Cadd Nuggets with Conditional Dipping Sauce

JEFF FRYE: My name is Jeff Frye, and I'm with HDR. And this is Spenser Hayes, also with HDR. The title of our class is Cadd Nuggets with Conditional Dipping Sauce. With that title, I'm really surprised all you guys signed up for it.

There's no fast food-- OK, there's nothing. But for Spenser and I, nuggets meant something. They were things that we would get out of a class. They were things that we'd get out of talking to each other about, and so we thought we'd put this class together. So hopefully you guys get something out of it at the end of the day.

So that's me-- 27 years professional CAD person. I like to call myself that. LDD, Civil 3D, AutoCAD. I'm a production guy, so I'm in the trenches; I'm making models; I'm putting plans together; I'm doing annotation on sheets; I'm getting quantities; I'm doing all of that stuff. And so anything that I can find to make my job faster and easier, I want to share with other people.

Quick story, that last bullet there. You guys can all picture a carpenter, right. He goes to work and he puts a bunch of tools in his tool box-- a hammer, and a screwdriver, and wrenches. Civil 3D-- our bosses bought Civil 3D for us, right. It's hundreds or thousands of tools that we know how to use. Maybe we don't know how to use all of them correctly. Spenser and I found some of those tools, and hopefully those are things that we're going to talk about today.

So I'll turn it over now to Spenser and let him introduce himself.

SPENSER HAYS: Sure. Spenser Hayes with HDR as well. I'm from Billings, Montana. I used to work with Jeff in Bellevue, Washington. I transferred to Billings, Montana about a year and a half ago, and became avid fly fisherman. I love like fishing out there.

I've been using AutoCAD since 2003. I also love using Autodesk Inventor and InfraWorks. InfraWorks and Civil 3D are my full-time job, and then Inventor is just kind of a hobby. I use Inventor if I'm out doing hobby work. I once made a big barbecue smoker that I modeled first in Inventor. It was a lot of fun.

And along with Jeff, we're HDR trainers, so we're on what we call the Sim Civil 3D SWAT team. We go around the US for HDR ops just training other people in a lot of that we're going to shoot today.

And then also, kind of my passion in Civil 3D is just finding something that improves our workflow, just something to do with process improvement. So that's me.

JEFF FRYE: Thanks, Spenser.

So, again, what is a nugget? We needed to define it some way internal for us to be able to start putting things on paper. So this is our definition-- an unexpected tip, or trick, or time-saving command, or other click-reducing workflow. That's our definition of this. So the things that you're going to get out of this are hopefully ways of leveraging your model, leveraging your data a little bit better.

And I really like this; I stole it off the internet. Every click costs money. That's true, right? The farther into a dialog box you have to go, the less time you have to finish your project.

So, quick agenda, we're going to talk about workflow items, starting at alignments, profiles, assemblies, and sub-assemblies. We'll do some data extraction examples. There's no live demos. It will all be videos that we're going to talk to. You don't get to hear our voice on the screen, but we're going to be live talking.

And then we have a project case study. It'll be a light rail project that Spenser is going to talk about down in the Seattle area.

And then, new this year, is office hours, 5:30 to 6:30; we'll be back in this room, and there'll be light refreshments. We'll be here along with every other speaker that was in the room during the day. So you guys can come back and pick our brains a little bit more.

So talking about some basic modeling things. You're going to need an alignment, right. We're going to have those. This is just kind of some background information to get us going. You have profiles in your drawing; you have assemblies; you have existing ground, probably 2D line work, and then lastly we'll end up with some conditional sub-assembly talk. Don't let that scare anybody who hasn't-- anybody haven't used conditional sub-assemblies? OK, good.

So your drawing probably looks a little bit more organized than that. This was just crammed together for that picture. But that's everything that we're going to talk about today. Who's drawing actually looks like this, anybody?

So the first little thing we're going to talk about, I'm going to go ahead and add alignment name and a description to an alignment entity with a general note. And we'll talk about why I use general note in a minute. We'll start with this little video where we we're just going to create a new style and a new label. And we're going to name it alignment name and description.

I did videos because I thought it would be a little bit smoother than trying to sit up there and do it live.

We'll go here to the Layout tab. We're going to delete the text, and add a reference text. And we'll select alignment for that reference object. And you'll see all the other things available in a minute. We'll grab the alignment name. We'll add that with the right arrow. We'll put the description underneath it, and then we'll say OK to that. We'll adjust the text height, make it a little bit larger than the normal. And then we'll change the name of the general label there.

Naming is important in labels and styles all the way through. We'll go ahead and say, OK. We'll add it to the alignment by selecting where we want it on the alignment. We'll select the alignment, and it's in the drawing. That text is dynamic to that alignment now. It's not touching; it's not attached to it physically, but the name will stay. So if the alignment name changes, that text will change.

Other things you can add to those general note labels, you can add alignments, COGO points, parcel, profile, surface, or survey features. I put it in general notes, not an alignment label, because I like to label all those things in my drawing at the same time, and I don't have to switch back and forth to multiple tabs.

So the next thing is profiles. What we're going to do in this example, if you remember from my original drawing, we have a side street, and we have an intersecting street to the main one. We're going to superimpose the intersecting profile onto the main line profile. So we'll start off-- again, everybody's drawing looks like this, right? We have to start by taking-- the profile on the left has to be changed to a style that shows the markers at the ends. So we're going to do that. I've already created the style, but I'm going to go in and show you here what to look for. So I have finish with end markers, and we'll look at that style, and you'll see the begin profile and the end profile have the basic circle with a cross.

So say OK to that, and you'll see at that end over there-- and there's a marker at both ends, so that circle with the cross. You have to set the source profile to that style first. Then when you come over to the destination profile, we'll go ahead and hit superimpose profile. We'll select the source profile, which is going to be the intersecting street on the left, and then the destination view, we'll click it over here on the right.

We're going to select a start station and an end station. If we don't select a start station and end station, it'll stack up. I'll show a picture of that. We're going to start at station 10; that's the intersection. And then 10 plus-- a pair, 0.1. So it's just going to get a little sliver. And we'll see that populated over here in just a second in the profiles.

So that's the marker. Best I can tell, we can't label those markers, but you can list them, and they have value. So there's an elevation, and there's a station, and that marker's dynamic now.

You can change your original profile back to your original style when you're done, and the marker stays. So see, the marker is gone there, but it stayed in the destination. You notice when you highlight over it, it showed the alignment name, it showed the profile name, and it showed the elevation that it was at. And you'll notice when we change that profile, then the marker moves.

So there's value to that. I know a lot of people use the intersection tool, and you can lock things together as well. I'm not a big fan of the intersection tool to stay in my drawing. I use it to start drawing, and then I usually delete the intersection marker, and like to have more control.

So remember when I said we needed to select a small sliver. If you don't select a small sliver then you get two elevations here. So this profile, that's where it really is, but this 204 is where it was in the back. So it actually just took both elevations, the beginning and the end, and put them both on your profile. So that's another option. If you wanted to, you could still do that.

Again, in a file, we probably have assemblies, right. Anybody's assembly area look like this, with no names, no idea of what assembly is what? The only way to get there is to what, highlight or hover over, and list.

So I'm going to go ahead and create-- the next video I'll show, we'll create a text label that goes above each one of the markers. We're just going to start by a normal piece of text. It can be any height, style, font-- doesn't matter. And then we're going to go into it to edit it. We'll Right-click, and insert a field. From the objects, we're going to go ahead and select Objects from that first column. And then we'll click the middle-- the object type.

We're going to go ahead and select the marker, and then we want the name. You can see all the other values that you can get out of that marker. So now that piece of text is dynamic to the assembly. If you move the two together, they'll stay. If you copy the two-- so if I took that, and I copied it to the right, it would be mainline 1, and it would update that text as well. So once that link is made between those two objects, they stay.

Anybody using fields like this? Pretty popular, isn't it? It's something that-- anybody using it for other objects? Like, throw some names out there. What are you using it for?

AUDIENCE: Areas.

JEFF FRYE: Areas, yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEFF FRYE: OK.

OK.

So another thing in assemblies is this column over here, this parameter reference area. This is something that has a lot of power. It's not like an override in that corridor, but it does-- who's using it, first of all? Who's using these things on this side? Yeah. So you guys can probably understand, it's not like an override, but it allows you to control other sub-assemblies from the interior.

So in this example, when I get to the video. This will be called lane 1, this will be lane two, on the outside on the right. We'll be able to control the properties of lane 2 from lane 1 using this column here, the parameter reference column views, and we're going to get the value from the other object.

So we'll start out. This video is kind of slow. It gives me a chance to talk. We're going to go ahead and create just a regular generic assembly, and we're going to add those two trapezoidal shapes. I added those just because they have more pizzazz in a big room like this, but this functionality works with almost all of the sub-assemblies.

So we're just going to set up this first one, lane 1, we'll set some of the parameters in just a second. We're going to name this one lane 2. Naming is important, so I like to get all my names done first, and then go back and populate all the values. So look at lane 1. Current width is 8. We'll adjust that, and we'll adjust the slope, again, just to show that it can be done. And then these sub-assembly features have an inside depth and an outside depth, and so I just set both of those to 3. And then we'll look at the lane 2.

So right now, I went into the assembly properties in the construction tab. And you can see lane 1, and those are the values that we set. And then there's lane 2; those are the default values that we had. So we're going to start clicking in this parameter reference use column, and we're going to use a value from, and we should be able to see lane 1 width, and hit Apply. And now it changed that over here on this side. Then we're going to go ahead and use the slope of lane 1 as well. Then we'll hit Apply to that. And then we'll use the outside depth of lane 1 for the inside depth of lane 2.

So again, those are on the same side, and I think that is a restriction is they have to be connected on one side; they can't be opposite sides from each other. But now, when we just go to regular sub-assembly properties, we get to come in here and adjust lane 1. We can adjust its slope, its width, and you can see that it controls the outside lane as well.

This example is a linear example. I'm currently working on a project where I have multiple strata with different widths. So I use a generic pavement structure, and just put multiple pavement structures in a column, and I'm able to control all of that substrata with these commands using the top one.

So, existing ground. We all get-- I don't have surveyors in-house in my office, but we get survey in, and surveyors are notorious for progressive file naming. They give me a different file name every time, or a different surface name. And so what does that mess up? Our Java shortcuts, right, so then everybody's broken. We've got to fix all the references. So workflow that Spenser and I put together will create a container surface in the drawing. We'll then paste the survey surface into it, and then we'll make that surface available.

So this is what we're going to do. Container surface, we'll paste it in, but this is what it feels like.

[LAUGHTER]

It feels like magic, right. Every time we do this, just nobody knows we got an updated survey, and it's all seamless, right.

SPENSER HAYS: Jeff, I have a question. How did that turn out for Indiana in the end?

JEFF FRYE: It didn't turn out well for him, but this turned out really well.

SPENSER HAYS: OK. All right.

JEFF FRYE: So that's our survey surface. We'll just remember it as EG surface. My surveyors happened to name it pretty good, but I still want to make this container surface. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to make a folder that we can do now. I'm going to make a folder, and call it survey. And I don't let people reference things out of the survey folder; I only let them reference things out of the design folder that we'll make in a minute. I just move that surface. I didn't edit my video, but it took a long time here. So I'm going to move that into survey, I'm going to create a new folder, called design, and that's where I'm going to ultimately make my design surface into-- or my reference of the existing ground.

So I'll just start a brand new drawing. We'll call it existing ground composite. So we just make that drawing, and that's the one that we'll be doing the shortcut out of. So at this point, now I'll just make a reference of that original, remember the 1508; that's my survey surface. We'll create a reference to that. And there it is in the drawing. And so I'm just highlighting it to show that we've got that right name.

Then we'll create the dummy surface, or this container surface, called existing ground. And then we'll ultimately paste that survey surface into that surface. So there's no data there right now, right. This is just a blank dummy surface. We'll edit. We'll paste the surface together. You select the paste surface that you want second, right. Now I have two surfaces in my drawing, even though they're the same definition, and ultimately I'll turn off the display of the original survey surface, and I'll make a data shortcut of that new surface that we made.

Any other ProjectWise users out there? So this saves me a ton of time in ProjectWise, just the way the Civil DS proj file works.

And then, here, we'll go to existing ground, we'll move that up into the design folder, and then from right there, I would make my data shortcuts of that, and make that available to the team.

So 2D line work-- a lot of times, 2D line work is that afterthought. It's that thing that we have to have; it's part of our plans, but we have some workflows where we target xref layers for our width and offsets.

This example here, I'm going to go through basically how to do some quick data extraction using your 2D line work, and we'll use fields in just a minute to do some other things. So this example, I'm going to have dirt, grass, and water. If that's difficult to see, it's dirt, grass, water. I'm going to do a data extraction. The goal here is I'm going to get some areas for those objects.

So we do a data extraction. We'll save that DXE file. That's a selection set that we're going to make, and it just stores that information out there. We're going to pick the objects from the drawing. And I'll just select all three of those objects, hit Enter. We go Next, and you'll see they're all polylines, so I didn't grab any text, or xrefs, or blocks, or anything. I'll hit Next.

You can see all of the category filters and all of the properties that are available about those objects. We're going to narrow it down to just the area and the layer. So again, layer naming becomes important here, because you'll see the layers are water, dirt, and grass. And those are going to show up in the table. I didn't have to manipulate the table at all. So we'll narrow the search down to just the area and layer. I don't need the count in my table, and I don't need the name in my table. And then just to show that you can move things back and forth and sort.

Then we're going to hit Next, and then we're going to insert it into the drawing as a table. Tables come in small in my drawing. You can format these tables any way you want to, just like you can any other AutoCAD table. I'm going to go ahead and name it for this example. It comes in kind of small for me, so I'm going to scale it up real quick, just so you can see what it does.

Now that table's dynamic to those polyline objects, right. That table can be exported to Excel if you wanted to. I'm just showing here, where we can move some of the lines. We can make the shapes different sizes, change the geometry, and then we'll update the table. So, a couple of uses for that would be running bill of materials. That could be just a quick where are we in the project? How much area is the pond? How much area do we have for this type of thing-- the grass, or dirt, or whatever.

AUDIENCE: Do you have to Right-click, or can you re-gen [INAUDIBLE]

JEFF FRYE: I actually thought you could just re-gen and update it, and I tried before I did this, and it didn't work, so I had to update the table.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEFF FRYE: So again, when it's in AutoCAD, or in Civil 3D, it's fully dynamic. If you export it out to Excel, you lose that dynamic functionality.

So this one killed me. Construction notes per sheet. So we have construction notes that typically run down the right hand side of our sheet, and some of our clients, if note number five isn't on the sheet or note number 12 isn't on the sheet, they don't want to see it, right. They want to see one, three, and five. That's it. So how do we do that now? OLE linking with multiple Excel file links, right. Any other way to do that? Xrefs.

AUDIENCE: Blocks.

JEFF FRYE: Blocks.

So what we're going to do here with this data extraction example, we will-- I'll just start it, and we'll start talking here.

So here I've just labeled up those three things, the dirt, water, grass. I've created a construction note Excel file that has a number column and a construction note column. And that's in Excel. Could be in the network, can be on your C drive, wherever that wants to reside. And just make sure you save it so it's up to date.

And then, again, those construction notes, right now they're not linked. I did a 1, 5 and a 3. We'll start the data extraction command again. And again, this DXE file is just going to be for the multileader blocks that we're going to select. We'll go ahead and grab the objects from the drawing. I can grab all, or just to make this simple, I only grab the multileaders. And you'll see when we hit Next that that's all that shows up in that list is the multileaders.

These multileaders actually have three attributes to them. We'll narrow the right column down to just attributes. You'll see tag left and tag right. I'm going to turn those off for now, but we'll use them in a minute. All we're concerned about is the number column and the properties. So we hit Next, and again, we don't need the counts, and we don't need the name, and you can sort this by just clicking on the header of the column. So I have a 1, a 3, and a 5.

We're going to link to external data. We'll go ahead and set up an OLE link like you would to bring in any other Excel file. So in this case, we're just going to go ahead and name this construction notes. And we'll link to that data extraction XLS file that we need.

So we'll browse out. There is our data extraction file. I'm just bringing that up to show you that it matches; the name matches; everything is good there. And we'll say OK to this. Just make sure you link the entire sheet. You can put it to ranges if you wanted, or multiple tabs if you wanted. And we'll say OK here, and then we'll say OK to this box as well, since we've made the link.

The next step is testing the data, making sure that there's a unique column in the drawing that matches a unique column in the Excel file. So we do that, the drawing column, and then the external reference column. So the drawing column is going to be the hashtag. That's going to match the default attribute-- the tag for the attribute-- and then that matches the number column in the Excel file.

So once that looks like the hashtag matches the number, we'll hit check match. And that dialog box, we're really happy when we get that one, because then we know the pairing was successful. It meant that numbers match numbers, and text matched text.

And we'll hit Next. We'll bring this into the drawing also as a table. And I'm going to title this construction notes. You can have any title you want to. Again the tables are-- that's a standard table, but you can format those tables. I don't remember why I went and highlighted that.

And we'll just scale that up, and you'll see we have a 1, a 3, and a 5, but I made a mistake. That number 5 really should be a different number, right, since that's dirt. And we're not we're not protecting a concrete pad. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to edit the attributes to a number 2, and install the dirt access road instead. So this is the drafter or whoever changes that note to a 2, and then again, you click on the table, Right-click, update the contents, and it changes and sorts them into the right order.

So, a lot of value here. That DXE file that we created is linked to this multileader, this multileader, and this multi-leader at the bottom. If those three change, the table changes. If we add a new one, a number 7, we have to rerun the DXE file to get the table to update, but that table will update then.

So construction notes can use fields. We're going to talk about those tag left and tag right. So that 1537 number, that's a field. Just going to quickly show other objects or other information that you can bring in from a field. This video is really quick. We're going to add the area-- the square foot area of the water body, if I go into what I've already set up, a tag right. Those are just three attributes in that multileader block. You can Right-click, and insert a field. We'll go ahead and grab an object. That object that we're going to grab will be the water body. We want the area, and we look at how it's formatted. We'll go two decimal places, and then we'll add square feet at the end.

And again, if those that aren't using fields, that gray box doesn't print, plot, or otherwise interfere; it's something in the drawing to indicate that there is a field there. And that field is dynamic, so it updates automatically. It works with the re-gen.

I use fields all the time for things like this that I don't want to have to go list it, or get a distance between two points and then transpose numbers. I'm horrible about that, right. And so I use this a lot to save time. This works really well with demolition plans, where you would put maybe some demolition lines over your base map, that things you're going to remove, and you can put them on a note plot layer. But you can label them up in your plans. So remove so many linear feet of curb, and you have that line that you're getting the information from.

So it looks like that. Again, fields can be used for a whole lot of other purposes as well. So I'm about to hand it over to Spenser, and he's going to continue to talk about what that mess is on the screen.

SPENSER HAYS: I like your animations there.

JEFF FRYE: It was a good transition.

SPENSER HAYS: Yeah. That's a good transition.

OK, so when Jeff and I were putting our nuggets together, we had conditional sub-assemblies on there, and we had just kind of small nuggets within the conditional sub-assemblies. And then we got comments back that a lot of people don't really know conditional sub-assemblies. So what we decided to do is just go from 0 to 100 with conditional sub-assemblies. So I'm going to talk through everything how to create them, and then go through a case study where we use them for an advanced case.

So first, I don't know how long it was, Jeff, when we were modeling, and we always passed by this little tab and saw these guys up here, right. I don't know if anyone else has done that, but it was a while before we actually took a class at AU that was called One Assembly to Rule Them All. It was a class a few years ago. And they used one assembly that used conditionals like crazy, and made that spider-looking thing for the one project, and they just blew it through their whole model. And so Jeff and I took that on as kind of a challenge. So that's kind of where our little journey came from.

So, conditionals. So I want to talk about how they operate. They're very similar to an if-then statement in Excel. If a condition is met, then perform this action; if it's not meant, then perform this different action, right. We've all probably used if-them statements in Excel, or are at least familiar with them.

So these are the two that you would see in that tab, right. There's the conditional cut fill on the left, conditional horizontal target on the right. All right, I've got to get a joke to get louder than those guys that just laughed.

[LAUGHTER]

I know. Don't you think? All right, awesome. Like, jeez, they're not even working in there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SPENSER HAYS: Yeah. There you go. Now you guys know the prompt, right. You have a job, too.

So the difference between these two, right. The one on the left, the cut fill, is vertical only; the one on the right is horizontal only, right. So the difference is there's the cut, and then there's the fill. And what those look for is the vertical distance at this hinge point. If that hinge point isn't cut, we're going to build a retaining wall. If it's in fill, we're going to do some sort of slope.

Then over here, the horizontal, it's finding a target from a horizontal distance from this hinge point out at whatever distance we specify. If it doesn't find that target within that distance, we're going to build a curve and a little sidewalk. If it does find that target, we're going to build a depressed curb, and then thicken the driveway.

So in that case that I just showed, there were just two. Maybe you've seen examples of spiders, right, or like Jeff and I call it, a big Indian goddess with a lot of arms. So there are ways of organizing those conditionals so that they don't run into each other, and you can kind of organize it, right.

And there's four properties that we can use to organize them. The first one is the layout width over here. That simply is just the horizontal distance from the hinge point out to this end, right. And then the other type-- there's two types for each one of the conditionals. There's the not found and the target found for the horizontals, and there's the cut and fill for the verticals. And whenever you change those in the type, they'll flip across the horizontal line.

So the target not found is always above horizontal; the target found is always below horizontal. The fill below horizontal, and the cut is always above horizontal. Again, when you change them, they'll flip.

Two other properties that you can change is the layout grade-- so, since they're always on one side or the horizontal or other, that layout grade is always positive, and that just changes the angle at which it comes off that hinge point. Then, the last one is probably the most important, is your max distance, right. So that's the distance that you set for it to find its target from that hinge point, right.

So for the cut and fill, it's looking for that distance-- its target is always a surface, so it's looking for a surface within the distance that you specify. For the horizontals, it's looking for an alignment, or a polyline, or a feature line within that horizontal distance.

So let's go through the first example. We'll use the cut and fills. In this case, I have some sort of ditch that I've just made with some links for an example right here. I've got a ditch bottom, side slopes, and then a bench. And what we want to use on the conditionals is we add the conditionals at those hinge points, circled in red, and then in the cut condition off to the side, we're going to have another sort of slope, and then another bench if we're in cut, and then we'll daylight. If we're in fill at that hinge point, we'll just daylight.

In this video, I'll just show you how to create those. We're going to go to that tab that we always pass by, click conditional cut fill, and we'll click that hinge point. We're still in the commands, so we can go to Properties, change it to fill, and we'll click that same hinge point again, and create that fill.

In this case, I'm going to copy that bench up to my cut to create that example. I'll change the slope of that slope right there to 50%. And then what I'll do now is we'll go and get daylight general off of the daylight tab, and then we're going to add both of those daylight generals to those hinge points up at the top, and then down at the bottom, at the fill.

And then the easiest part, I can select all of them, mirror-- you've probably all done this-- mirror to the other side.

Jeff, you like my nugget? I used the name there. [INAUDIBLE] Nice.

All right. This one is more advanced. But if we follow that same procedure, we can add on some retaining walls here. And again that organizational, those properties that I talked about, those come in handy here, because it'll get really cluttered real quick.

And then also, in this case that I'm going to show you in the next video, I've updated that max distance for these. Sort for the retaining walls, what I'm saying off that hinge point, if we're in a fill or a cut condition that's greater than eight feet, we'll build a wall. If we're less than eight feet, we'll just daylight using those conditions that we just created in that video. Does that make sense?

So in this video, we'll show how you use them. We have our conditional that we just showed you down in the bottom right. Alignment top left, profile top right, and then I have a 3D view for you guys to see in the bottom left.

We're going to create a corridor, get our window to pop up here. We'll just call it ditch center line. We have a style. I have the alignment set already. I have my profile ditch center line set. And then for the assembly, we'll just go and pick ditch. And we know it's ditch because of the name, right. We'll hit OK.

You can set your target surface right there if you want. I'm going to go and show you the target dialog box. Your target dialog box gets massive once you start creating conditional sub-assemblies, right so naming is very important. In this case, I didn't care what my naming was. So you're going to have a lot of different targets. And I don't care about the naming because I'm just going to go up here and hit click, Set All, because all I want is I just want my conditionals just to target that existing surface. That's the only target that I'm going to use.

So in this case, I have a LiDAR surface. We'll hit OK, we'll rebuild the corridor, and then what it's going to do-- I didn't put any regions in there, right. It's just going to find those different conditionals. So I have my wall there, right, that was greater than eight feet, and then I have-- we're still in fills. It created the fill, and as we transition, we come into a cut condition. So I've created my cut conditionals there.

If I go into my profile, I can go along and I can track-- you can see that we're in fill here. It's showing fill right there. We can see the wall. If I want to reduce my wall heights, I can just dynamically change the profile or the grade of the ditch there, and we can try and reduce our walls in some way.

Now, I'll move on to the horizontals. So in this case-- this example --I have a lane here. And then if we don't find a target, we're just going to build a curb and gutter with a boulevard in the sidewalk. And then in this case, the targets that we do want to find are driveways. So we're going to build a depressed curb, and then a thickened concrete there for the driveway.

So up in the top left, I've drawn in a polyline right there. We're going to use that as our target eventually. We'll create a corridor. We'll choose our alignment. In this case, our line is Midland Road. The profile is set. We'll pick our assembly. We'll hit OK.

[APPLAUSE]

Now we can go into--

[APPLAUSE GROWS]

That's amazing. Wow. That's awesome.

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah. Oh, man. Wow.

[LAUGHTER]

If I could give you guys reviews, you'll all get 10's.

OK, so I had to pause it, I guess. Let's see if I can go back here.

So, I guess, background. In this project, I have 36 driveways. And so I wanted to model all of these real quick. And so what I did is I just drew polylines at the back of all of these driveways, and I was able to set those polylines as my targets, and just blow through the project. And it automatically did the driveways.

So I didn't set any targets in this case, right. And if you don't set any targets, it will build your not found conditions. So it just built my sidewalk, right. We'll come back in here; we'll select our polyline target for that target found condition, hit OK, and then we'll also select the target not found condition. If you don't select the target not found condition as well, it will build both.

So I did set a width here. We'll go back into the driveway. We'll select that same polyline for our width.

And the default links to how they're set up, the sidewalk has a kink here, right. If we go back in, and maybe you all have done this, we can go in and adjust our frequency. We can take the end points off the ends of those driveways-- take in manual points. And then when those come back up in the dialog box, we'll just add a tenth off of each side. In this case, I tried adding 0.01 off of each side, but it wasn't working for some reason. I found that a tenth works. And now the side-- we'll come back in, and it matches up with where we want it.

This is obviously more of a I guess kind of advanced phase of the design. So when you start adding in all those frequencies, right, that's not preliminary; that's going to be final stages.

And then in this case, what I've done is I actually added another target found here. So my target not found condition is a curb with a swale and sidewalk. And then if I don't want a swale, and I want a driveway, I created a target found without that swale, and another target found for that driveway. So that's another instance that you could use that.

OK, next I want to talk about the case study for this project called the Federal Way Link Extension. Jeff and I-- you know, after Jeff and I took that class, One Assembly to Rule Them All, we took that on as a challenge. We wanted to have a project where we just had one assembly with all these conditionals as a big spider. And so this was the great example of where we were able to use that.

So this project was six miles long. It's a light rail project. It ends up looking like this eventually. And the pillars cross all of these roads down here, and so we had to have a bunch of different design standards for all these access roads and maintenance roads. There were some access roads that would actually end up coming down from existing ground, and then being able to have maintenance trucks access the superstructure. So with it being six miles long, it actually crossed four different local agencies. So they all had different design standards for what they wanted for their roads, or the access roads.

And it ended up being there were 98 access and maintenance roads that Jeff and I had to model. So we split up our corridor models into three different corridor models. And we wanted to be able to have one assembly, and not have to manage many different assemblies that end up getting created in many different models, or the three different models. in this case.

So what we came up with [GASP] is that guy. So, yeah. That's actually small compared to some that we've seen, really.

JEFF FRYE: It is. Yes. Yeah.

SPENSER HAYS: Some of you are like, yeah, that's small.

OK, so we had different design standards for different roads. We had a concrete, we had a hot mix asphalt road, and then we had a gravel road. And all of those had different standards, right. So we created as many different standards as we could. And in this case, what we did is we created only target found conditions, and all those target found conditions came off of just the main assembly point. We didn't have any lanes up here already.

What that allowed us to do is we were able to target the center line of the road. The assembly is built off your alignment. We were able to use that as the target. And we set our max distance between 0 and 1 foot. So it would always find that alignment at 0 feet.

That allowed us to kind of create a toggle. We could just toggle off the different types of roads. So we did that because the agencies would end up changing their minds along the way. So that gave us the ability to adjust very quickly.

So how that kind of gets set up. We have the target found conditions, and in this case, you have your long list of targets. So that naming convention is very important. And using that nugget that Jeff showed of the names for your sub-assemblies, that's very helpful. So in this case, we're building a gravel road, and we targeted the alignment for both.

What I'm going to show you is how we did that. So we're starting off-- the corridor is built over here, but we don't have anything targeted. Go into our targets, and I want to build a gravel road. So I choose gravel left and gravel right, and we're going to go in and target the alignment that it's set at. We'll hit OK, hit OK, rebuild that, and then that builds that gravel road that we want.

We would often, like I said, have to come in and change it again. So if we wanted to go back in and change it to a different road-- we built just the gravel right here; now we want to build that asphalt --you go in and you delete those alignments from those ones that you just made. Scroll down, find the correct one-- HMA road with curb is what we called it. We'll choose the right, and we'll choose the left, and it ends up building both of those, changing it from that gravel road to that hot mix asphalt.