Compute Materials List - When surfaces and structures overlap

[jmckayimeg]

Hi there, I am trying to create an automated cut and fill table with Civil 3D using compute materials.  I am able to use the Cut and fill quantity type using EG and FG surfaces.  But I seem to run into an issue when I add my corridor "structures" into the material list.  When added, my structures seem to overlap my EG/FG cut and fill quantities (creating duplicated quantities).  Is there any way to omit overlapping quantities between the two types?

for the overlap.jpg, the green is the original cut/fill from the surface and the cyan blue color is the curb assembly from my corridor showing the overlap between the green and cyan.  one of the areas would need to be eliminate or excluded in the quantities total

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, I hope you are doing well. The computation for structure shapes is delivered independently. What you call overlapping materials is showing up there due to how you are arranging the computation. You are using your terrain surface and your Top Finished Ground (Overall finished ground) surface instead of the Datum Surface.

Is there a good reason why you are computing cut/fill volumes with your Top Surface instead of the Datum Surface?

If you change that surface in the computation criteria, you'll notice that on that area a cut hatch will appear. It will overlap anyway with the curb and the pavement layers. However, this would not be a problem because it represents correctly how things will happen during construction. This is, you excavate, then you build the pavement layers, put curbs and then asphalt (all of this fills the space that is left once the excavation is performed).

Regards,

[Jeew-m]

Hi,

I can think of two reasons why this happens.

1. Your corridor surface does not have top links added as the breaklines and set overhang correction to top links 

2. Your cross-section location does not have a frequency line on the corridor. (If your corridor has frequency lines at every 10m then your sample lines should have the same interval to achieve the best results.)

[jmckayimeg]

Thank you @ecfernandez for your help.  Do you know if hierarchy applies when setting up the material list?  If I have my structures before my cut and fill or vice versa?

[jmckayimeg]

 . 

[ecfernandez]

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@jmckayimeg wrote:

Thank you @ecfernandez for your help.  Do you know if hierarchy applies when setting up the material list?  If I have my structures before my cut and fill or vice versa?

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Hi @jmckayimeg, having your shapes before or after cut/fill criteria won't change the result you are getting. The cut and fill materials are being computed by surface comparison with the surfaces you assigned, whereas the pavement materials are computed with the shape codes.

What I usually do is to create a material list for Cut/Fill and a Material List for Pavement structure. Something like this:

What I must mention again is that I find curious that you are computing Cut/Fill with the Finished Ground Surface at the top level of the road. I hope you find these comments helpful.

Regards,

[jmckayimeg]

ok, I am new to using the cut/fill compute materials feature, so I had selected the wrong surface.  I did update it to my datum as you mentioned above.  I actually set up the materials list as you listed above, so good to know I was on the right track.  When you get your totals (list/report or table), you get your total for Cut & Fill then totals for your materials.  How do you figure the final Cut/Fill numbers in the end to account for the materials since they are separate in the material list?  Do you export a cut & fill table along with the material table to excel and set up excel spreadsheet to do the calculations?  When I run my materials report, it comes back "0" on everything.  Only time I get the calculations is when I add a table into CAD.  I am not aware of a boxed report that supplies both together.  would you happen to know? 

I am also interested in auto-populating the cut/fill totals at the bottom on each cross section.  Do you know if this can be done?

Thank you in advance, just trying to understand this process alittle better.

[jmckayimeg]

@Jeew-m Thanks for the feedback, I did want to verify though, will I show 2 links then?  One for Top w/overhand to top links and one for datum with overhang to datum links and both listed as BL's?

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, there are several things to mention here. According to your image, you are getting Cut=0 Fill=0. You said you changed the surface for the computation. However, I could not see the surface in your section view. It should look similar to the following (red line):

 When computing materials, if you want to get the values for a report (say Excel or something similar), make sure you select the appropriate style sheet.

You should get a report like this, which you can copy paste to Excel:

Similarly, if you want to get these values for the pavement structure on your section views, make sure you select the correct table style (Total Volume for earthworks and Material for the pavement structure)

The previous selection must agree with the material list selected below.

I hope this helps. Best regards

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez the above "O" totals are just text.  we manually type these for each cross section.  I was looking for a way to automate this text.  It appears utilizing the tables listed above (as you mentioned) with some adjustments to the style of the table, we can do this.

I was using the same report as you mentioned above, but I get a blank .html page when I run the report using the selectmaterial.xsl   Would you know why this would be happening?

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, are you using Civil 3D 2023? if so, read this post to solve your problem of getting an empty report:

Link: Material list report not working  

I hope this helps, best regards.

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez Thanks again for your help.   I am actually working in Civil 3D 2022.  I did copy over the .zip file and ran the report.  I am getting this when I use Select Material.xsl file.  I do not report you showed above.  Is there something I am doing incorrect?  

I do have 2 separate materials.

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez for my material list calcs., I have a corridor set up with 7" curb with 7" subbase under curb, 7" pavt. with 7" subbase x 2 then another 7" curb with 7" subbase. I would like to just calculate the cut/fill for the areas between EG/Datum then all subbase under curb and pavt, eliminating the 7" curb material & 7" pavt. material. What would be the best way to set this up? I do not see anywhere to "exclude" part of a corridor shape when computing materials.

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, is it possible that you upload your file so I can give it a look and try to set up everything as suggested? 

Regarding the solution for the material list, I asked first if you were using Version 2023 because that was a known issue of that release. If you are using a different version of the software you should not use the files provided in that solution since they won't solve your problem.

Let me know if you can upload your file and I'd be happy to give you a hand. Best regards

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez Here are the dwgs.

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, thanks for posting your file. Could you please post your corridor? You have it as a shortcut, and I could not create the datum surface as I expected.

Regards 

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez sorry about that.  I attached it to the last post with the cross sections dwg.

[ecfernandez]

Hi @jmckayimeg, it's ok. Thanks for posting the file. I took a look at it and arranged the material list as I was trying to explain:

As you can see, the pavement materials and the earthworks are now separate materials (you can notice with the hatch pattern). The material list is the following:

However, there is still one additional step to compute all the materials. As you can see, there is an area behind the curb that is not being computed (just for cut, but not for the fill material that will come later to fill the gap). For the problematic area highlighted in yellow, which would be a fill that is not being computed, you could do the following:

1. Get a top surface for just the daylight of the corridor

2. Get another surface on top of the subbase layer. Then, compute the fill material between them.

I hope this finally helps you solve what you are doing. The file is attached so you can look at what I did. However, if you still have questions, please post them.

Best regards

[jmckayimeg]

@ecfernandez Thank you again for investing in the time to look into this.

For whatever reason, when I am creating the Top surface for just the daylight, it will not let me hide my surface data from inside the corridor from back of curb to back of curb. it gives me an error message below.  My polyline is closed, I checked that.  When I select another polyline to extend my boundary to the daylight, then it adjusts the surface to only extend to the daylight, but I am still unable to create a "HIDE" boundary to exclude the area mentioned above (boc-boc).  Any thoughts?

[ecfernandez · Accepted solution]

Hi @jmckayimeg, clean your boundary polyline with the MAPCLEAN command. Try to find any self-crossing segments, and solve them. Then give it another try. 

You can also create a custom subassembly that fills that gap. However, I did not mention that option because it is a bit more complex to achieve. I hope you can finally solve this issue.

Best regards,