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

  • 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
  • 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