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The Road Tool


HP Sauce

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After searching through previous posts it appears creating roads in VW isn't quite as productive as the rest of the software...

How would one go about modelling the attached site's roads in 3D - most notably where curves intersect? Preferably without creating overly-complicated meshes, extrude-along-path objects, or the use of additional software.

Cheers

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The straight and single curves could be done by the Roadway Tools. Beyond that, you could make 2D polygons of the curved shapes, and make floor objects from them. Everything would be segmented though. Or you could make all of the paving a single 2D polygon, and make a floor of that. Using a floor on a site model requires some Site Modifiers to do the grading. I don't see any contours on the site - does it require some grading?

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Manually creating the roads as you suggest was indeed my backup plan, similar to what you suggest but using extrude-along-path to get the curb profile right. I realise it'll take forever to render but it'll look lovely.

There will be some grading but this is just a proof of concept rendering for the time being, so we're not too bothered about that.

VW09 is in the post - hopefully arriving in time for us to try that magic new command before the deadline, Pat.

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That's the problem with the VW2008 Road Tool - there is no way of shaping the edge of the road with the cursor for the wider, curved paving shapes. So that leaves us with floors or roof surfaces, which do not have the site modifier function.

And then there is the problem of making parking strips alongside a driveway. I would be interested to see if Vw2009 can handle this better.

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Mr Anderson,

I was hoping that the road tool would be good enough that our bosses could see themselves using it. It's very rare for our sites not to contain Y-shaped roads, and to model these manually every time is too much hassle in the eyes of our elders. (I was expecting to be able to select two roads and CTRL/Apple+J them... ha).

For this particular project it's simply a graphical matter, although must still look realistic when rendered. I've manually modelled the Y intersections and they look great, just take far too long.

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It might be the way I do it, but whenever I put a pad next to a road or another pad..... weird things happen to the site model. Usually they are sharp, vertically edged ravines at the corners. I usually resolved such grading problems by replacing the pads with non-intrusive objects, like floors or roof surfaces, and site modifier graders underneath. And if it's still not right, I resort to 2D polygons to mask the problem spots.

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Does the new arc tangent mode solve the long standing problem with Vectorworks ie "For 15 years I have been requesting an additional vertex method that would insert a symmetrical curve between two intersecting lines that is not constrained by an artificial mid-point. The current problem is if the tangent distance of 1 curve is greater than 1/2 the distance between the intersection points , VW moves that vertex (disaster)!"

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