jbrhwy

Petri - my wish for 2009, after requesting it for 18 years, is a tool that places a symmetrical arc between intersecting lines & the resulting polyline radii are editable through the Object Info palette. Do I want to spend time developing Vw tools - no!, but I am more than willing to pay for it, I have purchased very valuable tools from Raymond Mullin, Charles Chandler & Manuel Garcia de Paredes, but sadly I am very much in the minority among Vw users according to the developers. They have provided tools for me that allow me to spend my time designing "Liveable Roads for all Travellers". "Some years ago an independent developer created an add-on for doing cartographic visualisations with VW in long/lat coordinates", but "Azimuth does not provide support for datums" according to the developer, Richard Furno.

If you want to see tools that quickly & elegantly allow you to display road infrastructure in 3-D take a look at Charles Chandler's Land Planning Vw add-on "http://scs-inc.us/default.php?page=products". I use it check potential location conflicts between underground utilities, but there are many other tools that are beneficial to any one who works with site plans.

Probably right Petri, seems any company in the USA who lives in the past gets bailed out.

With the world heading towards rapid increase in infrastructure spending maybe more users of Vectorworks will be diverted from McMansions to design/build of linear assets. "Very few VW users are involved in such projects" - the greatest potential for Vectorworks growth is if they can provide a suitable product for civil engineers. "Do not need to be geospatially google-earthed* by a button", why not?, potentially a great data retrieval system.

To me the questions is: are your designs for you or will your designs hopefully benefit society. The public is demanding input in to our design work & the best way to share our designs is with Google Earth, which makes it very easy for the public to visually determine how the proposed design affects them. Governments here require georeferenced designs & as-builds drawings, do they always get correct drawings - no, why not, because our design software hasn't made it easy to meet the requirements. Miguel, officials in California advised me that they require georeferenced as-builts - are they misinforming me because I am not a local practitioner or canadian? Should all public drawings be georeferenced, in my opinion yes, as it is the only practical way to make them available to anyone at anytime. Vast amounts of public money are wasted because drawing can not be retrieved. Please Nemetschek lets move forward & provide your users with ability to work with georeferenced drawings. I am sure that Safe Software could assist you in providing this ability as they have for others.

Mark I have not printed any design layers since I learned how to use sheet layers / viewports & they are used exclusively for public & client presentations. The design layers are used for sharing files with other Vw users or exporting to DWG for other consultants, I do not share/export sheet layers.

I have no problem printing a 117 mb road design file that includes a 30cm resolution colour aerial photograph as a background with my setup.

All my design layers for road design projects are either 1:500 or 1:1000 depending on the length &/or complexity of the road network, then sheet layers with viewports at different scales are set up to print to different paper sizes. Roads are long narrow entities, therefore, difficult to fit all information required by various users on a single size sheet. For example a site plan my be required on 11"x17" paper, construction drawing on 24"x36" & a intersection detail on 18"x24". Vectorworks sheet layers, viewports & layer/class visibility have completely enhanced the ability to prepare road design drawings that are functional for a variety of users.

Started using MiniCad December 1990 & loved it, except for how it handles arc polylines, I do wish after 18 years that they could eliminate the restriction imposed by the mid-point (phantom) vertex. Merriam-Webster Dictionary: phantom - "an object of continual dread or abhorrence".

Reshaper is an essential tool for me & it even has an azimuth mode for line direction. Thanks Raymond Mullin (www.SiriusSolutions.net).

Mark Take a look at Charles Chandler's Land Planning Tools (http://scs-inc.us/default.php?page=products&subPage=Products/Land%20Planning/Default), sewer & water line tools are 3-D, & if you need any modifications contact Charles.

Miguel Some jurisdictions are requiring georeferenced plans, see below, & 1 reason is: "Up until a few years ago cadastral fabric map representations were only important to people that wanted information in quite a localized way. The land surveyor would compile a representation for a specific area that was under survey as a backdrop for the legal survey plan. The local government would compile a map representation as a backdrop for infrastructure such as sewers and water mains. Over the past few years and particularly since the introduction of products like Google Earth and Virtual Earth the general public are using online information systems for day to day activities." "British Columbia Land surveyors operating within an official integrated survey area are required to tie their legal survey plans to the control monuments. This supports the ongoing geo-referencing of the cadastral fabric. Surrey, BC, Canada ? Within the integrated survey area untruncated UTM (NAD83 CSRS) coordinates on the projection (not ground level) shall be used. The scale factor given in the attribute data shall be the mean combined scale factor for the survey. ? The scale factor should be suitable for the specific area under survey."

Panta The property line tool allows each leg's distance & bearing (or azimuth) of a polygon or polyline to be displayed & edited. Are coordinates ground, grid or georeferenced & how are you handling them in Vectorworks?

Mike Would you test one last item, what happens when the polyline includes a vertex with an intersection angle greater than 90? & the tangent of the radius is greater than 1/2 the distance between the points of intersection?

Mike Were you able to revise radii using OIP or the fillet tool & if you did what were the steps involved? In other versions, sometimes revising radii would change the original point of intersection of the tangent lines (phantom arc vertex). Thanks for staying with me on this dilemma.

Mike When I use the fillet tool & then offset tool in Vw2008 the inside radius is 70.085 metres not 70.000 metres (beyond the required +/- 10 mm tolerance. Would you go to the next step which is to revise the curve radii because the roadway is too close the right-of-way, change curve 1 radius to 85 metres & curve 2 radius to 25 metres & then do the offsets again. This is the ongoing problem arc polylines can not be easily revised because of the phantom midpoint. Huge problem for me as 70% of my design work involves polylines.

The name of the plug-in is "VB Optimize Drawing.vwplugin" in my VW12.5 Plug-in folder.

Mike - could you post the Vw2009 file that you used to create & offset the polyline. Michael Young had tested my file in Vw2009 & commented "Well, your suspicions are confirmed. I could not leverage v2009 to accomplish this". Please note the file (Arc Polyline Disaster.vwx) I posted is a very simplified version of the actual design, more curves, no road intersections or driveway curb returns. What happens when the polyline includes a vertex with an intersection angle greater than 90?? Thanks for your assistance on this matter.

Mike If you offset the Vw2008 polyline inside by 10 metres the resulting arc radius is 70.085 (error of 85 mm) not 70 metres (design tolerance is +/- 10 mm), if you offset the resulting polyline another 2.0 metres (ie to get back of sidewalk) the error gets even larger. In VW12.5 the radius becomes 69.755 (error of 245 mm), this error was fortunately identified at the time of curb & gutter survey layout.

Ray In some versions of Vw "A" shows as a polygon but it started as a polyline, as a polyline the OIP for the 2-D Reshape tool can change the vertexes.

Ray The OIP was used to change the corner vertex to an arc vertex. For road & railway design curves are applied to the intersection of tangents. You are correct, but you can not change the radius now because 4 additional corner vertexes were added by Vw & in addition the polyline can not be offset correctly without regressively adding & deleting corner vertexes. The continuing saga is that I need the ability to edit arc polylines, what is required is an additional vertex mode that places an arc radius at the intersection point without any phantom midpoint. Thanks for looking at the example.

Miguel Is it correct to assume that you do not use GPS surveyed coordinates for your design work in Vectorworks? If do receive GPS surveyed coordinates what software are you using to translate the coordinates?

Why should you have to place an additional (corner) vertex. When you do add a corner vertex to the polyline the radius can not be increased & in addition the polyline will not offset correctly.

How VW handles arc polylines must be addressed, it is unacceptable that the software can change the radius of an arc vertex without providing any WARNING. The attached file "Arc Polyline Disaster.vwx" illustrates the condition. Since I have been reporting this problem for 15 years & neither Nemetschek or Graphsoft have been unable to address it, I want everyone who uses arc polylines to be aware of the problem. This problem has also been confirmed in Vw2009 by Michael Young.

Miguel I find it unbelievable that Caltrans & TxDot are not georeferencing your design drawings, surely someone at these agencies is inputting your drawings into their GIS-T system! How are your design drawings integrated with their other projects? It is my understanding that all states have a congressionally mandated requirement to provide US DOT with state transportation geospatial information.