People often ask me how to handle staking of a surface against one or more alignments in SCS900 / Siteworks, especially when you want to stake elements that are away from the main corridors of e.g. a subdivision.
SCS900 / Siteworks have different types of data that you can use in a Design as follows
2D/3D Linework - this can be used for staking the line with or without offsets. These lines are typically not alignments so the start station is typically 0 for these lines. They are provided to SCS900 as a DXF File or in Siteworks you can also send them as a VCL file today.
Alignments - For Siteworks an Alignment or Alignments can be sent to the product using a VCL file or a PRO file. When they are sent using the Design Export tools of TBC they will be sent as a PRO file when selected as an Alignment or Road Surface type of design. You can also use File Export to create a VCL of the data. If read from the PRO file and after being exported as a PRO file, the alignments are set up as Corridors where they use the alignment as the Station and Offset source and they use the Surface as the Elevation Source. In this mode, Siteworks and SCS900 will show you the Cross Section through the surface as well as provide Station, Offset, Elevation for Staking and Checking. When exported as a VCL file, you can use the Alignment for Station and Offset and Staking, but at this point the Siteworks Product does not associate the Surface for the Elevation part - I have requested that they look at that because a VCL surface made from Strings when sliced shows all of the nodes and the surface so it should be easy for them to support this in the same way as a PRO file
Surfaces - if you send out a surface it goes out as a TTM file, but if you send it out as a Road Surface it goes out as a PRO file and associates with the alignment and acts like a corridor model for measuring and staking purposes.
Points - Go out as a points text file and act like points for staking purposes.
When you send out a Road Surface model you can select one or more alignments - i.e. for a Subdivision where you may have one design surface and 10 alignments, you can send all 10 Alignments with one surface and then when you use that in Siteworks you get the Alignment, Surface, Section and 3D views to work with when any one of the alignments is selected - the video shows how.