BIM and Civil 3D

Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2009 is a great year!

I think it's appropriate to start the year off with a topic that I'm sure will on everbody's mind this year. BIM, otherwise known as Building Information Modeling is technology that is quickly moving to the forefront of the design world. But how does it translate to civil engineers?Well, BIM isn't just for architects, in fact, it's for everyone involved in the design of anything that will be built. That goes for buildings, bridges, roads, even parking lots. Try not to think of the "building" part as an actual building, rather the act of building.

BIM is extremely useful when multiple disciplines are involved in the same project. Imagine having an architect share his CAD building with the civil engineer who is designing the parking lot or planning the land layout for drainage. The building can be loaded into the topo and shown in it's future real world location for design. Now if the architect needs to make changes, he has the future topo design to aid him when making revisions to the building.

Autodesk Revit Architecture and AutoCAD Civil 3D can interchange models today, that functionality is already present. I hope we see more interoperability between these two powerful programs in the near future. Plus, Autodesk NavisWorks is compatible with both products, so models can be loaded to NavisWorks for even more analysis. All of this is going on before the site is even disturbed.

If NavisWorks was a foreign word to you, check it out at the Autodesk website here.

Are you getting the idea yet? BIM allows engineers, architects, and planners the ability to build it (whatever "it" is) before "it's" built. Intelligent models are giving us the ability to detect design flaws before the plans go out for construction. BIM reduces design time, field revisions, and can significantly reduce build time and cost.

It doesn't stop there, though. For civil engineers, BIM also means machine control and automation. This is exciting technology, true Feild to Finish technology! A number of survey manufacturers have put their hat in the ring and developed these next-generation grading systems.

Here's a link to Trimble:

http://www.trimble.com/GCS900.shtml

And Leica...

http://www.leica-geosystems.com/corporate/en/lgs_70038.htm

I've pasted an image of the Leica reciever for their PowerGrade 3D system below.

Hopefully BIM makes a little more sense to you now. I'm open to comments if anyone has anything to contribute!

See ya - Denver

Free Tools for Civil 3D - Corridor EZY Lite

I've come across a site that offers some pretty cool software add-ons for Civil 3D, most of which are free. I don't have any affiliation with these folks, I don't help sell or demonstrate their products, but I can offer a few words on usability, feasibility and maybe some other abilities? Anyway, I'll start from the top.

The site, http://www.civil3dtools.com/ contains downloads of each add-ons that I'm about to present in this post and a few to follow. I'll include links to each individually also. The company who hosts civil3dtools.com is CadApps and they are an Authorized Autodesk Developer. If you visit their website, you can download and view AVI's of some of this stuff in action.

First on my list is CorridorEZY. EZ is right. I'll admit that designing and modeling an intersection or cul-de-sac in Civil 3D can be cumbersome, to say the least. Well, CorridorEZY can hopefully alleviate some of that pain. You can read what Angel Espenosa of Autodesk thinks about CorridorEZY also over at his blog Angel's Civil 3D Thoughts, I have a link in the sidebar for his blog, or you can visit his "Nothing Up My Sleeve" post about Corridor EZY here.

Please note also that I am running the Lite version of CorridorEZY, it's a free download but will only have commands for Intersection design unlocked. You have to pay for the full version in order to get Cul-de-Sacs and Roundabouts. I think you'll find that the free version is pretty amazing on it's own.

On to the software. First, I want to tell you that this VBA add-on runs all of the time. So once it's installed, Civil 3D will continue to try to use it. So if you need to create a corridor and don't want to use CorridorEZY to design it, you'll have to turn the software off, which is very simple. In the Utilities portion of the menu that it creates you'll find the Stop Software command. Then you're good to go. So what I've done is create a copy of my original workspace and added the CorridorEZY menu to it. So when I'm going to use CorridorEZY tools, I just turn the Software off before I switch back to my normal workspace.

It should also be noted that EZY will require a surface and centerline alignments. After that, it pretty much does the rest for you. You can use existing assemblies or create assemblies using the EZY editor. It feels a little like Land Desktop for creating templates, just FYI.

If you're using the same assembly for the through road as you are for the intersecting roads, you only need one assembly. After the assembly has been taken care of, you'll create roads out of your alignments. It's a simple process where you tell EZY what alignment your through road is and what alignment your intersections are and it creates "roads". During this process, existing and proposed profiles are created automatically. You'll choose the Civil 3D style to use for each as well as the band set to use for the profile view, when your finished, all of your profiles will be created. EZY has it's own profile editor that can be used to manipulate the profile, but it's not needed. You can modify the profile anytime using the Civil 3D profile editing commands.

So after you've picked the alignments and created roads from them, you can create the curb returns. Keep in mind that CADApps is an Austrailian company, so our Curb is their Kerb. There are a few things like that throughout the software, but it's easy enough to translate.
Curbs are super easy with EZY. Pick a button and pick a location near the return and EZY will pop up it's editor to give you a hand. It will automatically create the alignments and profiles for you, or you can choose your own.



The image above is a screenshot of my first intersection. The cross sections along each cl alignment were created when the roads were defined. The alignments and cross-sections of the curbs were created when I picked locations and defined the curb returns.


So far, aside from surface and alignment creation, about 2 minutes worth of work. Not bad. If your not interested in the corridor, but just need a surface, you can build the surface now and start creating cross sections. If you do need a corridor, you can let EZY build it for you, but as I understand it, you'll have to tie the intersections together, I haven't gotten that far yet.

Remember, I've done essentially no work. I even used my own subassembly, not created with EZY. So then I auto-generated a surface, the screenshot below is the result.




Another awesome feature, and one the Angel mentions in his blog, is that EZY links the crossing roads to the main road, including curb returns. This means that if you adjust the main road elevations, the side roads and curb returns are adjusted to match!

Go download EZY and play with it yourself. I'll bet you'll be looking for the full version in no time!

http://www.civil3dtools.com/

Quickies - Commands That May Come In Handy

Today I thought I'd list out some commands that may be helpful to you while working with 2009 AutoCAD products.

In Civil 3D, you have the ability to assign a coordinate system to the drawing. When you do this in 2009 a glyph will appear on screen, this is the geomarker.

From the help file....

The geographic marker is a visual representation of the location information and is created at the specified point on the drawing.

So, to disable this marker, use the GEOMARKERVISIBILITY command. A setting of 0 will turn the marker visibility off.

Also in Civil 3D - Use the SHOWDRAWINGTIPS command to display marker lines along your alignment and profile. When hovering an alignment, a reference line will show up on the profile and visa-versa. If you get sick of em', use the HIDEDRAWINGTIPS command.

In general AutoCAD (and any AutoCAD based application), I have a few commands that you may find useful.

LAYERDLGMODE: Setting this variable to 0 will cause the Layer Manager Palette to return to pre-2009 form, a dialog box.

MENUBAR: Setting this variable to 0 will turn off your menubar. In 2009, the Menu Browser contains all of your menus, so if you'd like to save some real-estate, turn off the menu bar and start training yourself to use the menu browser!

MEASUREINIT: This variable tells AutoCAD to use Imperial units, meaning Imperial hatch patterns and linetypes or Metric. A setting of 0 tells AutoCAD to use Imperial, 1 is Metric.

BROWSER: Type this command and press enter twice to go to the Autodesk website with your default web browser, type the command and press enter once, then you can enter your own web address into the command line and press enter. Your default web browser will open to the page you enter.

Starting Hydraflow within Civil 3D

By default you have to double-click the hydraflow application you wish to start via a shortcut - usually on the desktop. For some, this is very acceptable, either they don't use Civil 3D and only use Hydraflow, or they use Civil 3D and don't care about Hydraflow.

If you're in the middle and your inside of Civil 3D wanting to open Hydraflow, you have to minimize Civil 3D before launching Hydraflow. I'll offer a quick tip to fix that, here is how I'm opening Hydraflow within Civil 3D.

First, there is no command for Hydraflow, let alone seperate commands for each extension. Knowing AutoCAD, we know that in order to do anything, a command is needed to execute the action you want to take. As mentioned, Civil 3D has nothing in the way of Hydraflow commands, so we're starting from the ground. A little (little should be stressed here) programming is in order to define the commands needed to launch Hydraflow within Civil 3D.

If you're not LISP savvy, and I'm not, you can search around online to find resources to help you along, a great resource for everything lisp and CAD Management is Robert Green's site http://www.cad-manager.com/ . Check it out when you can, for now I'll copy my code here so you can just paste it into a notepad file and get moving.

Once we tell Civil 3D (via lisp) to define our new commands, we can create commands in the CUI that reference our lisp commands.

The lisp code I used for Storm Sewers is as follows:

(defun c:hstm ()

(startapp "\"C:\\Program Files\\Hydraflow Storm Sewers Extension for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009\\Storm2009.exe\"")

(princ)

)

Line by line definitions:

Line 1: Defun = Define Function, we're defining a command, that command is HSTM, that is what I called it, you can call it whatever you want.

Line 2 & 3: AutoCAD already has a command called startapp for Start Application, use this to navigate to the .exe file you want to run.

Line 4 & 5: Needed to to close the lisp. You'll always see the (princ) at the end of a lisp. I don't know why, it's just always there! If you know, leave a comment and fill me in!

I followed this format with each extension, giving me three new commands. Here are the other lisp files:

Hydrographs:

(defun c:hydro ()

(startapp "\"C:\\Program Files\\Hydraflow Hydrographs Extension for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009\\Hydro2007.exe\"")

(princ)

)

Express:

(defun c:hexp ()

(startapp "\"C:\\Program Files\\Hydraflow Express Extension for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009\\HydraflowExpress.exe\"")

(princ)

)

Once those are created and loaded (I just loaded them into my Startup suite, so each drawing that opens loads them) you have a choice. You can run the commands as they are, limiting you to entering the commands at the command line, or you can make buttons out of them and add them to a menu. I've added mine to a Hydro menu I created. Since the command list won't show the newly created commands, you'll have to add them.

I've pasted the contents of the storm sewers command above. From that, hopefully you can figure the other two out. Once there is a command is there, you can add it to a toolbar or menu or even a ribbon panel.

AutoCAD Tools in Civil 3D

So many of us are used to AutoCAD. Sometimes, we're so familiar with AutoCAD that finding commands and utilities can be difficult unless those AutoCAD menus are present.

It's not too difficult to turn AutoCAD menus on in Civil 3D, but if you turn all of AutoCAD on, still have all of Civil 3D turned on, then maybe toss in Raster Design or Trimble Link your menu bar is two lines, taking up more space!!!

What I'm proposing - consolodate. You don't need to have those AutoCAD menus showing all the time, you just need them to be available when you DO need them - so....

Create a new menu in the Civil 3D CUI and copy/paste the AutoCAD menus into it.

What do you think?