River Rock Void Ratio Confirmation

Been really busy at the moment so have not been posting as much as i like. Anyway this is a non Civil3d post that maybe of interest to some. I was designing a detention pit/chamber the other day and had no idea of what the likely void ratio of the rock material available would be. So I looked into it theoretically for spherical stones here and then once on site measured the actual void volume of some sample rock.

Sample Rock available was 40mm and above Clean River Run sourced from a local river

Test Procedure

To calculate the percentage void volume in the sample rock fill to be used in the proposed detention pit a 14litre bucket was filled with a sample of the 40mm and above Clean River Run and water was poured into the bucket to fill the voids from another bucket of known volume the percentage of voids filled with water was then calculated as follows

Round Bucket Volume

Pi(0.25)^2/4 * 0.28 = 13.7 litres

Volume of Water from Square Bucket

0.23*0.23*0.13 = 6.877 Litres

Percentage Void Ratio =6.877/13.7 =49%

Adding Additional Properties to Pipes and Structures

About a month I go I was playing around with partbuilder trying to add additional properties to pipes in my catalogue to improve our pipe labels and did not have much luck.

However Kevin posted an interesting couple of articles the other day with a link to a BeingCivil post on how to do it.

So I have revisited the problem with this new knowledge  and have been able to add a Stiffness Class as well as Material type to our PVC pipes and labels. I was able to get it to work following the Being Civil instructions with a couple of extra bits of information.

1. If you pipe catalogue is in a common network location the .xml file you adjust is in that location not on your local drive.
2. If you are in Civil3d while you are changing the xml file you will have to shut down and restart to have the new xml file loaded into Civil3d.

Use Minimum Distance between surface to get zero polyline

I keep forgetting about this tip I found one day in the forums so this is just a reminder and a link to the forum discussion.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/Trim-Surface-at-Elevation/m-p/3222202/highlight/true#M163412

Civil3d versus 12D

It seems that 12d is taking over the civil software market in New Zealand at the moment particularly with the recent Christchurch earthquake and the fact most rebuild teams seem to be using 12D, Autodesk seem to have missed the boat completely here.

I keep joking with my reseller on a bad day with Civil3d that perhaps I should be moving to 12d as well, so I asked a colleague who used to work exclusively with Civil3d before moving company to use 12d, what his thoughts were on which package was best and have posted his reply below as it maybe of interest to others

In regards to your question about which is best, well…….each has its own strengths & weaknesses really.

From my own perspective:

• I am using V9.0. V10 is due to hit soon, which has a lot of improvements apparently.
• First off, 12d is a PAIN to learn. The menu system is very counter-intuitive and the help system is a DOG. That aside…
• 12d handles large datasets better (e.g. LiDAR), but no point cloud handling capability. It can pare down the data in a clearer fashion better than Civil3D seems to.
• Not that I have done field-to-finish work with 12d but from what I’ve seen they do here with it, I would give Civil3D the advantage here. The description key work that can go through to labels and how point groups works is a clear winner, PLUS manipulating and displaying (i.e. swapping triangles, changing surface styles) a surface is by far easier.
• Stability – 12d far excels C3D here. The only time 12d seems to futz out on the odd occasion is when is changing large amounts of data at a time or pad grading (a rudimentary version of C3D’s feature line + grading).
• Working with CAD – obviously C3D is a vertical of AutoCAD, so no guesses who wins here. In 12d you have export EVERYTHING to CAD. And then if you spot a mistake, you have to fix it in 12d and then export it all again.
• In addition to that, there is no real dynamism to 12d of the labels. If something changes (elevation/slope etc.), 95% of the time you have to clean the model (layer) and get them re-calced.
• In terms of design, it fairly even here – apples and oranges really. No such thing as sub-assemblies, only templates (which aren’t really visually-driven; more by figures/numbers). Alignments and profiles are combined into a single ‘SuperAlignment’ which is nice. The basic mechanics of it are the same though. 12d has a nice thing called computators, which come in handy for kerb returns as they act dependent on the incoming/outgoing roads, almost like a live intersection wizard, and can be used for other functions too. 12d seems to be able to do transitioning (crossfall/width/height) better though.
• Also 12d has a better recording system. It’s somewhere between the Action Recorder and a macro. Makes re-calcing a lot of instructions at once a breeze.
• Civil3D’s feature lines and the FL editor win hands down. Better calculation of grading along it and between objects.

That’s just off the top of my head really. There are a lot of other differences that I haven’t mentioned, but to explain them would take more time than I have.

Constructing Kerb Return Profiles based on quarter points

When building Intersections Civil3d gives you only one option for the shape of the kerb return profile a straight line or grade.

Rob Gadbaw who use to to be located in New Zealand and still provides support to us remotely has teamed up with the guys at CGSplus and have made a small app to create better create return profiles here. base on quarter points.

If you are not into purchasing third party apps then are some notes on what you have to do manually to achieve the same result.
New profile in white with incoming and out coming grade projected to quarter points.

New Vertical Curves Added at the quarter points

A couple of things to remember are that.

1. You should hold off to the end before making the final manual kerb return profiles encase the road intersections get moved.
2. Do not extend your kerb return profile to far past the PT just to the first end point snap next along the profile from the PT as this is the end of the triangle in the surface. If you do make the profile to long it starts to play around with your surface to much and does not match offset profile levels exactly
3. To check that the surface coming into and out of the kerb return is correct use the isolate region command on the ribbon just to see the bit of the surface made by the region before and after the kerb return section and compare that to your hand drawn profile.

Printer Settings reminder

Reminder to myself if pdf’s are not plotting to scale make sure page scaling is set to none 

and that in the printer driver have orientation set to landscape or the bottom of the page will be cropped off.

Adding a Subgrade Profile to a Profile View

There are a couple of ways I know of how to add the subgrade levels of a road to a ProfileView.
One of them is dynamic and will update with changes and the other is not.

Depending on what data you want in the ProfileView bands Subgrade or Finished levels will dictate the method you choose and if it is dynamic or not.

This is where the business case for a Dynamic Offset Profiles to be built into Civil3d comes into play as these could be used to create a road Subgrade Profile and they would live update. 

For now we have to use one of the following to methods

Method One (Dynamic but no grade and curve data in profile bands just surface levels & grades)
Create a subgrade surface from the corridor model bottom links and then create a surface profile of the subgrade surface.

Method Two (Not Dynamic)
Copy the Finished level profile and then raise and lower the new profile the depth of offset you want as follows.

Seeing this method is not dynamic it could be a good idea to add a profile of the subgrade surface with a noplot style to the ProfileView to compare against so any manual updates are picked up in the future.