Modeling of a long power line with different kind of custom pylons

[juuso.virtanen]

Hello everybody!

I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to model a planned power line with Infraworks or not. Or rather how not to do that the hardest way possible. Here are few specs about the power line:

• It's rather long power line, so there will be hundreds of pylons (maybe even thousands) - Probably have to divide the power line into few different IW projects
• There will be few different types of pylons

Now here's the issue I'm most curious about:

• What is the best way to place the pylons?
  • If we have the alignment (.dwg, polyline) of the power line, we can bring that to IW as a .svd and use a custom made pylons with fixed distance between each pylon - Rotation will be correct, but the location of each pylon may differ (if we even have the actual locations)
  • If we have the actual location of the pylons (.dwg, points/blocks), we can bring them to IW also as a .svd and place a custom made pylon over each point - Location of the pylons will be correct, but the rotation probably won't
  • 3rd option - Do everything in Civil 3D and import a dwg to IW?
  • 4th option - ???

Then there're of course the actual lines, but I already found few similar questions/forum posts about how to model them. Those pylons are the tricky part... I really don't want to fix the rotation/location of thousand pylons by hand 🙂

Any tips and suggestions are appreciated, thanks in advance!

-Juuso

[andrewofabley]

Greetings Juuso,

You're in luck - I happen to have a complete end to end workflow for something very, very similar but with Gondolas instead of transmission lines.

• What is the best way to place the pylons? I recommend using points from a SDF file, draped onto the terrain, using 'land area' polygons to first level the terrain / make foundation areas underneath the pylons.
  
  • If we have the alignment (.dwg, polyline) of the power line, we can bring that to IW as a .svd and use a custom made pylons with fixed distance between each pylon - Rotation will be correct, but the location of each pylon may differ (if we even have the actual locations) I recommend using SDF for this.
  • If we have the actual location of the pylons (.dwg, points/blocks), we can bring them to IW also as a .svd and place a custom made pylon over each point - Location of the pylons will be correct, but the rotation probably won't. If you populate a rotation attribute on your points - then insert your 3D models using these points (rule style) and assign the rotation to the model Z rotation, this should work fine.
  • 3rd option - Do everything in Civil 3D and import a dwg to IW? Do as much as you can in Civil 3D, then import the conductor lines in (with sags) in to IW as pipelines for example.
  • 4th option - ??? For my workflows, I use FME to derive and prepare attribution for IW model positioning, scaling and rotation. If you use software like PLS-CAD and can output to spreadsheets .etc then this really scales up well. You can run the workbench and then hit the refresh button on your IW data sources, thus updating nearly every aspect of your transmission line in one simple automated workflow.

Then there're of course the actual lines, but I already found few similar questions/forum posts about how to model them. Those pylons are the tricky part... I really don't want to fix the rotation/location of thousand pylons by hand. With attribution driving the geometry, I believe you won't have to. I often position a few hundred elements at a time, each with individually unique scale, rotation, 3D model type and position.

Good luck Juuso!

[Karsten.Saenger]

Hi @juuso.virtanen ,

reading your description and if you go the Civil 3D way, there is a possibility to use Dynamo for automatisation. Once everything is built in Civil 3D simply import the 3D model into InfraWorks.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajKhhIMJW_s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMWSTbGH2dU.
I believe theses scripts are available as sample scripts.

Regards,
Karsten.

[juuso.virtanen]

Thank you for the reply Andrew! I had a suspicion this would be done something like that. I'm fairly new with IW and Civil3D so I'll need to look more into these things. One question though: Do you happen to know if Civil3D can handle point rotation/is there an attribute like that? I think we have few people in our company who's working with FME, so I need to talk with them as well. Thanks again!

[juuso.virtanen]

Thank you for your reply Karsten! I've heard a lot of good things about Dynamo and other similar programs. I've never used them but I guess it would be a good idea to learn to do so 🙂 Thanks!

[andrewofabley]

Hi Juuso,

I don't know specifically if Civil3D can retain point rotation data as an attribute to be exported - perhaps hit up the Civil 3D forums. I would have assumed so. 

One other way to do this is would be to have the alignment as a Polyline, make a block of a point with an attribute definition which tracks the block rotation value - then array that block along your alignment. You can explode the array and export that to SDF including the block attribute rotation value. (See attached)

Import the points to Infraworks, set their style rule, and apply rotation as per the SDF attributes.

Odds are that Dynamo can do something similar - although I don't know how deep it's automation capability goes. The tutorials linked by Karsten certainly make it look like a possibility.

FME will let you work with the data end to end in a tidy, format agnostic fashion. It's especially good if you need to do complex mathematics to derive the various attributes.

I hope this has helped.

[juuso.virtanen]

It has. Thank you! 👍