Hello all,
I know it is still very early in the 2013 release cycle, but I was so excited to hear about the new pressure pipe networks that I had to get into the software. What I have found is both promising, and a little bewildering. The promising aspects are that the pressure pipes appear to act and function effectively, and in a manner consistent with real world design that is easy to understand and use. Kudos to Autodesk!
That being said, I do have a couple of complaints. First, the pre-loaded fitting and appurtenance libraries are very limited when it comes to sizes and materials that are more commonly found in the land development arena I work in (8" PVC is our bread and butter). Hopefully, additional resources are forthcoming - they usually are.
Second, and more importantly, I can't figure out a way to data reference a pressure pipe network. Am I missing something? If we can't data reference the pressure pipe network, then we really can't use them at all, which would be very disappointing. Has anyone come across this, or found a solution that I have overlooked?
I look forward to hearing what you all have found!
Andy Reese
I don't have an answer for your data reference question but I'd like to comment on my first impression of pressure pipes.
First off I'll mention that the lack of support for pressure pipes has been a big problem for us as we are working on a wastewater treatment plant that has lots of crossing pressure pipes that require profiles and conflict resolution, so I was eager to see if they would be a salvation.
The layout compass is a great feature and would have been really handy when I was laying out the pipes on this project. However I was disappointed to find out that the constraints to the pipe bends and joints are not maintained after the initial layout. While we do get warnings when they are out of tolerance it's still a manual process to correct and the compass does not function for grip editing.
With regard to the pipes in profile, there is a bit of work to make the tools useful in my opinion. Currently there are only 2 options for assigning profile elevations, either a VPI at each junction or a VPI at every joint based on pipe cut length. If we apply the second option we end up with numerous VPI's that cannot be deleted or shifted. So if we want to straighten portions of the profile we have to manually align all those segments. There is no way to remove the segments or change their length once they are created, aside from re-creating the pipe.
Having the tool is certainly better than trying to use corridors or gravity pipes, but it's not the salvation I was hoping for.