Back to Basics Pt. 8: Roadway Design in Civil 3D - Plan Sheets, Reports, & Quantities

In this session, we will create plan and profile sheets based on our design and calculate the earthwork volumes and pavement quantities. We will then look at some of the Reporting options within civil 3D.

Author Name: Ben Wardell
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Description:
To begin with, we will create the view frames based on our design alignments. So under the OUTPUT file, we will choose to Create View Frames. We can either select the desired alignment from the list of choices or we can select the alignment on the screen. Next, we choose the scale and page size – and we can determine how the plan sheets will be displayed, plan – profile – or both. Once we set the view parameters for the plan and profile views, the view frames are created. And We can do the same thing for another alignment but at a different scale.
Next, we will choose the Create Sheets function under the output tab. We choose which view set we want to use and we can specify the location of the sheet files. They will be added to BIM 360 with the rest of the project. After we provide the inputs, we then specify on the screen where we want the profile views to be drawn. We just pick a point in our file.
In the sheet file, we can view the details. If we need to make any revisions to the profile view, we go into model space and do the same modification we would do for our other profiles. Here we want to revise the elevation view. We can select automatic or user-defined, then make any revisions needed. We can also make revisions in the viewports to the plan view.
Next, let's calculate the volumes and quantities of materials. We can do this by cross-section or based on the corridor. Let's look at the assembly to see what info we need to gather. We will select the subbase and the sidewalk. We created a sub-assembly previously, so we need to know the codes to include – they are subbase and botcurb. We will also include the cut and fill points. When we add the elements to our surface, we want them to represent the bottom of our structural section. Once the surface has been created, we can add it to our sections and compute the volumes.
We select any surface and choose Sample MORE SOURCES. We choose the surface we want to add and specify the style – We want to this to stand out, so we will revise how our standard surface displays. Once that runs, then we can inspect other sections. That surface seems to be in good shape.
Let's create the material list now – we choose the section and select compute materials. There are several types of quantities we can compute including earthwork and pavement materials. We specify our surfaces and run it. We can now see hatching in our section views. We can do this same workflow for the pavement quantities. We need to add those as structures and we can choose the material from the corridor shapes. We still need to add the shape we created. We defined this as concrete – so we do this the same way. We can see these are now in the section view – so we are ready to run the volume and quantity reports.
We will generate the volume report first – we have some choices for the style based on local standards. When we run the report we can see the summary of the sections, particularly the cumulative volume. We could copy this into an excel sheet or to a table if needed. We do the same thing to run the quantities reports – we chose a section, select Volume Report. This time we will choose the Select material type. This gives us a summary of all the materials we created on our list based on the corridor. We can also create a mass haul diagram from the volumes that were calculated.
One other option we have is to choose the ANALYZE tab and pick the volumes dash board. Here we can create a surface based on the delta between any 2 surfaces we choose. That could be the top surface against the subgrade, or the subgrade and the existing ground.
The last workflow we will demonstrate here is the Reporting Feature – we access those in the ToolBox tab. We open the Report Manager and we can see the different reports that are available for all the different Civil 3D elements in our Design File. We can generate Geometry Reports and Pipe network reports. We can select a single alignment or feature, or multiple items. This is a great tool to explore to find the specific data needed for any design project.
So this series demonstrated some of the capabilities of Civil 3D in roadway design. Civil 3D makes creating roadway projects fast and efficient and really helps to put the control in the user's hands.