Deck Spot Elevations

Good Afternoon!  I have a unique bridge project I am working on where we are putting a park on top of our bridge.  I am looking to see if there is an easy way to determine the top of deck elevation from the bridge model and various spots.  Prior to porting my model over to OBM I had my bridge model created in ORD using corridors.  This was nice because when I wanted to check the deck elevations with respect to the landscaping spot elevations given to determine soil depths, I could use the Civil Analysis --> Analyze Point tool, select the deck element in the corridor, and the tool would give me the deck elevation when i snapped to the 2D spot elevation location.  This civil analysis tool does not work with the OBM bridge elements and I don't see any sort of similar OBM analysis tool available.  I kind of thought having a tracking tool like this in OBM would have been a no brainer, but it appears I am wrong.  I am currently debating extracting the top of deck surface from the deck solid and then trying to create a terrain from that, but im not sure how good the DTM will be giving it will be trying to create it from a B-spline curve surface.  Is there any simpler way this can be done?  I have a lot of spot elevations to check and i will most likely have to check several grading iterations in the future.  Any help/suggestions would be very much appreciated.  Thank you!  

  • Carl ... Take a look at the Deck Elevation tool. You can generate elevations at typical locations a structural engineer would need.   You could use any interval and or offset from any alignment, beam, etc. 

  • Steve,

    Thanks for the suggestion but that is not really going to work. The landscaping spot elevations being provided are not at typical locations and correspond to their walkway/curb layouts, which are irregular.  I need a way check these spot elevations which are essentially located at random locations compared to the deck/girders.  I think i have found a work around, but its not as clean as I would like.  Essentially i have to extract the top deck face as a smart surface/B-spline curve, and then from there convert it to a mesh. At that point I am able to use the civil analysis tool in the same manner as i would in ORD. I don't really like having to do it this way, but I cant think of another way to do it at this point.

  • So I have been experimenting as the best way i have found to check spot elevations thus far is as follows:

    1. Extract the deck top surface using the Solids > Extract Face-Edge tool.
    2. Stitch the extracted faces together to create a single mesh.
    3. Draw vertical lines upwards (Z-direction only) from the spot elevations so that they pass through and intersect the surface.
    4. Use the Surfaces > Compute Surface Intersections tool to create points at each location the vertical lines intersect the surface.

    So far this seems to be working.  I tried converting the extracted surface to a mesh and then use Civil Analysis > Analyze Points tool, but there appears to be some inaccuracies when the program converts the Smart Surface to a mesh surface. and can be greatly affected by how the surface is meshed.

    I am still open for any other suggestions as to how else this could be done.