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NURBS Roadways: modify elevation of individual stations


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hi Christiaan

Do you have VSS? There is a tutorial on Roadways in the portal there...

But you can use the different roadway tools Roadway (Tee) and Roadway (Curved) to join segments.

Yes - Roadways can be a site modifier - just check Create Pad for Site Model and optionally Create Boundary on the Object Info palette. Then you can Send to Surface and the points will automatically use the surface of the model. Or, you can Align Stations Vertically to develop a constant slope from A to B.

And, on the Object Info palette, you can change Move to Vertex only and use the Forward and Back keys to move between the vertices and change the Z elevation of each.

It's all on the Object Info palette.

Hope that helps.

In haste...

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Tamsin,

I see you do training on site modelling - I'll get in touch.

As a firm who use the VW Architect package, without Landmark, how useful/thorough are the VW site modelling tools to us? I have tried to use the roadways before, but like all 'automatic' tools it dies in the detail - we do lots of quirky road/street layouts in the UK as you know, with HomeZones, shared surfaces and the like, and hardly any of it could be drawn with the VW tools as far as I could see.

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Chris, the whole VW site modelling thing seems to me to be geared toward single houses on big site (aka McHouses). It's not well suited to a dense urban environment.

It would be handy perhaps if we could take a site survey or OS map and extrude roads, paths, site, etc. so they all have the correct height relationships to each other and then apply topographical levels after that without changing the various relationships defined in the first step (e.g. level between road and footpath).

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hi Chris

THanks for your email earlier. I've been training today, but the office team will come back to you with some ideas on training for your team.

To answer your question... the road tools indeed are a little quirky, and the fact that they can only joint at right angles is a limitation too. Without Landmark, you are missing the option to create a roadway from a polyline and have easy adjustment of the elevations along the length of the road. But other than that, the roadway tools are the same and just as quirky.

THe trick is to combine 3D modelling with a site model - you can get raw 3D geometry to work with a site model too, so sometimes it's just a question of building your own modifiers.

Christiaan - glad you like the tutorial. The most recent one covers harscapes and also how to get a roadway to incline steadily from one elevation to another. But it does use Landmark features mainly.

In terms of bringing in site detail and extruding, you could look at Shapefiles. These have data attached to the 2D Objects. Using the Modify by Record command, you can do things like Extrude and set colours based on the information attached to each shape. This may be useful to you. Also, the Shapefiles retain their georeferencing.

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Hi Tasmin,

In what way can "you get raw 3D geometry to work with the site model"?

I have tried to use the site model many times only to be frustrated by the lack of fine control and the fact that it does not accurately model in accord with the original topo lines (3d polys) it is based on.

Thank you in advance for any comments you may have in this regard.

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Any 3D object placed into the Site-DTM-Modifier class will become a site modifier... So, you can extract geometry using the Extract tool, place it into this class and then it becomes a modifier.

I need training...to learn things like this...

A single class may not be ideal but at least it's a workaround.

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Any 3D object placed into the Site-DTM-Modifier class will become a site modifier...

Only seems to work with 3D polys for me. You can also only do this on the proposed site model rather than the existing, which kind of assumes your site model source data is complete when you begin, which is rarely the case.

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Any 3D object placed into the Site-DTM-Modifier class will become a site modifier...

As far as I know this is uniquely peculiar to this class, not something you could reasonably intuit and should be highlighted over and over.

Are there other places in VW where placing an object in a class transforms it to be something else? If so, we should compile a list of these Transformer Classes or they should be somehow marked/highlighted differently in the Navigation Palette.

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  • 3 months later...

When I create a NURBS Road from a polyline the road itself displays with no fill or line weight/colour even though the object was created with a class colour. Lines show in wireframe render but not in Open GL or Renderworks.

Does anyone have any ideas.

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