Jay Meszar | Solutions Consultant
Hello again from the wonderful world of Infraworks 360! This installment of What’s New in Infraworks 360 will cover the new commands that permit users to display profiles, cross sections and superelevations.
Viewing a profile is not necessarily a new feature in Infraworks 360, but it fits well with the other features, so I thought it would be good to cover the subject here. When a roadway is sketched out, Infraworks 360 will essentially place the new roadway as close to the existing surface as it can. This is often acceptable to many people because they aren’t sure where the final design will appear in the early stages of development. Others will need to adjust the profile to meet their desired design. If you have been doing this and grip editing the roadway in plan view, you have been missing a very useful feature Infraworks 360 has to offer. There are two ways to view a profile view. The first requires you to select the roadway and right-click, then choose SHOW IN PROFILE VIEW.
Select the PROFILE VIEW button, and then the roadway
The profile can now be adjusted using the grips in plan view OR the grips in the profile view.
Now, on to cross sections. Before this release, it was difficult to see what the slope of the road was. The new cross section command makes that very easy. First, select the road, right-click and select SHOW CROSS SECTION VIEW. A new window will appear showing the cross section of the road. The only question you might have is, “how do I know where the section I am viewing is located?” The answer is a simple one. You can see in the image below there is a station listed in the top right corner that reads “18+75.00”. If this is the first time you are using these features, you might not understand that there are several ways to change the station.
First and probably the easiest way to get the station you would like to see, is to simply select the station number and manually type in the station you would like to see (keep in mind that each road begins at station 0+00). Another method of changing stations is to click the + or – signs to the right of the station number. Using this method will either increase or decrease the distance along the alignment by 25’ respectively. Lastly, we can use the up and down arrows to move to the next critical superelevation station along the alignment. The critical sections available are listed below.
Cross section views offer more than just a view of the section at a critical station. The view itself can be changed to view different aspects of the road and provide more information. For example: Select one of the radial buttons in the lower right corner and the view will change to show a line diagram of the top of the section. Select another and the view changes to view the top and depth of the section (Currently without customization the depth can’t be changed.). The last button shows the cut and fill area required to build this section. The area is shaded red to show cut areas and green for fill areas. There is also an aspect ratio setting that allows you to change the vertical exaggeration within the view.
Superelevation was mentioned above so let’s look at how Infraworks 360 handles superelevations. The tricky part can be just figuring out where the command is. Select the road, right-click and select in the box next to Show Superelevation.
If you don’t see the yellow and red shaded areas around each curve, you may need to turn on superelevation for that roadway. To accomplish this, see the roadways asset card and click the switch next to Superelevation (see the red arrow in the image below).
My initial thought when seeing this was, great but I bet I have no control over what the superelevation rate is. Well, I was wrong. Using the asset card available when the road is selected, users have control of not only the Max Superelevation Rate but also the Runoff on Spiral. Once again, Autodesk has impressed this user with the available design input for a tool that hasn’t been given much credibility in the past.
If you have been following this blog for the past few weeks, you can see there are a number of new tools available to Infraworks 360 users. These tools have taken Infraworks 360 from what many believed to be a “napkin sketch” software to a legitimate preliminary design tool.