Trimble Business Center

I've got a subgrade surface created from a finished level surface and site improvements applied.

I can do an overall quantities report with the earthworks surface to surface report, but the engineers want it like a corridor report.

Creating the corridor and adding the surface is not the problem. But Cut and Fill is only reported if Subgrade and existing surface create closed areas.

In special cases that is not the case and the report will miss those volumes.

I've already applied side slopes at the edges of the surface, but that only covers those areas. If there are "holes" in the surface if reported perpendicular to the alignment it can miss those volumes.

And even in areas that are closed it won't always compute the values. 1m ,it does, 1m further it doesn't, then maybe it does again.

It would be better if it wouldn't just look for closed areas, but use all those surface nodes to determine if it is above or below the initial surface.

If you use a Connect Command rather than a Tie Command you may see better results than using the Tie Command to close out the areas. The end section Area method needs the areas to compute the volumes - I agree that sometimes it is a trick to get the areas to close out as needed to compute the volumes that you are chasing. 

If you have to tie surfaces together - sometimes the Clip Surface to function of a surface instruction helps also as this trims or extends a surface back so that the two surfaces tie together and it uses the last element slope for the projection slope (Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't).

If using Subgrade adjusted surface to finished grade surface, I find that if I put a surface edge breakline around finished grade and then offset it inside by 0.01 feet (0.002m)  and then apply it to the subgrade surface to make it fractionally smaller that I get better results and that it ties up vertically automatically more reliably than using a Tie Slope or a Connect Instruction.

There are a few other things to go over here which I will cover tomorrow. I have also seen the issues you are raising and they were looked at last week and while there are work arounds today there were a few changes made in the software as well that help to rectify.

Alan

This video covers some extra points that I think are useful

Hi Alan,

sorry for the late reply but I didn't get to test it earlier.

It makes absolutely no sense, but just adding the edge breakline to the original FSL surface (which is the base for the site improvements) did the trick. I still use the vertical side slopes to close the area, but now for some stupid reason it works.

In another area I had to create a "Copy" of the Subgrade surface with the "Offset Surface" macro to get it to work.

Thanks, I'd never have had that idea

Ronny