A Change of Pace

The retaining wall sheets house a series of views, each with their own important information, for retaining walls on a plan set. In the olden days, that is, before OpenRoads Designer but after the printing press and Y2K, you would use Microstation to quickly piece together a retaining wall sheet. The method was simple and only required the user to know what to reference into the empty sheet. They would then add labels, clip/mask references, and then with a chef’s kiss, print the masterpiece for their project manager to bleed all over it with red pen. OpenRoads Designer does change the former of that process but the latter unfortunately remains.

A Wind of Help and A Concept

It is an important step that you go to the FHWA’s OpenRoads Designer Manual Chapter 14C.4. This is nearly the entire procedure minus the need for a cross section view of the retaining wall. The concept of the whole process is this: the retaining wall sheet is made as if it’s a profile view sheet with the plan view and cross section referenced in. This procedure assumes you fully modeled your retaining wall, that your wall height is finished, and that you have already created cross section sheets. You did use the 3D Linear Method for modeling didn’t you?

The Procedure

1. Using a feature definition assigned line, spanned across the entire face of the retaining wall, project the top of wall, bottom of wall, and the element adjacent to the wall (sidewalk, edge of shoulder, etc.) to it. Trace the projected top and bottom of wall profiles if you’d like to communicate a smoother profile without small bumps every 50 feet. Assign the traced top and bottom of wall lines, or projected ones if you chose not to trace to a proposed profile feature definition. This will provide auto labeling later on. Do not give the element adjacent to the wall a feature definition. It does not need auto labeling.
2. Provide good data hygiene by giving all these lines proper names. Having none leads to confusion, lamentation, and bemoaning.
3. Create named boundaries for the profile view. Try to make the available profile height minimal to 10 feet above and below the wall to reduce cleanup and adjustments afterwards. If your wall is going to have to fit on two sheets, make the first named boundary no more than 700 feet long to leave room for the cross section view that needs to fit besides it.
4. In plan view, reference and level adjust everything that needs to appear on the retaining wall sheet. Don’t forget to place the north arrow.
5. Rotate the plan view to where the retaining wall runs horizontal to the view. Zoom out enough to view the entire wall and create a Saved View with proper naming convention. Toggle the Saved View to “Civil Plan”.
6. In the profile named boundaries, create the profile drawing and sheet. Assign it to your sheet index within the dialogue prompt if you need to. I found that it helps to go ahead and have your sheets get their corner text populated. Make sure you toggle the options for the profiles to be automatically labeled.
7. In the new sheet, reference the DGN that houses the saved view you just made. If you separate your sheet models from your drawing models like I do, they will be in a different DGN, the default option places them in the same file. With the option “Interactive” toggled, select the “Saved View” drop down to find the one you made. Drop down the default scale of “Full Size 1′:1′” to whatever scale you want to show it as. My plan view sheets show them at a 1″:50′ scale. Enable “Live Nesting” to 99 and set the “Synchronized View” to “Presentation Only”. Place the reference where you need it.
8. For the cross section view, reference the cross section sheets you have made already. Select the model space that has a section along the station range the retaining wall is in. Set the scale to be 1″:10′ and place it where you need it.
9. You will need to do clipping for both plan view and cross section view. The plan view will not need any level adjustments if you set up your saved view correctly but you will need to turn off levels for the cross section view like the grid and any unnecessary labels. The profile view should only require labels for the existing ground, finished grade of the adjacent element, and the begin/end flags for the walls. My DOT does not have begin/end flags in the Civil Labeler for retaining walls in profile view yet so I use special ditch flags instead and rename the top text.
10. Tweak any sheet text, add labels as you need, and you are done.

Is This Easier Than Microstation?

This requires much more technical know-how than Microstation. I do not think it requires technical know-how that comes from years of training or online courses but from a few hours of practice. Yes, it’s very different than Microstation. No, it doesn’t take much more time. If the project team has little experience with this then I would recommend to build in time to try a few of these a month before a major deadline. It’s not so niche that only one monkey can do it. This is leans more fundamental with understanding how OpenRoads Designer behaves. Knowing this new workflow will help proposal writers determine time needed to produce these deliverables, no doubt about it. But saying that requires people to want to learn new things doesn’t it?