Thursday 18 April 2013

Quick Sports Pitch Design in Civil 3D

Below is a video that was created to demonstrate a workflow for designing sports pitches in Civil 3D.

The basic workflow is to create 3D linework (featurelines) to define the outline of the pitches, applying the proposed levels at the corners as we create them. The grading of the pitches was at either 1/100 or 1/140 and we can apply this as we create the featurelines, grading tools weren't required. The boundary featureline is created by snapping to the existing ground surface along the site boundary line. (you can quickly do this by turning the boundary polyline into a featureline and get it to pick up the levels from the existing surface). We then simply added all these featurelines into a new surface to create our proposed surface.

The volumes were then balanced by raising or lowering the featurelines as necessary, keeping an eye on the numbers in the volumes dashboard until they are close.

Thursday 4 April 2013

Noise Mapping

On a training course recently one of the trainees described a situation where they were attempting to hatch decibel 'contours' to create a noise map along national roads for an entire county.

When they tried this the AutoCAD hatching was too large for their PC to handle and continuously crashed. The decibel contours came in DWG format from the NRA. Also provided with the drawing was a shape file. Using the shape file to visualise the decibel range along the roads is a quicker and more efficient way of achieving the same result.

The following video shows how to connect to and stylise noise level shape files that come from the NRA in AutoCAD Civil 3D: