Productivity Apps for Civil 3D
“Time is money”—something you hear in most construction and design companies. The ability to cut down on time, but still be accurate and efficient is key to being more profitable. When designing in AutoCAD® Civil 3D®, being productive, fast, and efficient is key, and with the Red Transit apps and suite, you can achieve that. In this article I will share a few of the productive apps that I use from the Red Transit Pipe Network Productivity Suite.
Pipe Network Productivity Suite
Red Transit apps have been around since 2011. I personally started using a few of the apps in 2012. Great apps such as the Slope Across Pipes help cut down on my utility design time drastically.
RedTransit Pipe Network Productivity Suite contains a large set of time-saving tools to cut down on repetitive tasks when working with AutoCAD Civil 3D gravity pipe networks (Figure 1). Cutting down on repetitive tasks such as swapping multiple pipe network parts or assigning a constant slope across multiple pipes helps increase productive time.
Figure 1
With the RedTransit collection, designers can increase productivity in task such as swapping parts, adjusting pipe elevations, adding wye connections, modifying part references, modifying part descriptions, modifying part style/materials, labeling pipe crossing, labeling pope elevations at any point along pipe, renaming parts, gathering quantities, daylighting pipe at surface, and modifying hydraulic properties.
Many of these easy-to-use tools also provide selection capabilities from plan and profile views. Any experienced user who works with pipe networks will immediately recognize the benefits these tools provide. In the next few sections I will discuss a few of the apps you can find within the Pipe Network Productivity Suite.
Slope Across Pipes
Most designers who work on utility design projects such as storm and sanitary sewer understand the tedious task of changing multiple pipes across a section of pipes or a whole pipe network system. Though having a set of pipe rules is helpful, it is still limited to what it can do. Right now, the current workflow requires designers to edit pipe elevations/slopes individually by clicking each pipe, editing the properties, and entering in the elevation/slope information. The process is not natural and can be time consuming depending on the size of the project. In order to be efficient, elevations and slopes must be known in advance. But the design process does not work that way. Often, we adjust pipe elevations multiple times to help find the best design with a number of parameters, pipe slopes, elevations that must be held, depth of pipes, pipe conflicts, and so on.
If you purchase the Slope Across Pipes App, this tool allows for editing pipe elevations in a more natural way by selecting an upstream object and a downstream object, and the tool will apply the elevations/slopes to all pipes in between in just a few seconds with some guided input. Adjustment options allow for adjusting by slope or adjusting by holding two elevations and calculating the slope.
A recent update now also allows for assigning specific Pipe Slopes to pipes and specific drop elevations to structures. For a pipe or a structure with specific assigned information, while running this command it will observe and follow those settings for the pipe or structure regardless of what was entered in at the command prompt. This allows for maintaining specific design requirements on certain locations of your project and not having to re-enter that information
Wye Connections
For some regions in the United States, wye connections parts are common to connect lateral lines to main systems lines such as for sanitary sewer and stormwater. Currently, Civil 3D has no way of creating an accurate wye connections part without a little manual calculation. It requires placing a pipe at the wye location and manually changing the centerline elevation invert value. This is done as one would expect—measuring the distance from one end of the pipe to the wye location, then multiplying that value by the slope of the pipe and adding/subtracting to the pipe end the elevation the measurement came from. From that elevation, a designer can establish the desired elevation of the wye connection.
The Wye Connection tool allows the designer to set a wye pipe elevation by first clicking on the main line pipe and then selecting the wye pipe. The tool automatically determines which end of the wye is closest to the main line to use for calculations, then does the math to calculate the elevation at that specific point along the main line pipe. Next, it prompts the user for any additive factors to the wye connection, and lastly adds XDATA to the wye pipe to allow for updating at a later time. Should the main pipe elevation/slope change, hit the wye update button and the calculations will be performed once again to update the wye pipe.
Figure 2
A recent update now also allows for assigning the Wye pipe slopes at the time of assigning the wye connection as well as implementing this on the automatic update side so that if a wye elevation changes, the defined slope will also stay the same. The update also includes a wye connection manager to easily find and modify your wye connection information from a tabular editor view.
Daylight Pipe At Surface
Civil 3D does not have a simplified way of determining pipe daylight out of a surface, though there are ways to calculate it using the software. If a designer has a pipe at 1.00 percent slope and they need to determine the daylight point and elevation on an existing surface, the only accurate method to calculate that is to draw a feature line along the pipe invert, extend longer than necessary, and then use grading groups to grade to the surface at any grade. The point between cut/fill on the grading is where the pipe daylights the surface.
The Daylight Pipe At Surface tool simplifies the entire process, prompting for the end of the pipe to extend by and selecting the surface to daylight to. The tool will then use the pipe’s elevations/slopes to determine a daylight point/elevation and apply it to the pipe. This is just another helpful tool to have on hand during utility design.
Figure 3
Split Pipe in Profile View
Another productive tool that comes within the Pipe Network Productivity Suite is the Split Pipe in Profile View. With Civil 3D, inserting a structure in the middle of a pipe can only be done from Plan View. Thus, if a user wants to insert a structure at a known location in profile view, they must do the following:
- Get the station from the profile view where they want the structure located.
- Zoom to the corresponding location in plan view.
- Note the station they want to do the insertion and the pipe.
- Edit the pipe network and choose the structure type to insert
- Insert a structure along the pipe, making sure the pipe break symbol appears, and choose the location.
With this tool, users can select the pipe to break, pick a location or enter a station in profile view, and choose a neighboring structure to inherit part type (or choose from a dialog) and the pipe is split into two parts with a new structure in between. No need to go back and forth between plan and profile with this tool—it maintains the alignment of the pipe and provides a warning if the pipe is not parallel to the source alignment of the profile view. This is a great app that I love using during my storm design.
In conclusion, using RedTransit Pipe Network Productivity suite for AutoCAD Civil 3D is a great way to be more productive and efficient when working with gravity pipe networks. You can find Red Transit apps within the Autodesk App Store or go to the Red Transit Consultants website at: www.redtransitconsultant.com.
Tony Carcamo is president of Civil CAD Learning Solutions. At Civil CAD Learning Solutions, he provides software training and technical support on several Autodesk software platforms. Tony has 22 years of experience in the civil engineering field, performing different tasks including surveying, platting to site, road and utility design. In addition, he has also spent 12 years of managing and implementing Autodesk software as a CAD Manager. Tony is a blogger, participates in several Autodesk committees and council groups, and serves as president of the DFW BIM Infrastructure User Group. He is a certified professional in AutoCAD Civil 3D and InfraWorks and an Autodesk Expert Elite member.
