topic Re: drawing 2d roads in AutoCAD Forum

drawing 2d roads

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:11:13 GMT

Hi. I have not used AutoCad for 20 years. I used to be able to define a road (width, curb, sidewalk, etc.) and then just draw the center line. All the rest was done automatically. So how do i do that in 2D now???

Re: drawing 2d roads

Alfred.NESWADBA — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:20:19 GMT

Hi,

>> I used to be able to define a road (width, curb, sidewalk, etc.) and then

>> just draw the center line. All the rest was done automatically.

Not without an additional tool 😉

For road design I would strongly recommend to use Autodesk Civil 3D >>>click<<<, there you have components to design the assembly and use alignment + profile to create a (closed to) finished corridor.

- alfred -

Re: drawing 2d roads

beyoungjr — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:25:56 GMT

Hi,

You must have been using one of the vertical products for Civil or something. Plain AutoCAD has never incorporated road details "out of the box". The Multiline (MLINE) command still exists where you can define multiple line paths that orient upon top, bottom, or center. These can certainly be used for defining roads with curb/gutter, sidewalks, and other elements.

Multilines are not readily visible on current versions with commands on the ribbon. You need to turn on the Menu Bar (MENUBAR=1) to see the traditional cascading menus with Multiline on the Draw menu and configuration for them on the Format menu.

Explore MLINE and while you're at it please let us know what AutoCAD you are working with.

Cheers,

Blaine

Re: drawing 2d roads

Kent1Cooper — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 22:10:25 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

.... I used to be able to define a road (width, curb, sidewalk, etc.) and then just draw the center line. All the rest was done automatically. So how do i do that in 2D now???

You can do it [not quite that automatically but] pretty quickly by drawing the center-line route and using OffsetBothSides.lsp, available >here<, on it a few times. Give it half the overall cartway width to get the curb faces, a distance greater than that by the curb width to get the curb back edges, and another greater distance to get the far edges of the sidewalks. That's assuming a symmetrical arrangement, of course. There are other routines out there to Offset things in both directions. And it wouldn't be difficult to adjust it to [for example] put the results on a different Layer, and even to combine itself 3 times, asking the User for the overall cartway width, curb width, and sidewalk width, and using a different Layer for each for those different locations but requiring the User to pick the center-line route only once.

The advantage of something like this over MultiLines is that it works on any kind of center-line routes including curving routes [Polylines, Splines, Arcs], whereas MLINEs do only straight segments.

Re: drawing 2d roads

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 22:39:44 GMT

THANKS, Civil is impressive..