The Art—and Science—of Transitions in Civil 3D

RUSS NICLOY: I found out yesterday that if I move my arms like this, you get all kinds of weird feedback. So I'm going to try and pretend this is not a Jimi Hendrix concert, and not feedback on you. That'd be cool, right?

Just a couple of things-- we've got a couple minutes here. Go ahead with your emails and texts and all that. Just wanted to kind of lighten my load for the ride home. Just want to get rid of some stuff here. Just want to ask some questions about where's everybody from?

Now, the next question is going to be on flight time. And this is not counting layovers because that's cheating. How many hours did you spend on the air getting to Las Vegas for AU? I'm going to start with four hours. Four hours? That was me. Four hours?

Five hours? I have to go up here, OK. Six hours? You were six? OK?

Anybody can beat six? OK, we got one. Seven? Oh. Well, and the other thing that-- about how many?

AUDIENCE: 12. 12.

RUSS NICLOY: 12? 12 hours?

AUDIENCE: I'm from Germany.

RUSS NICLOY: Oh, from Germany? OK, yep. Oh, then you definitely win. That was actually where I was going next, was who came from other continents, because that's amazing to me. Thank you very much for coming, too. I do appreciate that.

The other side of that coin is who drove here? Oh, [INAUDIBLE] Very excited hands in the back there. How far away? How long was the drive?

AUDIENCE: Five hours.

RUSS NICLOY: Five hours? Five? Eight? Oh, sorry.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RUSS NICLOY: The Road Warriors, you know? There you are. Since you tied, that's-- usually I ask something about the Green Bay Packers. But their season has been less than stellar.

Any Green Bay Packer fans? Oh, there's two. I'll catch you later. There you are. Just for the record, Aaron Rodgers has not told us to relax yet. So Green Bay Packer fans are not relaxing, just to bring that up.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RUSS NICLOY: Oh, right. Right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RUSS NICLOY: We'll let you sit in the front anyway. That's--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RUSS NICLOY: So we're getting up to be on time here. So I'm going to get started here. Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. This session is actually replacing another session. So I know that can be a little bit discombobulating for those who were, maybe, coming for the last session. So I do appreciate you coming.

The session that we're looking at here is the art and science of transitions. The idea is that it is an art and it is a science. There's a lot of math to it on the science edge of things. And it's a lot of art because you've got to be creative with the tools that you're using as you get into that. So I'm hopefully going to balance on both the art and the science edge of this.

My name is Russ Nicloy. And somebody pointed out that in the schedule it says George Nicloy. We are one and the same. My first name is George. My middle name is Russ. And I don't go by George. So you are in the right spot. If you see-- those names are interchangeable.

I am a civil solutions specialist with Maser Technologies out of Wisconsin. We are a CAD services firm providing services all over the civil and AutoCAD drafting area. I've done some mechanical drafting as well, but not Inventor. I've been in the industry for 23 years. 10 of that was in the actual production industry. I was in water, gas, site design, survey, GIS.

Basically, all the different parts of a project, I've kind of been involved in. After that I was 13 years with a reseller, which means I was still in all of those areas, but I was helping others do those things. I was taking workflow processes, support calls, training, being a subject matter expert on Civil 3D specifically, InfraWorks, Map 3D, all of the civil area products.

So currently, and at my last position as well, I've worked with the Wisconsin DOT for quite a number of years. I am currently a consultant member of the Methods Development Unit focused on training with the Wisconsin DOT-- so a lot of transportation work, besides the other things that I get to do. So that's why I am particularly interested in the art and science of transitions, because it's a tricky area and can be a tricky area. You can blunt force a lot of things. But there's other things that you should finesse.

A little bit about the agenda that we're going to look at today-- I'm going to try and go from the very basics all the way up to things that you may not have thought of or may not have seen before. Hopefully there are things in all of those steps of that ladder that will resonate with you and you'll be able to take back to your firms. First of all, I'm going to look at the parameters that affect targeting and targeting itself. Literally, I'm going to start with just what the parameters can do inside of an assembly, inside of a sub-assembly, and then what the targeting can do from there.

I'm going to, then, progress into the offset alignment and the offset profile. Offset alignments have been around for quite a while in Civil 3D. The offset profiles have been around for just a release or two. They're still fairly new. And a lot of people that, if you're using offset alignments, you may not have even heard or seen the offset profiles yet-- so, a very important tool for the targeting aspect of what we're going to look at.

Then we're going to go into using super elevation not for curves, and kind of taking it and turning it sideways a little bit. We're going to use it to control your design through the super elevation table. A little bit different than how AutoDesk intended that to be used, but it's still something that could solve an issue that you're facing. And again, that's where the creativity comes in. If you know it's there, then you can apply it.

And finally, I'm going to go into something that I think is just a genius process. Somebody from WisDOT actually dreamed this up. And it's just amazing. It's the parameter to slope function. There's quite a few steps to it. And I'm going to walk through it so that you can understand it out of the box. WisDOT actually built the tool so that they don't have to go through the out of the box process. There's a lot of clicks to it, but it's well worth the time knowing it's available and knowing that it's something that you can do. So we'll take a couple minutes and kind of dive deep into that so you know what's coming or what's available.

So with that, let's start with the first one there, the parameters that affect targeting issues. And when I first started laying out this presentation, all I thought was man, we're always solving for the right triangle. We're either giving it a distance at an elevation or distance at a slope or an elevation at a slope. We're always solving for those two sides of the right triangle. So that concept is going to permeate through what we discuss today.

So we're going to start with just the parameters, nothing else, nothing fancy about it. When you're creating sub-assemblies or attaching them to an assembly, you're doing either the slope, the elevation, or the distance, or some combination there of the two of those all the way through. Now, that's static. That's just a static number in there. If you say eight feet, it's going to be eight feet. And that's all you get.

The horizontal, vertical, and targeting is your first override to that, and allowing you to move things around. If you're targeting an alignment for width or a polyline or a survey feature line, survey figure line, or you're targeting profile, or maybe both, you can target these things to override all of these settings. So what happens if you've got a transition from a four-to-one to a six-to-one over 100 feet? I kind of doctored up a little storyline for us there. We're going 100 feet, and we need to go from four-to-one to six-to-one.

How can you take care of that? Well, the blunt force way-- the sledgehammer method-- is I'm going to put a gap in my corridor and have four-to-one here and six-to-one here and nothing in between. I highly suggest that you don't do that. You're missing a lot of detail between here and there. It's a possibility. And if I don't talk about it, then I'm not doing due diligence. You can do that. That's not suggested.

Now, the little dotted line there from the top of the four-to-one to the top of the six-to-one is reflecting the alignment and profile targets, profile targets in particular. The trick to profile targets here is that you are able to give it the exact elevation at all of those points along that distance. Now, you may not dream up that, OK, what's the five-to-one in between? What's that elevation? You might just draw a line between them, and it's going to go to that. Great way to do it, you're giving it elevation. So you're, again, solving for the height of the right triangle that we're talking about there, while you're also targeting for horizontal and then giving it distance, and so forth. So you've still got those at your disposal.

These are a little bit more on the basic side of things, and probably most of what you will need to do. A lot of the things that you're going to get into, you probably don't need much more than just that. However, let's move into the offset alignment and offset profile.

The offset profile-- I don't know if I realized how important that was going to be when it first came out. I liked the idea of it, like oh, why didn't they do that earlier? But then when I started using it, I was like, oh yeah, this is a great tool, because it does package both the offset alignment and the offset profile in the same package. Basically, you are getting a distance at a slope.

Now you're thinking, wait a minutes, profiles are elevations. Shouldn't we be solving for the elevation part of that right triangle? And actually, no. In this case, they are targeting for distance at a slope because the offset alignment-- they have to come together. So understand that they are a unit. You get the offset alignment, giving you the width. And then you will identify what the slope is over that distance. And that's going to come up with your final elevation there. So you don't need to know the elevation, and you don't need to care about the elevation to do the math on that. You're just going to get the slope of that, or provide the slope of it so that can be solved for you.

Let me just jump in here and show that in living color. I've got an alignment here. Now, I'm going to create an offset alignment from it. There's a couple different ways you can do that. I'm going to do my favorite way, just so you can see one way to do it. There are other ways where you can create an offset alignment and assign it back. I want this offset alignment to come from this alignment right here.

Basically, I'm identifying the parent. There's a parent-child relationship for the offset alignment. Wherever the parent goes, the offset child will go and be parallel-- not truly parallel, because you can do widening and and transitions. But for the most part, it will generally be always parallel to the parent. If you move the parent, the child will move with it and maintain the relationship. So that's why this phase is important here.

I'm going to select on the alignment, come up to the offset alignment option in the launchpad, and I'm going to come down here and say I don't want a number of offsets here on the left-hand side. I only want to offset to the right in this particular case. You can do right and left at the same time. That's not a problem-- different measurements, and all that. But I'm just going to do the zero for the offset to the left. And I'm going to do 15 feet to the right.

Down below, I'm going to pick a style that's different than my parent, just because I want it to look like a polyline, basically. I kind of want to fool anyone who looks at this that this is not an alignment. The alignment label set-- no labels. I don't want that cluttering up the drawing. I want all the labels to come from my parent.

What they've added here is this tab right here, this create offset profile. In fact, let me zoom in on that just so you can see it clearly. That's the create offset profile button. I'll select on that.

And now first of all, you want to make sure that this is checked on. Now, you can turn it off, obviously. That's an on-off button. But let's turn it on.

We'll make sure that we're using the parent profile. So the parent alignment is-- I think this is Crawford Road-- the Crawford Road's proposed profile is named layout one, in my case. So we want to make sure that that's selected.

Now, the one that always catches me is this superimpose onto profile view. And I think that's because Autodesk has trained me that whenever I see a gray dialog box or a gray dropdown, that that's something, ah, I don't need to worry about that. I'm just going to buzz on through that. And in this case, it's really important if you want to see it in a profile view.

You don't need to put this in a profile view at all. You don't have to see it ever. Just know it's out there and react to it. I'm a visual person. I'm a visual learner. I need to see it out there and be able to go up and kind of data check myself throughout the course of a project. So I need to turn this on. Just understand that that's there. If it's not something you need, then you can blow right past it.

I'm going to click the dropdown. I have a very simple file here. I only have one profile view to superimpose this into. But I am going to use that one. So I'm going to choose Crawford one.

The cross slope-- I'm going to zoom back in so we can see closer here. The cross slope default is negative 2%. They're assuming that you're working with roadways. And it's a good starting place. Just understand that if you're not doing that, then you will have to adjust this appropriately. I'm going to leave it as negative 2% for the time being.

The profile name, I'm not going to mess with. The profile style-- I'm going to make it look a little different than the existing ground. And there we are. And you can see as we get in here, here's the parent. But this line right here, that's that offset alignment. I'm going to hit escape to let go of that and pan up here to the profile view, where you can see the blue line is my parent profile, the parent alignments profile. And the red line here that's smooth and following it is the offset profile.

Let me clear up the view just a smidge. I'm going to take out that existing profile so it doesn't clutter the view there. So now you can see that it is consistent all the way through here, 15 feet at 2%. I'm not going to do the math because I'm terrible that kind of thing. I let computers do math for me.

Now, one of the things about the offset profile to alignment relationship is, if you widen that alignment at all, it's going to continue down the percentage slope that you ask for. So I'm at negative 2% at this point at 15 feet. Well, what happens if I go to 20 or 25 feet? Well, you just get further down. The reaction is live and in real time here.

So I'm going to go over to my offset alignment, and I'm going to widen it. Again, there's plenty of ways to widen this. I'm just going to use a real quick and dirty method to get this done, giving myself a little transition from the 15 foot to the-- 25 feet is what I picked. It's kind of the default.

I'm going to come down here and transition back. I'm just going to use the widening tool and then eyeball about 15 feet. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're just throwing this in there, and again, adding a little transition there, because that's realistic.

So now my alignment goes from 15 feet out to 25 feet, nice transitions, and so forth. So again-- transitioning the horizontal as we go through this area. But if I go up to the profile view, nice 15 foot offset here, and then you will get to a point where you'll see that transition. And now we're out to the 2% at 25, and back to-- I made that a long transition. There is a transition there, and back to the 15 foot, or close to that elevation. So again, live and in real time, it happened while we were doing it and as fast as you could possibly need it to.

What happens, however, if I needed this slope to not be negative 2% for a while? Maybe I'm going to recreate the super elevation in an area, or I'm just trying to get some drainage and force some drainage to the other side of the road for whatever reason, or whatever your design is-- not necessarily a road, I suppose. I need to change the slope of this offset profile. You don't do it from the offset profile directly. And this is what threw me.

You actually come back here to the offset alignment, select on the offset alignment. And then in the launchpad, there's the offset profile properties. When I go in there, this is all about the profile properties from that offset alignment. And it is very focused so you're not affecting other parts of your project. There is a tab here for offset parameters, and a data area, data entry area, very similar to what we would see with design speeds or other aspects of alignments. We just go in there and add in what we need.

I'm going to zoom in so you can see the default is starting at zero, or starting with your start point. I started with zero just so that we could talk about it that way. And it's going to be negative 2% all the way through our project. Well, I'm going to come in here, click the little plus sign. Where are we? Click the little plus sign up here.

Now, enter where I want these to start. Remember that you have to pin things down. So if I went negative 2% for 100 feet, I have to say, after 100 feet, give me 2%. Then I want to go to something different, and it'll start to transition for you. So I'm going to go to one-to-100, and I'm going to say 100 feet in, and negative 2. It gives you this, like, red rubber band line like it's asking for distance. It's actually trying to flag you to, hey, enter a slope for me.

And now I'm going to say-- so that was 100. I'm going to go to about 250, station 250. And I want that to be a positive 2%. So I'm just going to type 2, enter. So 250 to, let's say, 350, will be a positive 2. And then 350 to, let's say, 6-- I'm not putting the plus sign in. I'm just typing in 600. It can translate for us. But I want that to be negative 2.

I hit enter, let it know that I'm done, and there is our table. And so you can kind of check the numbers. All of that's editable, so you can go in and say, well, it's not 350. It's 353. You can do that live in this document here, change the slopes as well.

So oh boy, I just hit-- I just hit escape instead of OK. Shoot, sorry. Let me try and recreate that real quick. Negative 2, 250, positive 2, 350, positive 2, 600, negative 2, and click OK. That apply button could have really paid off here. I could've left it open and had that all set, ready to go.

But here, you can see they've got the negative 2% to get the elevation there. I get the transition up to my positive 2, and then back down to negative 2 outside of that. And again, live and in real time-- once I clicked apply or OK, it's going to force that information into the profile and give us that result. So that is a quick way to get to elevations in a profile, using the offset alignment, offset profile.

Let me switch back over here. So with that, let's move on to something completely different, if you're a Monty Python fan. We're going to look at super elevations here, and like I said, not in the traditional sense. Autodesk has built super elevation tables to super elevate roads. And really, that was kind of their thought process.

They didn't block anything off. The functionality does not stop there. But they are clearly biased towards doing just super elevation of roads. Super elevation tables can be very useful because they can provide you for transitions over very long periods and at very specific numbers. You can enter data in a lot of the options that I'm giving you here. But this is one that's almost all data.

The first time I ever saw this was back in the Land Desktop days. Civil 3D wasn't even a thing yet. A firm was doing-- they wanted to control the slopes of the road running down a roadway so that they could match with driveways. Now, they were controlling slopes to get the specific elevations. And I don't think that's the best way to use it. But they were using it that way. It kind of tripped up something in my head that, hey, we could use that for other things.

When you need to control the slope of a roadway, if you're not using super elevation already, then why not? Things like the road lane adjustments of steepening or flattening grades, paved shoulders, adjusting to intersections, ditches, behind beam guards, any kind of control that you might deem necessary, I'm not saying that this should be your first place to go. But it certainly is something that should be in your menu so that you could go and do this if you needed to.

The super elevation table itself consists of eight different tables of information, all of them named after specific super elevation critical parts, I should say. They're looking at left road outside, left road inside, left shoulder outside, right shoulder outside, and inside. So you've got eight columns of information to work with. So actually, you've got probably way more than you need there to work with. Just ignore the name of the column at the top and say, OK, this is the left outside lane. As long as I can get that lined up with the part that I need to control, you've got control. And you kind of made that connection for it.

There are two ways that you can set this up. One is use the super elevation wizard just like you would for your regular roadway. The other way is to do it manually. Both of them have, well, benefits. And both of them have huge hooks that could get you in trouble.

The wizard, for my money, is way too specific to the traditional super elevation. It's going to give you information on everything. It's going to give you the level crown and all the different critical stations. It's going to do that automatically. If you only need a couple of stations, that's too much information. And you're going to spend more time going back and zeroing things out or changing slopes than you will actually using the tool. I don't to dissuade you from using it, just understand that if you do, it's going to be very specific to traditional super elevation settings and distances and transitions.

The manual process-- I kind of gravitate towards the manual process because I can go and say, I need three stations. I don't need 18. I need three. And I only need one column of information. I've got full control. The bad side of that is that you do have to enter all that information manually, and you kind of have to track things down.

With that little bit, though, that's not nearly as bad as having to go through the whole table. Setting up a traditional super elevation manually, that's kind of painful. But doing it for the small little sections that we're looking at here? That's not so bad.

Now, the other trick to this is that-- oh, and I did want to mention, and I mentioned this with the offset profile, that another trick is that you do want to put down start and end points. It assumes zero unless you give it something else. So if I say, well, at station 250, I need it to be super elevating up to 3%, let's say, it's starting at zero and transitioning up to the point that I gave it.

So what you'll want to do is say, well, the roadway is negative 2. Or, let's say the shoulder. The shoulder is negative 2%, negative 4% through here. I have to start at-- my start station is negative 4, where it finishes regular at negative 4, and then starts the transition after that. So always remember, give yourself the beginning and end slopes, your default slopes, before you get started.

Superelevation-- using a superelevation table like this will only be effective on subassemblies that react to superelevations. Lanes, shoulders actually do twice. They do for the pave shoulder and for the subbase area. You can control that twice.

Generic links generally will. And there's a handful of them that do. There are a lot that don't. So the lot that don't will be carried by the next section that we're talking about-- the parameter to slope option.

My example is shoulder pavement. Yeah, then shoulder pavement easy-- but the daylight slope after that? Not controlled by super elevation, so if you need to control that, you need to wait for the next section to do that here.

By the way, also I will show this. And if I don't, call me on it and keep me honest. You do not need a curve to create a superelevation table. OK? That's true of traditional and nontraditional uses of it.

You can create on a perfectly straight line. We used to put just a little hook at the end so that we'd have a little bit of a curve that wasn't in our project, kind of off to the side. You don't need to do that anymore. You can assign a superelevation table to any alignment, no matter how straight-- I believe, yeah, complications.

One of the major complications here is the firm that I saw use superelevation tables was not a transportation firm. They were a site developer. They were developing subdivisions.

They didn't have superelevation. They didn't have to worry about that. If you are concerned with superelevation as a day-to-day thing, we're going to have an issue.

Now there's eight columns. Unless you're using all eight columns, you can still use the extra columns for whatever you want. The problem is I've never seen the superelevation on a road that didn't require a report. And the report's going to bring everything. So it'll bring your non-traditional as well as your traditional. So it's almost that we get cut off if you are doing superelevation traditionally, as well.

The answer to that has come up as, hey, just make an offset alignment very, very close to the original, or maybe far enough out, depending on what your thought of close is. I make an offset alignment a tenth of a foot away. Actually, I make it a hundredth of a foot away and make it really hard to see.

I know it's there. The complication is down at the bottom here. How do I communicate to other people on my team or others who will see my project that that's there? Because if I make it a hundredth of a foot away, nobody is going to see that unless they know it's there. They've got to zoom way in.

So the idea, though, is that you make this slightly offset alignment. You give that one a superelevation that's different than the traditional one on your mainline. And then the assembly has to be built a little bit special, where you have a generic link that will allow your shoulder or whatever part you're working on to be set way out where you need that to be and attach that. That generic link will target an alignment in profile and get you out there and get you connected. And then that part will be reading a different table than your main body of your work.

You also want the generic link turned off, that generic link that you're using turned off so it doesn't confuse people. Hey, what's this thing? What's this surface that's suddenly popped up in here?

So I have a file that's built with a superelevation already built for the lanes. The lanes and shoulders are already set up to respond to a superelevation table on the main line alignment there. That's right here.

The sub assemblies that I have-- let me take a look at this right here. Here's our lanes and our shoulders. They are reacting to the main line alignment. This whole assembly right here is for our main line alignment.

What I have down here is my shoulders-- I'm sorry, my ditches to the right and left of that, that I want to be able to control the slopes of those ditches differently than I normally would. So I have a generic link that-- actually, let me start here. This assembly will be writing very close to the parent on an alignment that's a hundredth of a foot away-- or not even a tenth of a foot, in this case-- of a generic link from that point out to here. That's turned off. But it has an anchor point here where I could put the other generic links for my ditch.

This point, or this link here that we can't see, is actually going to be targeted to the alignment and profile of this point here. As this lane starts to superelevate, the alignment and the profile keep me tied into that point so my ditches will start where I want them to start. So I'm going to zoom back here. I'm going to come down here. And first-- first things first-- I need to make the alignment profile that those are going to be attached to.

OK. So I'm going to select on the daylight sub point of the shoulder there, that outside point. Come up into the launch pad and say, alignment from corridor. It says OK, what's the name of that?

I'm naming this LT shoulder target. I practiced this in the hotel. So I have the name already set there-- LT shoulder target.

On the right side, change it to RT. It's very important. Those of you who came to my session yesterday know naming subassemblies can be very important. This is the exact reason. When we're targeting later, that name is going to come up.

So down below, we've got an alignment style, labels. I want to create the profile. That's the most important part here.

I'll click OK there and OK again. So now I have an alignment and profile is following that. I would repeat that for the south, or the right-hand side.

I'm going to zoom in to show you that I've got a parent alignment that's purple or magenta. And then offset alignments-- I think that's a tenth of a foot off. But this is the left-hand side one.

And it is a parent-child. It's an offset alignment. So if I move the main alignment, it's going to move with it. Nobody will even know that it's there. It really doesn't matter how far off it is because of the targeting that's going on out at the edge of the shoulder.

Actually, you know what? I have a superelevation table set up for that one. Let me set up the one for the one to the right. This is that straight line alignment that I talked about. If I select on that alignment, I'll go up to superelevation and calculate at its superelevation.

And I don't want to go to this calculate superelevation now. That's the wizard. And you can do that. But in my case, I want to create a superelevation on a perfectly straight alignment.

I'm going to come down here to open super, elevation curve manager. In the curve manager, up here at the top, is this-- well, in fact, I'm not even sure how long this was here. I missed it, I think, for several releases while it was up there and was still doing the little fishhook at the end. And someone said, hey, there's a little dot up there that you should probably look into. I'm, like, oh, yeah. That answers all my problems right there.

So that point there is create user defined curve. Basically, I'm going to lie to the alignment and say that there's a curve. So I'll left click on create user defined alignment. I have to identify the alignment.

It's going to ask for the incoming and outgoing tangent, which we only have incoming. That's fine. I'm just going to say grab this alignment. And then at the command line, then say select another entity, or enter to finish-- so enter. And now I have what it thinks is a curve.

I will follow that up by going to the tabular editor. And this is where you can start throwing in the different stations and different slopes where you want them. First of all, you have to highlight the user defined one or whatever you name it. Click the plus sign.

And then give it the stations. Remember, I need to start with zero. I need to start my default slope at zero. So I'm going to say zero for a station. I'm going to throw in a couple of stations here, 250-- so 0 and 250. I'll throw in another one at 450.

And now these are the stations that I'm working with. At 0, I want that left outside shoulder to be negative 4. Remember that left outside shoulder doesn't have to be left outside shoulder. I could be thinking ditch.

It's just hardwired to be left outside shoulder. So don't let that throw you. Just remember which one you use for which. Negative 4%-- I want it to be a negative 4% here because I'm tacking it down so that default ends at station 250. But by station 450, I want that to be a negative 6% and so forth.

You just keep clicking the plus side, giving yourself stations, and then going through there and adding that text in there. You can come back later and add more in when you realize, oh, wait, I needed to do this kind of little hop in this little area here. You need to change something throughout there.

You can do that after the fact, as well. So don't be afraid of that. Just come in and set this up the best you can, and edit it as you go.

We're not going to use that one. I'm just going to leave it in that state there. We're going to use the one to the left, which I already have set up.

So I'm going to come into the corridor, the corridor properties. And this is the parent alignment here and the parent region, just running all the way through our file. It is a superelevating road. It's the lanes and the shoulders.

I had already created a baseline from the left-hand offset alignment. It's using the horizontal baseline of CLF one foot-- it's actually a tenth of a foot-- and then the profile from that. I'm going to right click on that one and say add region.

I'm going to add the region of, in this case, left shoulder, LT shoulder. And again, remember, naming those assemblies came in really handy there so that I could find them very quickly here. I'll click OK. Click the dropdown so we can see the region.

And then I'm going to come over to the target and tell the link, width, and slope. And here I didn't name these link, width, and slope. Notice I've got three of them. Now I've got to pick between them.

The first one is that invisible one. The one I have visibly turned off the other two are my ditches. So I'm going to come up here to the offset target for the first one on the left side I need to target to the left shoulder target here. And then I also need to do the same for the first profile target there, because as that roadway superelevates, that shoulder point has got to move.

And I want this to move both x and y and z all at the same time. And so that is in place. I will click OK and rebuild the corridor. And now we have that shoulder. And then the ditches are now attached to that.

Let me go into the section editor so we can see that here's what that looks like. I'll zoom to an offset so that, as we move through here, we can see it better. Turn that down so the text is a little bit more readable.

Now as I advance through the stations here, you will notice that the road and the shoulders are going to do the superelevation. So that elevation is going to change. But watch the slope numbers on our ditches. We've got 6 to 1 and 6 to 1 at this current station.

I'm going to advance through this. And immediately, the first one is moving. That is following one of the columns that I have. I have two columns in the superelevation table.

And there the other one is starting to move. Notice that the roadway is starting to superelevate while it's doing that. So I'm able to do all three things at once-- the roads doing its superelevation while the ditch is doing whatever it needs to do in that area.

Just an example-- like I said, this is the art and science. You saw some of the science there. But the art is now you get to take that back to your projects and try and figure out if that's going to help in different difficult areas that you've been working in. So let me close that out.

And hop back over to this. Let's look at the parameter to slope tool. Now like I said, this was something that a user came up with. Basically, it's a translator. And the visual that I keep getting in my head is we're taking energy that's going North and South and turning it East to West.

We're taking beveled gears here, just like a big windmill they use to grind grain. They have information going this way translated to something going this way. So we're turning an angle here. We're going from elevation to slope.

Now I'm going to use the word elevation, and then I'm going to use the word slope. I hope to make a big deal about when I'm talking about one or the other. Because conceptually, that gets difficult for us, or at least for me, in my head. But that's what we're doing. We're translating elevation information from a profile into slope information for our assembly.

The benefits to this are that it's graphically representing what's going on there. We can graphically look at the elevation, change it, go to a profile view, and actually get our hands on that. It's not a data table. A data table that you have to imagine, OK, now I'm at station 250, and what am I doing there and all that. This is just going to be right there in front of you visibly.

What's going to happen is I'm going to take a small generic link. Actually, mine will be a long generic link. But generally, it doesn't have to be any size in particular.

It just has to be a generic link that will target a profile that you give it. We will look at that process in a second. It's going to go to a profile to give it elevation. That generic link will then, through the assembly, pass that number on to another subassembly that is looking at it and says, oh, that's my slope. OK? It's basically just a translator.

There is a gotcha to this. And that is that that generic link that I'm going to be doing must precede the subassembly that it's feeding the information into or else they don't talk. Assemblies are built in a very top down method. Subassembly 1 can talk to subassembly 2.

But subassembly 2 cannot talk back to subassembly 1. It cannot go back up the chain. It has to come down. So the generic link must come before anything that you need to come in.

Now you can put three, four, or five of these little generic links in there. They're invisible. You turn the link off, and nobody knows they're there. But they all have to come before what you're working with. It doesn't matter how far before they come in, but they just have to proceed.

Now the other trick that we're going to run into-- and I don't know if this is a gotcha, but it's something that I still get a little bit uptight when I see-- and that's the red slash. Any time that you give a subassembly part a number that it can't work with, like a zero, it doesn't like that. It gets all freaked out and says, well, graphically, let's warn them that this could be a problem.

And it turns into a red circle with a slash. And I'll show you that so you'll know exactly what I'm talking about if you haven't seen it. But it's a red slash in the layout mode.

It will work just fine in your file, so that shouldn't be a problem. Don't worry about that. It's just a graphic.

The other part of this is to translate from the profile that little generic link's profile number, that elevation. We're going to use the output tool inside the assembly. I'm not sure if it's something that you've seen before.

It's something that I went a long time in Civil 3D and never knew it was there. I guess I knew it was there, but didn't know how to use it. This tool makes it really easy to translate that information back and forth.

Now I've already talked through a lot of steps. Why in the world would we do this if there's a lot of steps? In fact, I mentioned that Wisconsin DOT was the ones that developed this. They did it manually for a while, but then they developed some tools so they don't have to do it manually.