to start writing on pipes, I wanted to jump on her momentum and throw out a nugget of knowledge discovered this week during training and working on some pipes questions from GBA in Kansas City. First, a couple of assumptions: 1. You've written your pipe rules, and worked through the parts list, labeling isn't an issue, and the world is well. 2. Your pipe networks are typically stationed such that 0+00 is the downstream end, whether is be a storm line outfall, or a connection to an existing sanitary sewer. So let's talk about those pipes. Because you're a die hard Civil3d.com reader, you know that when laying out pipes using the layout tools, it's best to work downstream. But now it's time to profile. You're like many engineers and designers I work with, and want to profile exaclty along the CL of the pipe, so doesn't it make sense to just use the tools that Autodesk gave us in the package? After all, there is a Create Alignment from Network Parts command, right? So you go to the bottom of the network, because that's where you want your 0+00 to be, and begin clicking and picking your way up the hill. You finish picking, the nifty create dialog pops up (look at that, we can even make the profile and profile view in this step!) and you pick, pick, pick until you wind up with a nive profile view on screen. But something isn't right. This isn't what I was expecting? And why does my alignment jump back and forth like that? Something is rotten in the state of Darcy Weisbach! After running into this a few times, I knew it wasn't just a quirk of the dataset. So after a quick e-mail exchange, I have an answer to share.... When you laid out the pipes, you went from high-to-low to create pipe network that worked fairly well based on rules of your creation and to get a good initial design. But when you created your alignment, you picked in the other direction! When creating the alignment, if you choose begin and end structures in the order OPPOSITE their initial creation order, AND pick structure, pipe, structure, pipe... then the alignment will double back as I've shown in this image. The solution? Create that alignment from top to bottom, then reverse it. Simple as pie, and no more fighting with the loopback alignment. Stupid blogger, it's official, we hate your image handling. We'll be shutting civil3d.com later this week to change blogging solutions and bring up something better in terms of tags, editing and user features.

Increasing Drawing Performance when working with Large Corridors

This weekend I ran into an issue with two large corridors I am working with. One is about 40 baselines with 2-6 regions each, the other is about 60 baselines with 2-6 regions each. The drawing was doing really well- I was surprised. The full rebuild of the entire corridor took a little while, but I only did that maybe twice a day, so no big deal. I expect that. What I didn't expect was lagtime and hangups when I was making grip edits or profile grid view edits to my centerline and transition profiles. We're talking- move one PVI, get the white screen and 20-30 seconds of 100% processor useage. This wasn't going to work. After some messing around, I realized it was the "mini" rebuild that happens when you make edits to a corridor. Now, I work with Rebuild Automatic for my corridors, OFF, but notice in the exhibits below that you get a little intermediate rebuild when working with a corridor. If I grip edit an alignment (or make a change to anything corridor related) the corridor does respond. It takes a full rebuild to get everything lined up again. I figured out that THIS was killing my drawing. So I did an experiement. I built my corridor with ALL baselines and ALL regions unchecked- essentially a corridor of nothing. WOW. What a difference. I might have actually been able to go outside this weekend if I had figured that out!! WARNING- I almost always get a Fatal Error if I build an empty corridor with my corridor surface visible. So I make the corridor surface a no-show style and make sure it is NOT rebuild automatic. I logged this problem pre-SP2, but I don't know if it was addressed.

Daily Affirmation

Here are some images from a model and design I did this weekend that made me realize it was all worth it. There is some serious exaggeration on the renderings to show off the grade differences. The guys here at Civil3D.com are probably sick of seeing these images, but I am just amazed that I was able to do this in the course of just normal every day design. No harder or easier than the old way- but you can really see your design! Here is the corridor that made the Cul De Sac above.

More on UCS vs Dview in Civil 3D

As much I try to avoid this subject, I feel that I must explain why I don't ever change the UCS in any form. But I have an open mind so feel free to comment. I think it is about time we had a good rousing debate and cleared the air! And this is just my (Dana) opinion. The other Civil3D.com bloggers can lay their reasoning out whenever they feel like it :) In my last post, Take Advantage of Twisting Labels, I said that twisting your view was required to get your labels to automatically flip. I have other reasons for prefering dview in general. It comes from my first days as a new EIT at an engineering firm. I was dangerous in CAD.... They'd give me something seemingly simple to do- like change lot numbers on a site plan, and when they went back into the drawing they'd find all of their special attributed blocks exploded down to dtext and that sort of thing. So I was told never to mess with anything. As my skills grew, I noticed that if I started my work in a drawing that came from an architect sometimes when I tried to import a surface or something from the project, it would come in all strange. It was explained to me that the architect didn't care when north was and rotated the UCS for whatever reason. In the old days, your UCS Y axis was North to softdesk and Land Desktop. (here is an article I found that explains it well from a Softdesk perspective UCS vs Dview Twist ) So if you didn't remember to change your UCS back to world before importing or exporting points, your surveyors where halfway to Tahiti before they realized their stakeout points were bogus. Civil 3D apparently takes that off the table. I had a minor brainstorm last night thinking that "Why can't we just change the UCS for a North rotation?" when Nick shot me down and sent me into help where I found this: ------------------------- Autodesk Civil 3D object data is always presented in AutoCAD World Coordinate System coordinates. For example, the alignment data in the Alignment Entities vista in the Panorama window is listed in world coordinates. In addition, the Autodesk Civil 3D transparent commands are based on the AutoCAD World Coordinate System. However, when you create an object and have an AutoCAD User Coordinate System (UCS) defined, the UCS is honored when you specify locations, which means that an insertion point or a coordinate is interpreted relative to the UCS. Autodesk Civil 3D objects are not aligned with the UCS. For example, labels can be oriented relative either to the current view, the World Coordinate System, or the labeled object, depending on the Orientation Reference setting, but they cannot be oriented to the UCS. Similarly, objects, such as profiles, sections, and tables, cannot be oriented to the current UCS. For more information about AutoCAD World Coordinate Systems and AutoCAD User Coordinate Systems, see AutoCAD Help. ------------------------- And I tried it. I labeled bearings, etc. on some parcels and alignments, then I changed the UCS and the labels nor the mapchecks changed. I also did another experiment. I imported a list of points. Then I changed my UCS so that my Y axis was 45 degrees turned. I reimported the same list of points from ascii. They came in at the exact same spot. So it is truly using the World Coordinate System when dealing with Civil 3D objects. In some respects, I think I would rather it react to the UCS. I think that an appropriate use of the UCS would be a North rotation. However, that takes my original fears off the table. UCS changes won't muck with the Civil 3D data. But your labels only react to the view change. Going through it both ways, it appears to me (and correct me if I am wrong PLEASE) that dview leaves you in world, but rotates the view. Like turning a sheet of graph paper on a table. Changing your UCS would be like erasing the Y axis arrow on my graph paper and redrawing it., then turning the paper until North faces up again. Interesting enough, it seems that you are actually dview twisting without realizing it in your second scenario because if you actually enter into the dview commmand after doing the UCS view change, you see that a dview twist has actually been applied for you. In my mind, I'd rather not mess with Y period. There are too many people I share data with that still use Land Desktop and Softdesk. There is too much confusion over North these days and with increased pressure to submit in State Plane Coordinates and be GIS friendly that anything I can do to make sure that stays intact, I will.

Take Advantage of the Twisting Labels

This isn't really a Civil 3D thing, but since Civil 3D labels respond to a dview twist, it is about time we all figured out how to do one with as little pain as possible. There is always a lot of passion surrounding the use of UCS rotation vs Dview twist to change the way your plan looks when placed in a layout. For some more information about UCS vs Dview in Civil3D see my next post. I am a resident of a Dview state, so I cast my vote for the twist. Jason, however, is from UCS country, so perhaps he will share his approach later. One of the main objections to the Dview twist is that it can be tricky to figure out your twist angle, where with UCS you can do UCS follow or some other methods that make the flip fast. I always struggled coming up with a dview twist angle until I found this. There is an express tool that makes this go really quickly. It is called ALIGNSPACE and it works very similarly to the ALIGN command in AutoCAD. I have a site plan with area labels I'd like to always remain readable, and I'd like the long roads to be parallel to the bottom of the page. I make sure my area label is setup to change with the view. Go into layout and make your viewport Draw a Guideline parallel to the bottom of the page. Execute Express>Layout Tools> Alignspace Choose two points in model space and two points in paper space as directed. REGENALL to see your label size and flip react. Now if you want to replicate this view in model space so that you can work on your drawing in an orientation that makes sense to you, you can name the view so you can access it again- either in model space or on another sheet.

Making Civil 3D do Water Pipes and Networks Part I

Civil 3D is setup for gravity pipes, however you can use it to help you design, draft and annotate other types of systems, like forcemains, natural gas, cable conduit, or even water networks if you have some creativity. Make Pipe Styles to match how you want to see your water pipes in plan and profile. Make yourself Parts list that includes your water pipes, and for now, just null structures. Make a rule set that puts your pipe in with desired cover and no slope. This will get you started, but your pipes will definitely need hand tweaking (coming in Part II) Draw in the centerline of your water pipes. A first, your null structures probably will look like this: But if you make a structure style that is no show it almost looks right: Now, make that no show style NOT do part masking: You'd never even know it was there. Coming soon, Part II- Profiles and Part III- Tricking Civil 3D into doing your laterals, valves and hydrants.