justinpickens77701535
2015-05-26, 06:46 PM
I am a land surveyor, tasked with laying out a road centerline that was designed in the early 20th century. The alignment is a series of tangent, spiral, curve, spiral, tangent, ect. There is one point where the series is broken and the plan calls for a spiral into a curve with and arc length of 0.00, then a spiral out. I cheated here and gave the arc length a value of 0.01 feet. Now, given the extreme difficulty I encountered attempting to create this alignment in civil 3d, I used a third party program to create a land XML file of the alignment. Everything looks good with my xml file, but when I import the alignments into civil 3d, it takes the arc length of 0.01 feet and somehow curves it back on it's self. This results in erroneous station and offset information when labeling or creating points. As far as I can tell, it's a flaw in the programing, has anyone come across this before?
I have attached my drawing, the problem can be seen on the CL2 Alignment @ STA: 497+61.23
On a sidebar, I can't believe how difficult it is to work with spiral curves in civil 3d. I attempted many ways of creating the series of spiral curve spiral from the tangents and each time I could only get one curve. When I tried to connect to the next tangent, the program would say the elements weren't tangent, even though they were. I drew all my tangent lines and created each curve as a floating spiral curve spiral, exploded them and saved the main curve. I didn't have any luck with this method either, after connecting one curve with it's tangents using spirals, and attempting to connect the next curve with a spiral, the program would tell me it was not tangent. Bull honkey, the lines and curves were created by the alignment and were definitely tangent. I ended up using Carlson Survey to create my alignment, it has a beautiful centerline editor. It was as simple as typing in the information on the plans and, boom, I had my centerline. Why doesn't civil 3d have something like this, the alignment editing tools it does have are lacking, especially when spiral curves are involved or you have hard data that needs to be held. That's my $0.02
I have attached my drawing, the problem can be seen on the CL2 Alignment @ STA: 497+61.23
On a sidebar, I can't believe how difficult it is to work with spiral curves in civil 3d. I attempted many ways of creating the series of spiral curve spiral from the tangents and each time I could only get one curve. When I tried to connect to the next tangent, the program would say the elements weren't tangent, even though they were. I drew all my tangent lines and created each curve as a floating spiral curve spiral, exploded them and saved the main curve. I didn't have any luck with this method either, after connecting one curve with it's tangents using spirals, and attempting to connect the next curve with a spiral, the program would tell me it was not tangent. Bull honkey, the lines and curves were created by the alignment and were definitely tangent. I ended up using Carlson Survey to create my alignment, it has a beautiful centerline editor. It was as simple as typing in the information on the plans and, boom, I had my centerline. Why doesn't civil 3d have something like this, the alignment editing tools it does have are lacking, especially when spiral curves are involved or you have hard data that needs to be held. That's my $0.02