Trimble Business Center

Hoping this may be of use to others as well, but I would love to see an Elevation option of "Surface" added to the corridor instruction options. For example, you create a new Offset/Elevation instruction, lets say your offset is 2m, and your elevation would be Surface instead of Elevation or Delta Elevation, or Node, etc.

Use case - you have 2 minimum constraints and one set constraint - 2m minimum wide ditch from road shoulder to backslope shoulder, 0.150m minimum v-ditch depth, and a set 4:1 foreslope and 4:1 backslope (silly conditions yes, but that's what's in the the plans I was given) and you check to make sure your ditch actually drains (we're for the contractor in this case, not the designer).

A more likely use case - you have your foreslope from road shoulder at say a  4:1 to your designed ditch elevation, 1-2m ditch bottom or v-ditch. When you get to the backslope, you're limited to how far out you can go due to a right-of-way limit or something and you don't particularly care if the backslope slope is consistent, you just want to grade it between the ditch bottom and the right-of way limit. The dreaded "varies".

Yes, I know you can elevate you're right-of-way or min/max limit line to whatever surface you want and then simply reference the line into the corridor. I just think this would be a nice little add that can alleviate a few extra steps/lines/layers, etc. Also helps to not have to change task when you're in the middle of trying to figure out the "ifs" and "else ifs" of conditional statements when you realize that that's what you need.

Anyway, back to my conditional statements in my corridor template...

Thanks!

Katie

Hi Katie,

Have you tried Offset / Elevation where the offset is a 2d polyline (needs to be added as a reference line to your corridor) to represent your limit/right of way:

And a template level of finish (needs to be a surface instruction representing finish created in a previous instruction):

Should look like the below:

I hope this helps.

Ed

Hi Ed,

I have done that in the past as well, just hoping to streamline things a bit!

100% agree. I brought this up to developers a couple years ago and everyone seemed to think it was a no-brainer but nothing came of it.

Even if it just lets us select the corridor Existing Ground that would be enough in the use case you described and for mine as well.

Yes I definitely agree this should be added and is another one of those "luxuries" that we had in Terramodel but have lost in TBC.  My use case for this is different than yours, but nonetheless the means of getting there is the same.  For me I frequently am doing widenings of existing roads where we are told to start at a certain offset from centerline and tie into the existing pavement at that location.  Currently my work around is to actually create the offset line (which is often a variable offset and the variable offset command does not work on alignments with spirals but thats a gripe for another day) and then drape that line on the surface, reference it to the corridor, and then use that node to begin the template.  But thats a bunch of silly steps when, as you said, it should be as easy as picking a surface for the elevation source.

Agree with all of the above in that having a surface as an option in the elevation would streamline the process. Especially when modelling complex roads with a large amount of template instructions. 

As you sid Wayne - it should be as easy as picking a surface for the elevation source like Terramodel use to be able to.

Another 'workaround' is to use the Surface command to create 'reference nodes' you can then use for Node to Node elevations. Ie. Surface instruction limited to your offsets - no material layer defined. Can then use the node generated to define Elevation as Node to Node from your origin node to this surface node.

Rob