How Do You Like Your Stakes?

Recently, a surveyor asked me if Civil 3D could automate the insertion of staking points along a finished corridor.  At first glance, I thought Civil 3D could do the entire job in just a few clicks.  Simply select the corridor, and then expand the Launch Pad ribbon panel to access the “Points from Corridor” tool.  Using this tool you can easily place COGO points along any of the feature lines in the corridor.

It turns out; this isn’t exactly what the gentleman wanted.  He was interested in placing COGO points along feature lines at a specified offset.  To do this, (while not difficult) requires a little more effort.

Let’s take a look…

I’m starting with a simple corridor…

Below is the assembly this corridor is based on…

The assembly is built from the BasicLane and BasicCurbAndGutter subassemblies and includes a DaylightMaxWidth to tie back to the existing surface.  Now, let’s say I’d like to stake the back of curb feature line at a 3’ offset.  To do that, I’ll make a change to the assembly.

(At the risk of “destroying the end of the movie” here, I am simply going to create some NEW feature lines at a 3’ offset from the back of curb.)

Step 1: Use the SAVEAS command and save the corridor drawing as a “working drawing”.  Then Press CTRL+3 to access the Tool Palette and set the Generic tab current.

Step 2: Select the “LinkWidthAndSlope” subassembly and click to place one on the left (and right) back of curb.  Press ESC when finished.

Step 3: Select both LinkWidthAndSlopes, and in the Properties Palette, make the following changes.
Width = 3’ – (Offset distance)
Slope = 0.00% – (Flat slope, same elevation as top back of curb)
Point Codes = 3’O/S CG – (Eventual name of feature line and COGO point description)
Omit Link = Yes – (No need for link to display)

When finished, select the corridor and in the Modify Corridor ribbon panel, click “Rebuild Corridor”.  At this point you will see the additional 3’ offset feature lines displaying in the plan view…

Step 4: Change the corridor assembly frequency settings.  We do this because the automated point tool will create points at EVERY assembly insertion.  By adjusting the frequency, we can control how often points are inserted.  Select the corridor, right-click and choose “Corridor Properties”.  On the Parameters Tab, click the “Set All Frequencies” button and in the pop-up dialog box, assign the following values…
Along Tangents = 50
Along Curves = 50
Along Profile Curves = 50
This will place COGO points at every 50 feet along the alignment stationing.  Note that (based on the other settings) COGO points will also be placed at PC’s, PT’s, High/Low Points, etc.

When finished, click OK to close both dialog boxes, and rebuild the corridor.

Step 6: Create COGO Points.  Select the corridor and then expand the Launch Pad ribbon panel and choose “Points from Corridor”.  In the Create COGO Points dialog box, make the following adjustments…
Select the “For entire corridor range” radio button – (This will apply points to the full length of the corridor)
New point group name: = 3’ offsets CG – (Name for new point group)
Point codes to create: = 3’O/S CG – (Code to assign points to)

Click OK to insert COGO points to drawing.

After zooming in, you’ll find that you have new COGO points, having the elevation of the top back of curb, and inserted at 3’ offsets.

Try experimenting further with this method of point creation.  As an example, try visiting the Construction Tab of the Assembly Properties.  In there you can match the slope of the LinkWidthAndSlope to another slope in the assembly (the lane slope perhaps?).  This would be a great way to stake edge of pavement offsets whose elevation matches the slope of the lane. 
Something else I was asked recently

Using the LinkWidthAndSlope subassembly can be an effective way to create COGO points for much of your corridor staking needs.

  

Real Time Design

Imagine being an Interior Designer and being asked…on the fly…to show different design options, a variety of furniture from manufacturers, carpeting styles, paint colors, etc all from a Revit model? If this sounds daunting or that it would be an impossible task…well, you are likely correct.  But a technology has been introduced to the public that might just be the unintended answer to this problem.  Autodesk Homestyler is an iPad application that is designed to allow anyone to import photos of a space and then decorate that space with furniture, carpeting, appliances, paint, accessories, etc all on the fly and from various participating manufacturers.

 

Before I get into how this works with Autodesk products, let me show you the first project I ever did with the software. I started by uploading this image of our old office into Homestyler:

 

 

Then, with no training at all, I had this 20 minutes later:

 

Not bad considering I didn’t know how to use the software 20 minutes before and I put almost no effort into it. The door openings could have been clean, the paint almost perfect if I had used a stylus on the iPad instead of my fat finger. 

Now back to Revit.  The image below came from the famous “Advanced” building model which comes from Revit. The only thing new is that I added a camera view to a large classroom.

It isn’t much to look at, is it?  But if you upload that image into Homestyler it doesn’t know that this isn’t a picture of a real room! Thus you can set it up and use the real manufacturer content that Homestyler provides to place all the furnishings in the room.

I added paint, carpeting, tables, chairs, papers & computers… many of which have real manufacturers behind them. The space above, once you pick up speed, could be easily finished in just 5-10 minutes.   It won’t look like a photo when done, but it will certainly get your design decisions across. Plus, when shown on an iPad, the interface is visually pleasing and keeps those watching interested…which means you can flip through design options, replace carpeting, paint, etc on the fly in front of the client and keep the conversation going.

If you own an iPad it’s a MUST download, even if you only have a casual interest in design. Apps like this are not the future of design, they are today’s design reality.

Homestyler: http://www.homestyler.com/mobile

 

 

Legal Descriptions Made Easier Using Civil 3D

When it comes to survey tasks, there is nothing quite as tedious as writing legal descriptions.  A legal description represents the meticulous documentation of dimensions that define a property boundary.  Since a legal description defines the “legally recognized” limits of a property, it MUST be free of errors.

This is where the tedious part comes in…

Writing a legal description usually involves checking, and re-checking (and checking again!) the measured bearings and distances in a CAD drawing against the measurements written in the description.  Fortunately, Civil 3D makes it easy to extract property measurements into a “legal description format” such that they can be copy/pasted into your favorite text editor.

Let’s take a look…

Below is some geometry that represents a closed property boundary…

We’ll start by converting these entities into a parcel.  To do that, visit the Create Design Panel, open the Parcel menu and select “Create Parcel from Objects”.  Then, using a crossing selection, select the geometry on screen and press Enter.

In the Create Parcel from Objects dialog box, accept the defaults for site, parcel style and area label style.  In addition, select “Automatically Add Segment Labels” and accept the label style defaults.  (Note: Available styles will depend on the template you are using.  If desired, select styles that match your office standards.)  When finished, click OK.

Now that the geometry has been converted into a parcel, its dimensions can easily be extracted using a report.  On the Toolbox Tab of the Toolspace, within the Reports Manager, expand the Parcel category and double-click on “General_Legal_Description_for_Parcels” to create a report.  (Reports are generated from LandXML data extracted from a drawing.  In this case, we only need the report to include data for a single parcel, so in the next step we’ll manually select the data we are interested in.) 

Within the Export to XML Report dialog box, click the “Pick from Drawing” button and then select the parcel by clicking on its area label and press Enter.  Finally, click OK to dismiss the dialog box and generate the report.

The report will be displayed within a web browser.  (Note: You may have to allow blocked content to complete this task.) In the pane on the left side, click the “Append to Report” button to view the property dimensions written in a legal description style format.

As you review the report, pay note to the formatting (especially the precisions).  Chances are the default settings don’t match your office standards.  We’ll take care of this in the next step.  For now, close the web browser and return to Civil 3D.  On the Toolbox Tab of the Toolspace, click the toolbox icon in the upper left corner to open the Edit Report Settings dialog box.

From here, expand the Legal Descriptions category and make any necessary adjustments to the settings.  For this example, I changed the Distance precision to 2 decimals.  I also changed the precision and formatting of the bearing (Direction) measurements.  When finished, re-run the report and verify the changes.

At this point you may be wondering if it’s possible to change the point of beginning used in the legal description.  We can do that by visiting the Parcel Properties for this parcel.

Once again close the web browser and in Civil 3D, re-select the parcel by clicking on its area label.  In the contextual ribbon tab, choose Parcel Properties.  When the Parcel Properties dialog box opens, select the Analysis Tab.  In the upper right corner of this tab, you can designate the parcel’s point of beginning.  Simply click the “pick point” icon to verify/select a new location.

When finished, run the report a final time to verify the changes.  You are now ready to copy and paste these measurements into a text editor where you can finalize the legal description to your liking.

In the past, creating a legal description from a CAD drawing required a great deal of verification to ensure that measurements were transposed correctly from the drawing to the written description.  Using Civil 3D, (and a parcel) the majority of the text within a standard legal description can be extracted in less than a minute, where it can then be copy/pasted into the word processor of your choice.

By taking advantage of this report feature you can improve your accuracy, and greatly reduce the amount of time spent writing your next legal description.

Vasari Talk 26 – MIT Students Model the Shanghai Tower

MIT students Stefano Andreani, Aurgho Jyoti, Patrick Little, from Zach Kron and Dennis Shelden’s class Digital Fabrication and Construction present a case study of Gensler’s Shanghai Tower. They explain how they built parametric study models using Vasari and how they then leveraged these models for additional analysis.

Vasari Talk 26 – MIT Student Model Herzog and deMeuron’s Beijing National Stadium

MIT students Vernelle Noel and Jaeyual Lee from Zach Kron and Dennis Shelden’s class Digital Fabrication and Construction present a case study of Herzog and deMeuron’s Beijing National Stadium. They explain how they built parametric study models using Vasari and how they then leveraged these models for additional analysis.

Autodesk

Autodesk YouTube Channel -  An important website for Autodesk users is the Autodesk YouTube channel. With over 73,000 subscribers and approx. 25 million video views, it has a tremendous amount of information and value.

Point Cloud to Model

Leveraging point cloud data can be an effective tool in creating an accurate model of a difficult space.  Take this room for instance:

This space has crumbing walls, no ceiling, collapsing duct, and creates a condition where individuals can’t visualize what the space could look like.  How do we communicate what this space COULD look like?

For us we started with a quick point cloud scan then brought it into Revit:

From this scan we were able to model the room’s current dimensions accurately (as well as the falling duct) in order to produce a conceptual illustration of what this room could look like as a blank slate.

From there we could have modeled it more, but it worked for our purposes. I did this rendering with the duct “falling down” as a visual que that yes, this is the same space, but that we could replace the duct and easily “clean it up”.

The entire time to complete:  For two people, one working on the scan and one working in Revit, we could have started the scan at 9:00 AM and been to a point where the “white” model was done by 3:30 in the afternoon… including lunch and the 30 minute drive back to the office from the site.

If you would like to know more, let us know ( you can email me, Brian Myers, at bmyers@seilerinst.com ) and we’ll be happy to discuss.