From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

Creating design roads - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

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Creating design roads

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- [Voiceover] Design roads are a more sophisticated more engineering based approach to roads. Let's see how they work. I'm in the chapter nine, Lynda Heights model, and I've chosen a proposal called Create Roads. I've also restored a bookmark called Common Area Plan. I'm gonna zoom out a bit so we can work in this area here. Actually down here, and let's just imagine that we wanna create another face to our development that includes a road that's going to run through this area. Now, early on in the course, we created roads with this tool in the orange core tool set, the very first icon called Roads, and we launched the tool, clicked a style, and then began laying out the roads and you kind of see the behavior here the double red line, the splined style. And when I finish that command, and we click on the road, we see something that's actually quite basic, and you may not even realize it yet, because we haven't seen the alternative, but for example, when I click and drag one of the vertices, I don't really have control over the curvature of the road, it's kind of built in and figured out automatically for me. So there are good and bad things about that. The good thing is it's very simple, and editing that object is basic, but along with simplicity comes limitation so if I want to do something like change that curve radius I really don't have those kinds of capabilities. So if I want to sketch roads in and have nice, visual representations of roads without being too worried about the engineering behind them, then that's the way to go. But if I want to get more serious about my roads, then I want to use the tools in this light brown toolbar. So expand the toolbar, I'll click its Create icon, notice the pencil icon, which is kind of universal across the product, that stands for create or design, and then within that design toolbar, I see highways, arterials, collectors, and local roads. All of these different design speed, starting with high speed down to the lowest. Obviously I'm in a low speed environment here, so I'm gonna click Local roads, I'm gonna choose a style, and just like I did before, I'm gonna close down the Select draw style asset card, and the way that I draw this road actually isn't much different than how I did it as a sketch tool. I'm gonna click a start point, click some points along the way, but right away I see some differences in the graphics for dealing with the solid black center line rather than that double red. And as I move the mouse around and click points, the behavior of the curves is a bit different. There's definitely something different going on there and I'm gonna double click near the center line of this existing road, right here to try to tie in. So I've created a new design road. Couple of clues right off the bat, the highlighting is different, actually when you create this design road it'll probably be set here to Geometry, so to look a little more like this. And you'll notice right off the bat that the gizmos are completely different. I'm not seeing this red highlighting, and I'm seeing shapes in the gizmos that I haven't seen before. The contextual stack for design roads has completely different information, we're seeing Selected Mode like Geometry, Road Style, Lanes Forward, Lanes Backward, we're seeing new things and things laid out in a way we aren't used to or haven't seen before with sketch roads. If we pan and zoom a little more, we start to see some other amazing things happen. When I tilt my view, notice how the gizmos change, and if you look closely you'll notice that when I'm looking top-down on the object, I can see gizmos that relate to horizontal geometry, the curve PI, the curve beginning and end, that sort of thing. When I flip over into vertical, suddenly those disappear, and instead I'm given vertical control gizmos. And we'll get into the way that those function a little bit later. So that's creating a design road from scratch. I'm actually going to delete that design road. We just wanted to demonstrate creating them from scratch. Another thing that we can do that's maybe even more handy, is we can take a road that's been created as a sketch road, like this one that we created early on with the software, and we can right click that while in edit mode and we can convert it to a design road. So, a scenario here may be that someone who's not really into the detailed engineering tools, may use the sketch roads to give you an idea as the engineering designer where he or she wants the road to be, then you can convert that to a design road, and really dig into the engineering detail of that design. For example, as I look at this road I see some really steep embankments along the side. I mean, this really can't be constructed out of earth, it's going to have to be a stone or brick or some sort of solid material, and that's going to get very expensive. So let's apply a more realistic slope grading design to this road. Now that I'm working with a design road, I can do that, so on the contextual stack I'm going to click the Grading option, notice that the Grading is currently set to fixed width, that's the default, and that's why this is so steep. It's trying to grade from design elevation down to existing over a very short distance, in this case 16.4 feet, which is much steeper than a three to one, or even a two to one slope. So let's change that slope method to fixed slope. That way it will go out as far as it needs to before it has to tie in. Now along with the fixed slope method, we have this idea of grading limit. It'll go out to the grading limit and then tie straight down, or straight up if it's in a cut situation. That's not going to work for us either, so I'm gonna use a grading limit that I know is going to cover the width that I need. I'm gonna try 100 feet. Now this slope is going to extend out as far as it needs to until it ties in with the existing ground and now we see a much more constructible and reasonable set of slopes, and you can see the tying is actually variable, because I'm in a deeper cut here, it's actually spreading out further to tie in and say this location where it's very close to existing ground. So that's just one example of a capability that you have with design roads that you don't have with the sketch roads in the orange toolbar. So hopefully it's clear that design roads are a bit more sophisticated, and a great choice if you wanna get more serious about road design, or perhaps have plans to move into detailed design using a tool like Civil 3D.

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