Alternative proposals

[neilyj666]

I've created a windfarm infrastructue model in Civil 3d and have brought it into IW (see screenshot) and I now have modified some road alignments in Civil 3D and want to bring them into IW.

I can only see the creation of a new IW model as being the way to show my alternative as the IW proposals workflow doesn't seem appropriate for my purposes i.e. the terrain would go very wrong if I mixed data in the same IW model.

Any comments on the way to go about this?

Thanks

Neil

[jutters]

Could you explain what you mean by "the IW proposals workflow doesn't seem appropriate for my purposes"? If both versions of the alignments are put into separate IW proposals that are based from same proposal (or the master), it should work just fine as individual proposals don't affect each other after their creation (as long as you don't merge them).

[neilyj666]

I've never fully explored proposals as the only time I did it corrupted my model.

All the data for the model is generally Civil surfaces imported via IMX - all terrain surfaces seem to just stack on top of each other to make a composite terrain and the highest terrain always "wins".

I'm primarily using IW as a visualisation tool (probably not what is was designed for and 3ds Max would be better but that has a steep learning curve) to produce flythroughs.

[DMFACER]

I believe separate proposals are the best solution for this.  Your Master proposal should only have existing conditions, and you should have a separate Proposal for each design option.

Also, you can control the priority order of surfaces by using the Manage Surface Layers tool (Ribbon - Home tab - Explore panel).  You can select the objects that make up your surface, and move them up or down in the list to set which objects take priority over others.  

[jutters]

So, give proposals another try 🙂 - e.g. create several proposals as needed from your master and import your different alignment configs/variants (incl. surfaces) into these, so they don't affect each other. Unfortunately you can't switch proposals automatically within storyboards, so you'd have to record independent fly-throughs for each of the proposals and cut them together using an external tool.

[neilyj666]

I wasn't aware of the surface priority method - I'm going to play with that right now.....

[neilyj666]

I'll certainly be giving proposals another try - the Infraworks stuff is done right at the end of a project and by the time I've completed what i need to do I need to move on to another project so I don't get much time to experiment.

From the replies thus far, proposals may be a useful tool to get to know....:)