OpenRoads Create 3D Design Model Error

Good Morning,

I have been trying to follow Bentley's best practices for file management within the OpenRoads environment, but I am running into an issue. It seems that whenever OpenRoads needs to create a 3D model on it's own, it will fail. If I create a file to contain my alignments, for example, I will start it in a 2D design model. When I go to begin the vertical geometry of that alignment, PowerGEOPAK will apparently try to automatically create the 3D design model needed, but it will hang and hang and eventually quit. If I start the process within a 3D model from the start, I don't have any issues. Is it having trouble finding a seed 3D design model? If so, how do I specify which design model I want to use as its seed?

Any other ideas about why it would fail at this step?

Thanks,
Ken

  • YUP...Back in 2001(ish) when we transitioned from V7 to V8, one of the benefits was a virtually unlimited design plane finally freeing us from the woes of global origin shift. (makes me cringe to think about those days) The Solids Working Area DID NOT become unlimited. In fact solids modeling is very different compared to back then but there are still limits. And if I go any further with the technical explanation I'll butcher it.  Short story: for the best solids quality, the SWA needs to be as small as possible.

    What happens if you leave it at 800+ miles? Your solids will look like crap. Very jagged edges and cylinders which look like hexagons, (or worse). This ugliness is caused because of a lack of sufficient resolution when rendering (?) computing (?) the 3D solids. (Apologies to K. Bentley if I am misspeaking some of the technical stuff)

    What is affected?  Your OpenRoads Corridors will probably be fine. Why? Because they are not solids, they are meshes. (Nope, I don;t understand why either)(In ORD, perhaps this is changed, but I don't think so)

    However, your pipes and structure which come out of SUDA will look horrible, because they are actually solids. And anything else you create with Smart Solids and Feature Modeling (SS4) or CONNECT Edition 3D Modeling will be affected.

    Why haven't you ever heard of this before? Because as civil engineers we are late in coming into the 3D world and we never needed to be bothered because we seldom if ever made any solid models.

    How can such a small working area be satisfactory when our projects tend to be 3 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles or longer? Because the SWA is sort of like a sandbox where all the math is done but then resulting solid is "moved" to the proper location.  

    How did we arrive at 1 mile as a recommended number?

    • Because 1 is easy to remember.  The recommendation given to me years ago by the experts was actually 1KM but it just didn't seem natural defining seed files with 0.621.
    • I did a lot of tests back in the day and confirmed that 1.0 miles works fine and I also became comfortable enough to stretch it to 2 miles if needed.
    • In the mix here is another consideration. Since SUDA creates water lines and gas lines and such, which can be miles long (compared to a storm drain which is measured in hundreds of feet) then the SWA needed to be a little larger to accommodate such long skinny solids.

    Then there is a companion rule: Regarding those long skinny water lines and such, if they are longer than 1 mile then they will start to look icky because they are bigger than the SWA. SO, when using SUDA, you need to split those water lines into lengths which are shorter than the SWA.  I have not foud this to be an issue in my travels. Existing utilities tend be be naturally of appropriate length just because of the way we collect survey data. For proposed utilities, it could create a little extra work for the designer if you are modeling a long pipeline.

    Robert Garrett
    Senior Consultant

    www.envisioncad.com

  • Can you explain the Solids Working Area a bit more. All of our files seem to be the 800+/- miles value. Changing this to on or two miles seems counter-intuitive. 


    Charles (Chuck) Rheault
    CADD Manager

    MDOT State Highway Administration

    • MicroStation user since IGDS, InRoads user since TDP.
    • AutoCAD, Land Desktop and Civil 3D, off and on since 1996
  • Here's my list of things I review in the seed:

    • Make sure there is no global origin shift (EXTREMELY Important)
    • Define Coordinate system
    • View Attributes
      • Turn Off grid (personal preference)
      • Turn Off clip volume, clip front and clip back (highly recommended for convenience)
      • turn ON default lighting (for convenience)
    • DGN settings
      • Set angle readout, precision and everything else related to Microstation.
      • Check the grid settings here - if the grid master or grid reference values are set to large numbers then OpenRoads has a fit. Don't know why but t does. If values are greater than 100 then things go wacky, so keep it small. 
      • View Options Civil - set the various precision and etc. as appropriate
        • Pay particular attention to the station equation setting (By Name for InRoads environment and By Index for Geopak)
      • Working units
        • Set the proper units of course.
        • Set Solids Working area to 1.0 (very important, mostly for Subsurface Utilities). Reasonable values are 0.1 to maybe as much as 2.0.  800ish (a common default in many seed files) is bad.
    • Attach the appropriate color table
    • Settings > Drawing Scale - I like to define a default scale
      • Side note: Scales can be tricky when dealing with legacy DOT workspaces.  This is a long discussion in and of itself.
    • I like to set the default text style (for convenience) 
    •  Locks
      • Set Snap divisor- I like 4 so that keypoint snap will give quarter points, but that's just me, so I usually set it to 1 or 2 in the seed.
      • Graphic Group Lock - I like it on by default but this can be dangerous so I am starting to rethink

    Robert Garrett
    Senior Consultant

    www.envisioncad.com

  • Thanks for the input, Robert. If I take the latest Bentley delivered seed file, I plan on just going through the design file settings to ensure all looks good for our use. Do you see anything else that would need to be checked? Thanks again.