Corridors, Sections & Slope Staking Reports

[Lisa_Pohlmeyer]

It’s been drilled into me that we should keep Civil 3D Objects as separate as we can in the design process, thus minimizing data loss in case of corruption (or other some such disaster).  So, our current workflow for our transportation projects is as follows:

Receive LandXML files of points, surface and existing CL alignment from surveyor.

Create a separate dwg for points which is then xref attached into our base model

Create dwg for EG surface, create dref

Create base model (existing conditions)

Create Roadway dwg, import LandXML of existing CL

Create design CL, dref

Create design profile, dref

Create Corridor dwg

                Dref alignment & profile

                Dref EG surface

Create Sections dwg

                Xref corridor

                Dref alignment

                Dref EG surface

                Create SLG

                Create multiple sections

                Hope that future release will have tools that mimic Plan Production for Align & Profiles

                Create Section Sheets

Now comes the conundrum…. We are now being asked to produce slope staking reports, which require a “live” corridor and a SLG.  Our current workflow doesn’t have both of these in the same drawing and since you can’t dref a corridor or a SLG, I’m forced to duplicate the SLG in the corridor dwg. Obviously copy/paste the SLG isn’t an option either.  I tried that, then exploding them down to polylines and creating a new SLG from the polylines, select them all, yeah, random creation.

Am I way off base here?  Is the intended workflow to have the design corridor, SLG and all the section views in one drawing?  I’m not sure how else to approach this.  The whitepapers and help file don’t seem to address workflows in this manner.

[tcorey]

Lisa, for what it's worth, I create the Sample Line Group in the drawing where the corridor resides. I Data Reference the other objects like surfaces and pipe networks because they can be.

What would be helpful would be if the sample line group would come over with the data-ref Alignment, but would allow you to add additional data sources (like a corridor) within the current drawing.

I would love to see corridors exposed to the whole Data Shortcut scheme.

[ntimba256]

On the subject of Slope Staking Reports, can i get a template into the C3D, instead  of manually editing the excel output, because 100km of pages is so much to edit, any ideas?

[MikeEvansUK]

As all I really wanted was the alignment horizontal & vertical data then the detail of CoGo point data extracted from each string as offsets I produced my own in VB. So that you obtain a read out as thus in excel.

Station:  0.069    Geometry:  type: N/A , Radius: N/A                    
Easting:   820.295    Northing: 535.755    Bearing:  N41°03,36.34"W    Level:                      
Point Number    Code    Easting    Northing    Level    Offset
79    EC    820.295    535.755    84.113    -1.488
119    XCH    819.659    535.025    84.12    -0.519

This means all you need is an alignment with profile and points extracted from the corridor or any other element you desire.

You can add in points on featurelines / 3d polylines, drainage etc and not have to have the actual model located in the drawing file.

The downside was that it needed a lot of programming to do but afterwards it was worth it. If you can I recomend using CogoPoints.

M

[WyldeParnelle]

Slope Stake Reports have been a pain in the "a" for me and Autodesk needs to improve it because it's pretty bad. To minimize potential future problems I create corridors as minimal as possible. Creating a decent slope stake report it's a huge pile of work to make it look correct. Worse yet, you can't export it cleanly to PDF or Word without it spliting where ever it wants, half way through images or data. The only way you can do it is manually by forcing page breaks where they should be.

I have put in the "Wish List" for them to improve functionality of slope stake reports, because it has a LOT of room to improve.

I have attached an image to show where it randomly puts page breaks. Also, this is a corridor I created and to simplify it I created it in 2 baselines, Northbound and Southbound, however, the slope stake only does HALF. Why won't it do both sides? Am I missing something?