Trimble Business Center

I'm trying to optimize my workflow with using the included "Finish design" surface in TBC.

For the moment, I am on hold with vertical design tools (too many bugs for me currently) and am not the biggest fan of the sideslope commands, but they do work well for other applications.

When it comes to jobs like the attached, it's much faster and more consistent for me to start with a "dirt" model, which consists of contour lines and all grading related features.

Then, I build a "road" model which I currently build using EP then offsetting lines. This is a surface I am comfortable with for roadway construction. It is built off of vertical profiles. In this example, I don't use any templates, just offsetting lines starting with the profile to EP.

I then create a roadway boundary, then offset it 2-3 outside of, in this case, back of gutter.

I then add an external boundary to my "dirt" model, then add the roadway boundary. The attached image is at this stop.

Normally I then have to merge the two surfaces which allows that 2-3' gap to connect the grading surface to the road surface (at the back of gutter). This seems to work very well for creating a nice clean surface. The problem is that once I have to merge two surfaces, no changes update into the merged surface. I was hoping that if I added each surface separately to the Finish grade surface included in my template, that it would act as a live merge surfaces tool. Unfortunately it ignores the boundaries when adding both of those surfaces to the finish grade surface. I understand how it works, I'm just wishing there was a way I could create that 2-3' gap easily and maintain a single live combined surface.

This entire process prevents me from having to break contour lines and all of that. The merge surfaces tool works very will in this entire situation, it's just dangerous that I don't always know the last time I merged the surfaces depending on how often I make changes.

If you have to create and off set all those boundaries anyway, why not just copy contours to new layer and clip them? Sounds like you're using a whole process to prevent running two commands, or am I misunderstanding you?

You can explode the road surface if it's a corridor and it will put the breaklines into it's own layer named after the corridor surface. Add those to a categorized FD layer. Clip the contours if you want to use them so they're out of the way of the road. I avoid putting contours in a grading model, you can usually recreate the breaklines that were used to create those contours in the first place and the model comes out much smoother. 

I agree with recreating break lines. May I ask why you prefer to explode the corridor rather than just use it in the surface? 

Just so that I can edit the lines easier. I don't have the intersection module so I manually model them.

Okay, I don't use the intersection module either and manually model everything a lot, but when I use corridors I don't think I've ever had trouble just snapping my intersection (or any) linework straight to my corridors. 

Just different workflows I guess. I don't use corridors often, when I do it's usually simple subdivision roads so after getting simple corridor models built I explode them all and join as many lines as I can so I have one big road model instead of multiple small ones.  

Absolutely, always more than one way to get er done. I just never cared for exploding unless absolutely necessary because it's seemed like doubling the info and it always dumps all exploded data on the same layer. I always merge and add surface members to combine everything into one model. Just a thought. ATB.  

Do you have an example that you can share that I can take a look at - I have just been doing some work on combining surfaces and maybe that could help here as well - let me take a look at something you have done and how you are structuring the info and I will see if we can make this more dynamic for you.

On a separate note, you mention that Vertical Design has "too many bugs in it for you" could you let me have a list of those bugs as I have not been seeing them and I use it all the time in training etc. It could be that there are things that you have tried that don't work that are either known issues or known limitations of v1, but v2 is really close and I would like to address any thing that you are seeing now before it is too late and we miss the window of opportunity.

Maybe there is an element of training here also as the known limitations if not understood can get in the way of successful use of the tool.

Let me know what you are seeing so I can work it with Trimble Development. I sit on a weekly call with the Vertical Design team and they love feedback.

Alan

I will e-mail you a .VCL of the job I'm working on.

With vertical design, the bug I found was after I spent 30-45 minutes elevating linework through the vertical design tool, I was not for the life of me able to get my curb Cross dZ to work. I tried everything. I broke the lines, I isolated them, I offset the EP line again, there was a point where I could get part of it to work with the Cross dZ, but could never get the entire thing to work. I'm not in the business of wasting time, so I won't try it again until the next version comes out.

Another issue I have with Vertical Design is that in order to get a cross slope/dZ function to work, the line has to be broken at the corners. If there was some way to make the cross-slope work and stop at a corner without breaking the line, that would make me want to use the tool. I don't feel comfortable sending files out to the field where every corner is broken. I know that if I were staking in the field, it wouldn't be an issue, but I just keep picturing someone laying out past a tangent and making a mistake. Even though I give radius points and you would need to stop the line stakeout, put the radius point in, then continue the line stakeout, I still don't think it's clean to have every corner broken. Although, I have a couple designs floating around out there that will get built this year, so I told those contractors they're on trial for seeing how it works with all the corners broken.

I have another job with a bunch of corners that are very close to each other. I'd love to use the vertical design tool since it's all sidewalk cross slopes and curb, etc., but I don't see sending something out with so many broken lines.

Other than that, it's worked very well for only being the first version or two. Is there an update coming out in April?