Landmark Special Interest Group August 2019

In this session, we covered creating site modifiers for a retaining wall, turning a complex roof into a gable roof, and using the Data Tag tool to get correctly scaled labels and add Dynamic Text to a tag.

Topics Covered:

• 00:11    We started by looking at site modifiers. The challenge was to add a curved retaining wall to our site. We drew the profile of the retaining wall and then drew the curving path we wanted it to follow. You might not want to use a Bezier curve for this because it’s difficult to achieve a particular radius, which makes it a challenge to tell your contractor what they are! With our profile and path set, we used the Extrude Along Path command to get our wall. We positioned the retaining wall where we needed it on the site and used the Send to Surface command—not bad! I like to group an object like this when I’m working on it. That way, I can easily separate it out and turn off or gray out the surrounding objects. Using the Extract tool in Extract Curve Mode, we used a curve from the top and the bottom of the retaining wall to fit the site model to the wall. Any 3D polygon or NURBS curve put on the Site-DTM-Modifier class will act as a site modifier. A Grade Limits around the whole thing made it look nice. We discussed about getting an accurate cut and fill calculation because it’s not that straightforward.
• 31:53    Next, we did a retaining wall where the wall was going up the slope. We found the slope by sending a 3D polygon to the surface. Then, we used the same 3D polygon for the path when we executed the Extrude Along Path command. Using the Lock Profile Plane option kept the wall straight up as it curved into the slope. Using the Send to Surface command might give your profile too many points, so we removed many of them and turned the vertices into curves, giving us a much smoother wall.
• 43:46   We had a complex roof that we wanted to turn into a gable roof, but after changing several roof points into gables, the roof vanished, with a message that the roof had failed. However, if the points are still selected (sometimes it works better to look at the roof in a 3D view), you can keep going with the changes. Sometimes the roof pops back into view and sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I break the roof into smaller chunks and try it again. 46:45   The challenge was that when we used the same design layer for different drawings—one was an overview and one was a detail—the labels were at the wrong scale and the tags were at the wrong angle. We demonstrated how the Data Tag tool can pick up the information from a plant and the right scale for the drawing (since it was in the Annotation window of the viewport). You can even have one Data Tag for a plant in one drawing and a different tag for that plant in the next drawing. We covered how to change the label and add Dynamic Text to the tag. The Data Tag tool is more flexible than the standard plant tag—you can have it include or take on any look you want!

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