Trimble Business Center

Hi,

I have to create models for precast box culverts. I've got the ILs for the inclined base slab top. I can create a plane surface and drape line work on that, no problem here. But the top of the culvert is a tricky. Since precast segments are square in themselves the top corners won't be located above the bottom corners if the base slab is inclined.

In Autocad I would just use a UCS and could work and offset perpendicular easily in any direction. Done in a few minutes. 

I've been playing around with cutting planes. But drafting in them is very tedious since all functions use some kind of world coordinates and you can't see or snap to linework the plane is cutting through. It takes quite some tinkering to get what you want at least once. But then you can't copy or move elements that have been drawn in the cutting plane to a different position in the 3D view. Very annoying.

I've also tried the Offset Slope macro, but it only uses a different elevation difference if I tick the checkbox, it won't actually shift the end points of the line.

Corridor only works vertical and I haven't got the tunneling license.

I really miss this nifty Sketchup snapping, extruding, cutting functionality here in TBC.

Or a sweep function, draw the 2D outline and extrude it along a path.

The future is IFC solid models. TBC definitely needs to be improved in that direction.

Have you tried the Create Side Slope command? It will allow you to draw 3D lines in a template editor just like corridor but you get to pick and choose which lines you use.

Completely agree about TBC and IFC work, 6 months or so ago I attended a Survey "power hour", and not only where they behind on current work flows and tools, but also they were handling IFC's in the same way they did 5 years ago. 

Scott Bridges and Alan Sharp, told you so!

Ronny

I pulled together a short video on how you can do this using Cutting Plane View. Maybe it helps?

One helpful trick is that if you draw a point in the cutting plane view it should draw it on the plane - if you then use Change Elevation command on that point it will move it perpendicular to the plane.

If you draw a point in the Plan View, you can snap to it in the cutting plane view - and if drawing a Polyline, it will draw the polyline on the plane - so dont use a linestring because that will snap to the 3D location of the point not the projected point in the plane.

Alan