We are working on our ORD Workspace and one area that needed work was our 2D Storm Drain Structures cell library. There had been reports of some cells not displaying using the correct rotation.
As I went through the cells, I found few that were 180 degrees from most of the other cells. By this, I mean that the red, dashed construction line for most cells pointed up along the Y axis. There were three or four that pointed down.
The orientation of the structure was equally rotated. If a cell was a curb opening inlet or a grate along a gutter pan, the entire inlet looked upside down compared to other similar inlets. Rotating the entire model by 180 degrees around xy=0,0 made them point in the same direction as all the other cells.
Additionally, a small number of Manhole cells were pointing along the positive X axis.
Are these orientations important to the software? If not, for the sake of consistency, should I care?
Thanks for any input.
The only thing that technically matters is that the alignment lines (the red line you mention) is consistent between the top, bottom and plan cells. It technically does not matter if these lines point left right up or down.
BUT-as you have found. It can become very frustrating to someone like yourself to debug a problem when inconsistencies in drafting practice were allowed to creep in.
So, you could have the bottom cell line facing east and the top cell facing west and it might still work. But proving so is complicated by the inconsistent drafting effort.
The other error to watch for (which is even more insidious) is that the direction of the line matters. So, the line may look OK, but is actually drawn backwards causing things to be 180 degrees out of whack.
Robert Garrett Senior Consultant
www.envisioncad.com
Answer Verified By: caddcop
LOL... Robert, you just beat me to the answer(s)!
Mark
That could be the secret sauce!
I might make a pen table to plot the cell matrix using a big arrow line style to see which lines are backwards facing. Thanks!
Charles (Chuck) Rheault CADD Manager
MDOT State Highway Administration Maryland DOT - State Highway Administration User Communities Page
For recent versions of the software, ORD provides an option allowing you to have the cross slope for inlets be extracted from the active terrain. If you are using this option, then for roadway inlets it does matter which direction the line is drawn. You want the line pointing towards the roadway, not the sidewalk/shoulder. You'll need to test this out to be sure you've got it correct.
Karl Dauber, PEAdvance ConsultingLaurens County, SCkarldauber@advconsult.netwww.advconsult.netwww.linkedin.com/in/karldauber
All great tips. These should be written down somewhere!