Category: OpenRoads Designer
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5 Key Tips for Horizontal Alignments in OpenRoads Designer
Here are some key tips for OpenRoads Designer users when working with Horizontal Alignments. These are very useful for someone who comes from a Microstation background. Use Smart Lines and Complex Chains Disable Persistent Snaps Simplify Geometry Use Complex Redefine Set Design Speed Standards
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A Case for the 3D Linear Method in OpenRoads Corridor Modeling
Introduction The 3D Linear Method will help all engineers and designers model corridors. I argue that it is much simpler and isn’t as deep as using master templates. On-boarding others will be easier, making changes to the corridor will be a breeze, and no one will suffer any headaches in needing to document how each…
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A Timely New Year’s Resolution
Introduction This week is a regular week like any other week. There is work to be done, kids to be raised, and I still can’t get ahead of my outside chores. Like any other week, my family’s house is filled with great times of laughter, singing, and playing. This week is different, however, than the…
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A Thought on Saved Views
A Lower Shelf On Which The Cookie Jar Could Rest In my recent wanderings of developing a workflow for retaining wall geometric layout sheets, I stumbled upon these words in FHWA’s OpenRoads Designer manual, “Saved Views are convenient for the creation of Exhibits and One-Off Plan Sheets because the Design Scale and size of the…
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An Attempt to Build a Retaining Wall Sheet
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…
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How To Print And Not Lose Your Mind And Time
Introduction OpenRoads Designer is different in its print workflow compared to the prior software package. Using the old Microstation method will cause your machine to take an unprofitable amount of time to print your plan set. Have you ever printed a plan set once and never needed to reprint it because you forgot something? The…
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When Clipping Goes To Far
A Sticky Pair of Scissors Corridor clipping is weird and you should avoid it when possible. Welp, I can end our long conversation there but I’ll try to extend that idea a little. Corridor clipping does what it says it does. It takes a secondary corridor and clips it into a primary one. The visuals…
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Revisiting the Scope
Fog Ahead, Captain I’ve been thinking over how the typical proposal describes deliverables at each phase when the software used is PowerGeopak. The first phase will usually state that the horizontal and vertical alignments will be designed along with a geometric layout, preliminary drainage design (the meaning is usually vague), driveway profiles, typical sections, and…
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A Long Walk for a Short Driveway
A Workflow Concern I’ve only worked on one dense urban project in OpenRoads so far. I did, however, make an observation about the current way my DOT is requiring driveways to be designed. If Geopak’s driveway design was wishful guessing then OpenRoads’ driveway design is forensic science. I’ll attempt to explain that weird metaphor. Geopak…
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3D Linear Method for Modeling
The Man from Down Under I came across Alex Badaoui’s post a few months ago as I was working remotely in my favorite coffee shop. It has a small pond beside it where I often pace around while thinking through a problem. For several weeks I had been troubled about the conventional method of corridor…