Using OpenRoads Designer for Production

The 3D modeling tools are fairly solid and stable ... on the other hand plan production tools seem "half-baked" ... my major heart burn is the cross-section "deliverables" (Oh-Boy!).

ORD creates a drawing model for EVERY station where you slice a cross section! This is how ORD keeps the connection between your 3D model and cross sections presented in the sheets LIVE.

You could easily end up with hundreds of cross section models in your drawing (for large projects) and the processing can take hours. This has made managing ORD cross section sheets so tedious that we had no other choice but revert to revert to SS4 or other legacy formats just for the plan production ... especially cross sections, which defeats the purpose of OpenRoads Technology!

I've had discussions with key people in our firm who adamantly expect to be able to edit cross section graphics. They explained to me that in complex urban projects they need to make small adjustments to cross section elements and that it would be tedious and time consuming to make these tweaks using the corridor template. 

We have a simple macro that Merges Cross Section Drawings to Master for incomplete models to allow for CAD manipulation of elements - not an option?

That option will work but it severs the connection between the cross section and the 3D model. So any change in design forces you to discard the cross sections and start over. Annotations would also need to be adjusted manually. I guess I could merge the incomplete section into the drawing model and edit it there. 

Absolutely! There comes a point where you will reach diminishing returns if you try to adjust the templates and model the corridor for every small adjustment - the possibility of breaking something that was working is never nil. There's always some odd section here, or some small existing condition there. Near the end of a project, when we are out of time and budget, it's much, much more efficient to make the changes in the actual drawings. I'm sure there are ways to get it all done with end condition exceptions and point controls and, and, and...but not everyone at the firm is going to be a master modeler and sometimes the work just needs to get out the door.

ORD has no allowances for that whatsoever.

Out of curiosity, I don't get it with the Cross Sections. How can you maintain a connection between the different models to have automatically updated Cross Sections and in the same time can manually tweak them? I would guess that once you tweak something it loses its connection with the models?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the request would be to maybe keep linked Named Boundaries, but get static Drawing Production - I suppose skipping the step of exporting to a Merged DGN or DWG?

We have that option for Meshes with the Display Clipped Graphics option when generating Quantities - Maybe an option to create Drawings as Graphics option.

I don't know why you would need it for Profiles, but it seems to be an option that keeps being requested for Cross Sections (although I'm not one of them).

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the request would be to maybe keep linked Named Boundaries, but get static Drawing Production - I suppose skipping the step of exporting to a Merged DGN or DWG?

We have that option for Meshes with the Display Clipped Graphics option when generating Quantities - Maybe an option to create Drawings as Graphics option.

I don't know why you would need it for Profiles, but it seems to be an option that keeps being requested for Cross Sections (although I'm not one of them).

In this case, why not to use a 'Clip Mask' with the reference with the option 'Merge Mask Contents' in the drawing or sheet model?

I've just tried it and it create a mask of the area you want to edit and drop the reference in the fence into editable elements that I can manipulate / delete / etc.

The reference clip mask is probably the optimal solution at the moment. It maintains the live connection between the cross section and 3D model and allows for editing of selected areas. Several masked areas can be created. When running Annotate Model the edited areas will be annotated with reference to the original geometry so some manual annotation will be required. One obvious advantage is that masked/edited areas are clearly marked and can be located later even if the model changes. Also the original model geometry remains available and is only masked out of the drawing so it's easy to delete edits and revert.

A definite enhancement to the cross section creation process is to allow the user to place more than one cross section per drawing model. This would speed up editing of multiple cross sections. We recently designed a 20 kilometer road segment. At the standard cross section interval of 20 meters this generated 1000 cross sections.

The location of cross section elements in the drawing model enables offset/elevation values to be extracted using XYZ Text. Y is elevation and X is offset. Quite handy when manually annotating edits.

Good stuff Benzi,

Maybe the enhancement may be having the Cross Section annotation group leaders/cells dynamically update offset / elevation values if picked up and moved to a different location to allow for manual edits - and can be "reset" by re-annotating?

The copied elements contained in each reference mask are added to a Named Group and should be easy to sort and annotate using a macro. Also toggle on Boundary Display in View Attributes to always display the mask boundary.