From the course: Roadway Design: InfraWorks 360

Vertical editing with gizmos - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: Roadway Design: InfraWorks 360

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Vertical editing with gizmos

- Not only can gizmos be used to make horizontal road edits, they're also available for vertical edits, and all with the benefit of real, engineered vertical curves that are consistent with accepted road design practices. Let's take a look at how you can use gizmos to edit the vertical aspects of your road. I've opened the Lynda Road model and I've chosen the Vertical_Edit_Gizmo proposal. Going to make a copy of that proposal, called My_Vertical_Edit_Gizmo. You can call it whatever you like, but that's the name I'm going to use. In addition, I'm going to choose the Lynda Road bookmark. That will give me a low-angle perspective view of the road. That's actually important because the angle at which I'm viewing the road will determine what gizmos are made available to me. When I'm looking at the road from a low angle like this, I see the vertical editing gizmos, such as the beginning and ending vertical curve, as well as the PVI, which is kind of buried under the ground here, and also the high/low point gizmo, here. When I look at the road from a plan view or top-down view, the gizmos completely change and I'm offered up the horizontal editing gizmos instead. What's beautiful about this is I don't have to execute any commands or launch any functions. It simply changes based on how I'm looking at the road, and that is very efficient. Let's take a look at actually what these gizmos can do. The one that you'll probably edit the most is the PVI gizmo. I'll zoom in a little closer so we can see exactly what's going on. When I click the PVI gizmo, I can either raise it up and down, vertically, in the z-axis, changing its elevation, or I can move it horizontally, but only along the alignment of the road. It's a very restrictive motion. I can only move up and down or horizontally along the alignment. Basically, I can change the station or the elevation of the PVI. At the beginning and end of the vertical curve, we have the cylindrical gizmos that we can use to change the length of the curve. Actually, both move simultaneously. If I click and drag one of them, the other moves with it. You can see how they move together. Then, finally, we've got this light blue cylindrical gizmo that marks the high point or the low point on the vertical curve. If it's a sag curve, it's a low point. If it's a crest curve, it's a high point. Now, I can't click and drag that gizmo. It's just simply a visual marker to tell me where that location is. That can be helpful if I'm trying to place a culvert or some drainage or something of that nature. Let's use some of these gizmos to make some changes to the road. If we look at this area, we notice that there's a pretty deep cut here. You can see this embankment where the road is cutting down through this agricultural area. I really want to reduce the amount of earth moving necessary to build this road, so I want to eliminate that deep cut. The way I'll do it is, with the road selected and the gizmos available. In other words, I'm in edit mode. I'm going to right-click and pick Add PVI. I'm going to right-click at the point where the cut is the deepest, kind of like the top of the hill. And if you don't get it in just the right place, that's one of the beautiful things about the gizmos, is that they're easy to edit. Now with that gizmo in place, I'll zoom in a little closer, click it and drag it upward until it appears to be at about ground level. After a few seconds, the road will update. I'll look at it from a few different angles, just to see how good of a job I did at matching the ground. I did a pretty good job, actually. I thought maybe I would need to do some more editing, but I'm going to leave it right there for now. Just like that, I'm able to create a new PVI and modify the profile of the road. What can I use some of the other gizmos to do? Well, you can see this curve's kind of short, so I can click and drag it to make it a little longer. And the curve on the other PVI that was there when we started, that one seems kind of long. I'm going to click and drag that one to make it a little bit shorter. Now, you may have noticed that, as I'm making these changes, tool tips are popping up that are showing me exact values. Actually, some of those I can edit. Let me tell you what I mean. For example, let's look at this PVI. You'll notice that the station is at 432.60, and the elevation is 209.73. I like to use nice, round numbers when I'm doing design. Why don't we make this a nice, even 400 for the station, and a nice, even 210 for the elevation? I'll press Enter, click a point in the model, and now, instead of just doing this rough graphical design, I'm doing a very precise type of design. I can do the same thing with the curve length. Instead of 198.38 feet, let's make that a nice, even 200. Another really important thing that I can do with gizmos and the tool tips is check the slopes. Whenever you're designing a road, you're quite often, if not always, very concerned about the slopes. If the slopes are too steep, then it's not safe to drive on the road. If the slopes are too flat, then you don't get good drainage. If we take a look at this road, we've got a slope that is 8.47%. That's kind of steep. Let's say we want to get that under eight percent. What I can do is, come over to one of the PVIs. I'll choose the lower one here. Notice the grade in is 8.46%. I can drag this PVI upward, until I get the grade that I need. I want to get it just under eight percent. There's 7.55. If I want to round that off a little bit again, I'm at station 13 37 34. I'd like to round that off, let's say 13 50, and let's try an elevation of 135. When I make that change, I'll click the PVI once again to check the grade. It's still under eight percent. It's at 7.89, so that's looking pretty good. Using a combination of the graphical editing of the gizmos along with the precise numerical editing of the tool tips, I'm able to get my profile for my road exactly the way I need it. As you've seen, it's just as easy to use gizmos to make vertical edits to your road as it is to make horizontal edits. Now that you understand how to use gizmos in this way, you can begin using them to edit roads in your models.

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