Trimble Business Center

I created my first corridor with a strata for topsoil stripping(used strata surface option) and then generated the corridor earthwork report which shows the topsoil stripping, that all worked fine. Now in the same file, there is a Phase 2 where the finish grade is now merged with the original ground requiring another topsoil stripping strata on the new merged surface, even if you create a new site improvement name and surface name your previous corridor loses it strata quantification in the report. Can you only have one surface strata per TBC file or am I missing something? 

Also, one lesson learned in this process when creating site improvements referencing a merged surface if your topsoil stripping(site improvement) doesn't fill/shade your whole boundary its because you had surface edges/breaklines in your original surfaces that don't show as members of your new merged surface. Display only the breaklines in your surface view options and pick additional site improvements in the missed areas.

Tony

You are correct in stating that one Business Center Project can only have one set of Strata. Having said that you have the following options

1) Use a different Project for each Phase and VCL the data you need from Project 1 to Project 2 (not necessarily ideal)

2) You can reuse the Strata for Phase 2 provided you lock down Phase 1 and create the surfaces that you need that are using the strata as input from Phase 1. If you have the Surfaces, and you don't expect those to change then this approach will work just fine. If you are running Phase 1 Quantities and then Phase 2 Quantities, you will need to run your Phase 1 quantities and lock those down before embarking on creating the Phase 2 extension to the project if you are going to use Stripping in each case.

This whole concept of Phased Construction and building Models that can use all the tools multiple times to model the phase scenarios is becoming a bigger and bigger issue and I hope that we can start to address those types of need in some way. 

Question - should we do this as Reference Files - where you build the phases as separate projects that can reference information in other projects, or do you feel that all this should be possible in one project.

I see Phased Construction and Construction Revisions in a similar light - they both could benefit from using multiple projects that can reference earlier versions of the project - would you agree? To satisfy this I feel that we need reference Files to achieve this. That would also benefit us in many other ways also.

On Your Lessons learned - one of the key tools to looking at what is happening is to use the Surface Properties in Plan View and turn off everything except Drapelines - the Drape Lines are all of the lines that are affecting the surface construction (The Breaklines and those that are set to Sharp and Texture Boundaries that can restrict the placement of Site Improvements - in your example you had the large area of the Phase 2 Embankment (surface boundary) that was divided almost down the middle by a breakline that came in from your Merged surfaces that was the Toe line of the Phase 1 embankment. This splits the SIte Improvement area requiring you to drop 2x Site Improvement locations to fill your Phase 2 embankment area.

Glad that we got this worked out and that you got your quantities sorted out

Let me know what you think.

If anyone else has input here I would like to receive it to build up the business case to work on this type of capability.

Time to bid another Project....

Alan