Roads from Centrelines
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I've brought this up a while back but with no solution but I thought I'd give it another go with the explosion in people involved in Ruby creation. I'm involved in a lot of masterplanning projects and when starting them I rough out routes which then develop into blocks and then insert houses, kerbs, front boundaries etc. I'm always looking at ways to reduce the time spent on this quite lengthy process and automate it as much as possible. One way would be to be able to draw out the routes with lines/arcs then select the lines and convert them automatically to roads/pavements and boundaries complete with kerb radii. I'm sure it's not easy but I've found a plug-in for Vectorworks that does a similar thing: http://www.softwarecustomizationservices.com/default.php?page=products&subPage=products/land%20planning/Default (scroll to ROWS object at the end) and also in Chief Architect: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/displayfaq.php?faqNumber=784
Anybody up for a challenge?
Kenny
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Have you looked into profilebuilder yet? I have not, but I have seen some vidoes that are impressive. Looks like it might help quite a bit,
Chris
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Hi Kenny
Using centerline layout here are some ways to make it work.
For level roadways Profile Builder will work but if roadway rises and has curved sections the profile will twist.
The free ruby Follow and Keep [fak] will extrude a face flat with no twist.
Intersections with radius corners, curb cuts, handicap access are best built separate and hooked up with the roadway.
You can create a roadbed (depression) using the pre-build roadway with the SU Sandbox)
Sort of a drill but will do the job with a little work-around in the mix.Hope this will help jump start your road building project.
dtr
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If it's 3D, don't forget FollowMe And Keep.
If it's 2D, why not give DoubleCAD Xt a try? -
Thanks for all the suggestions. I've got these plug ins as well as Doublecad and whilst very useful it's not an automated process like the examples I linked to. I'm only looking for 2d functionality where basically I sketch out the centrelines of the roads, highlight the lines, key in parameters e.g. road/pavement width, front boundary set-back, corner radii then hit enter and it's done. I'm trying to find out if it's possible to do this as a Ruby or are the parameters too complex to be automated in the way I've described?
Kenny
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I don't think its too complex to be done. Especially if you just want it in 2d. I don't think anything like that exists already though.
Chris
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