Interested in finding out how many of you create drawings or want to create drawings in TBC
What would be the top issues / requirements that you have to achieve this
What types of drawings do you typically want to create eg As Builts, Work In Progress, Pre Construction, Stockyard, Cut Fill Maps, Site Improvement Maps, As Staked Maps, Sections, profiles, plan and profiles …
What do you need in your Title Boxes
North Arrows, Scalebars ….
Any other requests or needs
We have some cool new tools coming soon and just want to make sure we have all your bases covered in v1 or v2 of the product.
Goal is to make this fast, easy, simple, comprehensive, cool looking output, differentiated, capable …
I’d love to see customizable grids and viewable area. With cross-sections in particular, if there is a large variation in the width of the project, or big slopes moving from one side to another throughout the job, or wall/pile sections, or turnouts/parking areas, etc, it’s impossible to run the sections with a fixed scale and have them look good and ‘fill the page’ to be easily visible throughout.
We have been discussing how to do match lines - for roads and for sites - I don’t think we have come up with a great answer yet as there are many issues associated with match lines, especially if you use rectangular boxes on an alignment - if you use the start and end station, left and right offset type of plot box it is easier to do match lines but harder to lay out the sheets nicely if the roads have any serious curves in them, and if the road forks or you get ramps and interchanges then the match lines get really tricky
How complex do these need to be for the 80 to 90% use case?
I do a lot of Cut/Fill maps but need to use the actual pick up points for them, not the generated grid pattern. An easier way of getting the elevation difference generated and labelled for them would be good as well. Also a auto text layout that doesn’t create labels over other labels so they are readable without having to manually move every overlapping label.
One thing I’ve wanted when I was doing more plotting. An option for black & white print outs. There were times I would change the colors of lines that I wanted to be grey to grey and the lines I wanted to stand out I would leave as colored lines.
I’m mostly working on smaller sites, industrial building etc.. I need Cut/fill maps all the time and cross-section where I want them and 3D views (for the moment screen shots from 3Dview imported as image.
Simple & fast single sheet exhibits in plan, cross section, or profile view for when we need a client facing RFI in PDF format to go out.
It would be awesome to not need to build an alignment/corridor for the profile/cross section sheets for sake of speed since some of us dont use them.
Cut-fill maps that can be set up with a custom template with north arrow, scale bar, custom color mapping and legend added in from the start of the process to save time would be lovely. Bonus points if we can have the option of importing an earthworks report pdf/jpg into the template when applied maybe, I dont always use volumes manager (I know shame on me).
The creation of CF Maps in RPS world is handled by our Smart Model command. This provides the ability to create a Cut Fill Map and Legend, apply your own color scheme, generate all of the labels and the legend automatically. This also provides the ability to apply shrink/ swell and haul bulking factors and generates a detailed earthworks report including the height adjustment to balance the site, the change in volume per 0.1’ change, the unadjusted and adjusted volumes, the surface Nd plan areas, the surface statistics (points, triangles, min max elevation etc.) And also the areas of each color band in the color map. If you change the color map settings the areas update, legend updates and the CFMap updates without recomputation. The report can be copied and pasted onto your drawing using any screen grabber tool like windows snip, Snagit, sharex etc.
In Smart Plot we currently support plan and profile at this stage, I am sure we will do sections in due course. For culverts, I wiukd do these as profile drawings not as sections. You can convert the alignment of the culverts into alignments using our Quick Alugnment tool, then you can cut existing, design and other surfaces as surface profiles along the culvert alignments. If you have other 3D linework that you want drawn in the profile view you can use create profile proxy to do that. Then it is down to labeling the profile as needed and create. Profile drawing using our Smart Plot Tool. I am sure there are a lot of things we can do with Profile Drawings - we are just looking at projecting 3D lines onto an imported profile drawing so that we can do 3D markups of As Builts etc. As Overlays to PDF or CAD profile drawings. I am sure we can do more if we know what you need.
In Smart Plot you can define your types of sheet eg CFMap or As Built or Work In Progress, and give then a code like CFM or PRF or WIP etc. And then we number them for you so you will get CFM - 001 or WIP - 001 etc on the drawings and in the drawing names. Each type of sheet can be split eg 60/40 or 70/30 or 80/20 or 100/0 and for profiles 50/50 vertically etc. We currently populate the left side or top side of the defined splits with the drawing giving you the remainder of the sheet for reports, notes, 3D views etc.
Streamlining the process for Cut/ Fill Maps and Site Improvement Maps would be awesome.
Custom reporting for Cut/ Fill Maps and Site Improvement Maps would be double awesome. Right now I’m generating reports, cleaning up in Word, exporting to pdf, then snipping and pasting on the plotted cut/ fill and site improvement maps.
Being able to right click and duplicate individual sheets has been missing since I started using TBC.
When you say right click to duplicate a sheet - is that to create a new sheet from a blank sheet or is that to create a copy of an existing sheet that has content (more than titlebox)?
Smart Plot creates a sheet from a template automatically so there is no real need to create a copy becUse that is done by the command.
Have you used Smart Model yet to create your CF Maps?
You can use RPS Copy and Paste to do this if needed by the way.
Answer to your first question: It could be either blank or existing, depending on the situation. RPS Copy and Paste seems to dump the duplicate sheet in a new sheet set. I would love to be able to drag and drop sheets in the Project Explorer, but that seems to be a Trimble problem.
In answer to your Smart Model question, I believe the correct answer is “not yet, but I’ll try it on the next one”
I’ll admit that some RPS commands that are problematic or not intuitive when they are first released sort of get shoved to the back until they get to be more useful, but in the process some great commands slip through the cracks!
The trick with RPS Copy and Paste for sheets is the following
If you copy a Sheet or Sheet Set called Sheet A it is stored on the clipboard with that name, when you paste it then it sees that name already exists so inserts the copied sheets into the original sheet set with the same name. If after you copy the data you then use the properties pane to rename the data that was copied eg to Sheet A1, then when the paste happens, no duplicate is found and it will create a new Sheet set with the original name. You can then rename it as needed.
In the properties pane of a Sheet it lists the Sheet set to which it belongs, if you change the Sheet set to a different one, the sheets will get moved to that Sheet set. This is the best you have, there is no drag and drop but it does work well, and you can move many sheets at once by group selecting them.
I am amazed at how many people I talk to have not tried to use Smart Model yet. I use it every day without fail fo all my surface needs.
