Changing the way you work, connected alignments and dynamic offset profiles

IAN PHILPOTT: Good afternoon, everybody. Sounds like everybody can hear me because I can hear myself quite clearly. Welcome to AU, and my class on changing the way we work, connected alignments, and dynamic offset profiles. So this is stuff that's come to us in-- new in 2018. So I've been playing around with it and seeing what I can get it to do.

Everybody had a good morning sessions, first day's AU? Awesome. So I'm glad I've got an early slot, so I can enjoy the rest of my week now.

[LAUGHS]

So just a quick little bit about me. I'm not going to go through it. You can read it all. But this is my sixth AU and my third year presenting, so this will be my sixth class I've presented. So it's a real privilege to be up here on the stage, and this is the biggest group I've ever presented to, and I seem to have inherited the lovely honor of being livestreamed around the world as well. I know my colleagues in the UK are listening in at 10:15 in the evening.

So a quick bit about the company I work for. I worked for Ramboll. For you guys in the US, you'll probably know the name Environ. That's part of the Ramboll group.

And we support 13,000 experts and 300 offices and iconic projects like what you can see out there. So the top one is British Antarctic Survey. So we support them around the world with ports, maritime, logistics, and we've got peoples seconded out to Halley 6 in Antarctica supporting them there.

The second one is Queensferry Crossing, the largest three-span cable stay bridge in the world. And the last one is one of the major rail lines into London, which is untangling 11 lines into a major rail station, so we're a big organization . We have some really prestigious projects.

So learning objectives. I want everybody to understand the capabilities of these new tools, how we can use them, what functionality they give us, and how we can incorporate them into our daily workflows, understand the limitations of these new functions because there are limits to them, and I've tried to bring those to the front so everybody knows what they're doing, and then maybe some little tips and tricks I've-- I actually thought I can make it do the standard stuff. I can do a manual junction. What else can I make it do? So we're going to look at some of those.

So let's look at dynamic offset profiles. So everybody know what offset alignment is? Cool. So the next step on from that is at the moment you have to create your profile manually. This allows you to create an offset profile based on the parent alignment profile.

Each profile can I have a number of different slope regions so that you can vary the relationship between itself and the parent profile. We'll come on to how we can use that better. But there are some limitations. So if you haven't created the parent profile, everything will be grayed out for you. So you-- just changes your workflow slightly, so you got to actually do that parent profile first.

If you wanted different cross slopes, left and right-- left and right side of your mind alignment, then you have to do it in two steps. You can't vary that when you do the creation, but there's two ways around that. Either do them separately or adjust them afterwards, but you can't go back and adjust them. And you can't edit those profiles except by changing the cross slope region, so they're all locked.

And this is one we found as well. So if you're changing your cross slope, say, for example 2.5% to 5% and that occurs where you've got a vertical curve, it will straight line it. It won't mirror the curve and change the curve, so it with straight line it.

Let me move on to connected alignment. A connected alignment allows us to form both an alignment and a profile dynamically connected between two existing alignments. They could be offsets. They could be main alignments, but it will create a single fillet radius between those two alignments.

It gives you a connection overlap. So when you see in profile, you can actually see that it's lining up with your other profiles. And it creates this dynamic but editable profile. So once it's created that profile, you can go back and edit it. You can put another few tangent points in there, some vertical curves if that's what you want to do.

But the limitations, it's a single curve. That doesn't quite work for us. We might want to-- more curves, compound curves, specific requirements to maintain that dynamic behavior such as this. So if those alignments don't intersect so the alignment on the north there, it wouldn't be able to compute that intersection at the moment. They have to cross over.

And if you make any manual changes to your vertical profile of your parent alignment-- so in the top one is the original-- top example on the screen there-- is the original [INAUDIBLE] it was designed. When I made the connected alignment, I made some changes to it to put those vertical curves in. And then when I changed the vertical profile, it removed them. So just beware that it will change any manual overrides you do.

So we've got all those tools. How do we use them in our daily workflows? So junction design. This gives us some of the capabilities that the intersection wizard that we use at the moment-- catch up with myself-- gives us some of that functionality the intersection wizard does by itself.

So at the moment when you design-- if you design that character manually, how do you do it? A moment you have to put an extended with profile. So an extended with card on both sides, and then you project that onto your curb return and then use that to make your design changes and make your connections. Don't need to do that anymore. So it's going to take a whole step out of your manual design workflow.

And the curb return regions can now obviously target that dynamic offset profile that we've created for that side-- the right hand side of the road in this example. So you can-- so again you don't have to extract another feature line. You've got a nice profile in there you can target. I'm not going to cover much more on this because this is really just an adaption of the current workflow we've got, but if you look in my class notes, there's some links to some Screencasts, which are switched off at the moment. The end of this, I'll live them up and you'll see a complete model workflow of this so you can use that later.

It will work in occasions where the intersection wizard doesn't. So I've done some examples where you've got a quite a skew junction and intersection wizard doesn't work. This will help you overcome those conditions.

Controlling crossfall and superelevation. How many people are in the room do development work, site development, housing estates? Quite a few of you. How often do you want to switch from maybe a center crown road to a camber left to a camber right because you might have some drainage swells that you want to just eject the water off the road into?

I do that quite a lot. But trying to get a superelevation wizard when you're using lots of straights to make those changes is quite complicated. These dynamic offset profiles allow us to do that much easier than with a superelevation wizard.

So actually superelevation wizard, you want to try editing that? I've done it. Not very easy. Can do the same thing. That top example is one curve.

The bottom example is how you do it with dynamic offset profiles. And those five changes of-- four or five changes of cross slope in there. And you've got five parameters to change on each side of the road, so it's a lot quicker.

So you can take that-- so that would be the subassemblies you need to do the way it is at the moment. Can replace it with that one. To me, that's a great saving. So when somebody decides they want to change the width of the road or want to change the thickness of one of the layers, you've got one assembly to challenge.

So I've actually got a little video of this.

I think a few computer issues today. It won't duplicate on my screen up there, so I can't see what is going on.

And we're not getting any VT feed from here either. Now that's just-- oh, well, that's a-- now let's try with--

Sorry about this folks. This is-- this was supposed to work really well, but hey. I thought this year, I'd record them all instead of doing a live demo because live demo is a dangerous but today--

Right, there we go. Better. So this is a dummy dataset I created. So we've got a piece of road here with some side roads on. And we're just-- it's just going to walk through it. It's probably a little bit-- I could have done with speeding up a little bit.

So what we're going to say here. We've got we've got this piece of road. It's quite a long piece. It's about 2.5 kilometers. So that's-- so what's that, 1.8 miles or something. Something along that line.

So I'm going to show you how quickly you can do these changes to the camber left, camber right center crown. So we take our-- we select our alignment. We pick up our offset alignments, and we select our-- let our parameters here. We're going to keep it exactly the same as I would keep it standard roadwidth, standard offset by sides.

This is where we go-- then go and create our profile, so it's just another tab on our offset alignment tab. So we're going to put it in a minus 2.5%. So what that's going to do is going to half. Now I've got to alignments, one down either side of the road, and their dynamically linked to that profile for the pair alignment but their 2.5% down.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to now go in and change some of these cross slope regions.

Really could have speeded this video up a bit. But it's taking far too long to try and cut it up and then re-encode it again, so I had to run with it just as it was. Now alert. Somebody sent me a Yammer message while I was doing it as well.

So here we go. We can go into the-- you can now go into your offset parameters, and you can say from the screen on the right there it's got a minus 2.5%. So that applies all the way from one end of that alignment to the other. But just like you have regions in corridors, you can have regions in these dynamic offset profiles. So we're going to go through and create a few regions and switch it back and forth from one to the other.

That's very simple, just exactly as you would with any other Civil 3D commands. So on the left hand side, we're going to keep it at minus 2.5% until we get to this point here. So we're going to set that point, and that's going to be minus 2.5% at that point, so from 0 to [INAUDIBLE]. What's that about 890 at that tangent point. We're going to be at minus 2.5%.

We're then going to go up an say, right, OK. We want a transition zone to go from minus 2.5 to something else, like I decided something about 60 meters would do the trick. So we go and put that in, and then we put in at plus 2.5. So it's going to roll from minus 2.5 to plus 2.5.

And then we're going to do the same with a few other sections so that we're going to roll it some different ways. And you'll see in the end of the video that actually creates a really nice neat transition. Equally as good-- for when you're doing develop work like this-- equally as good as what subassembly-- superelevation wizard will take for you but a hell of a lot quicker and easier to manage.

So we're going to go up the-- all the way up this left hand side. Once we get to the end of this, I'll show you see the screen. And I'm probably going to skip to the-- bit later in the video. So because we've got to do the same thing for the other side.

So you can see now in here we've got all these different regions with the different cross slopes in them.

So we're going to-- it's going to repeat the same thing with the other side.

Now again. And go back to here. So we repeated the same thing with the other side, and you can see I've got this single assembly. But notice I haven't got any crossfall on my carriage way. That's on purpose because in order to apply this, you need to apply those alignments and profiles as targets to your corridor.

So I purposely set this flat because then I can easily see if my crossfloor-- if there's no crossfloor on the road, I've forgotten to put target in. So you don't actually need to apply the crossfall at this stage. So we left out of the subassembly. And then we've got our-- some conditional subassemblies on the side there, so we can switch between where we want our swale and where we don't want our swale.

Now we go back to our-- we'll go back to our corridor here, and we do very, very quick corridor.

No different from any the workflows you work with the moment. Pick up our assembly.

That's created our corridor without footways down the side. Now we quickly going to put a-- at this stage, I'm going to put corridor surface on it so I can see what's going on with the subassemblies and these regions that we've put in these offset alignments.

Again just the usual same thing. Pick your top links, put a boundary on it because that keeps your contours nice and tidy, triangulation nice and tidy. And I can change myself surface style so that we got some contours and tend to model quite tight when I'm doing this stuff , so it will be a 20-millimeter contour so that 3/4 of an inch for the imperial side of the world. And you can say this-- you can see here that we haven't got any crossfall on the carriageway, which is my highlight that I can make sure that people have put their targets in the right place.

So I'm going to put those first targets in. I'm not going to worry about the conditional subassemblies in a minute. We just get in the road looking right.

So again pick up the-- pick out those offset alignments. Pick out the profile that goes with it.

That's just going to rebuild corridor.

Not showing right so I'm going to rebuild the corridor again. So you can see now we've got our first bit here, which is conventional center crown. We go up, start see the transition zone here, and it's switched to a camber to the left-- full-width camber to the left.

And we're just looking at the PCA where the transition zone occurs. And we'll just put the-- pan out the alignment a bit more. And you can see that it switched it's going to switch back the other way in a minute.

Just need the alignment.

This video went an awful lot faster when I was trying to record it. [LAUGHS] So you can see here this is the prime example. We're doing this transition from one side to the other on a straight, trying to do that with the superelevation wizard takes a little bit of fiddling with the radii and stuff to actually bit out and manipulate it to do that.

So you probably have to let it apply the superelevation change on a curve and then adjust all the changes so that it occurs where you want it to occur. Can be done but it's a bit of a faff. Much easier, much, much easier this way.

So I'll just fast forward through this little bit a bit more. And again, you can see what I've actually done here is I've used some target lines to make these conditional subassemblies change. So everybody use conditional subassemblies? Are you familiar with those?

Yeah, I find them really, really, really useful. I want to try and cut down-- always working with my technicians trying to cut down the amount assemblies you have in drawings because really easy to create them but when you got to come and make a change to the model at a later date wants to change a row things. You've got to make sure and go through, and it's always trying to validate that information at a later date.

Have you made all the changes to all the subassemblies? Fewer subassemblies you got to move, the better. So conditional subassemblies for me-- for the way to go.

So we'll go back to-- screen's here in the way so I can actually see the current slide. There we go.

So after I've done that, I thought, OK, I've used it on road corridors. What else can I do with it? Before we can do that, we're going to understand what we're looking at. So what do we want to do with them?

So the first thing is what we want-- what we're after with these tools is a behavioral relationship between the number of objects. So do we need that dynamic behavior? Before you go and do anything, do we need it? Very much. Keep it simple.

And then the other thing is how likely is it that we're going to need to change this model. If you don't think you're going to have to change it, then some of these methods might not be quite what you're after. But if you're expecting a lot of change, then these dynamic behaviors are quite good. So I thought, OK, I've done some stuff in the past that's flood protection work.

So this is the kind of example one of my clients was looking at. He bought a piece of land just over on the top left hand corner of the screen here. And this is a kind of a real world example, but this area here floods where he wants to build his building. So we looked at putting in some additional channels on the other side of the stream here, which runs down the page and allow that to back up and flood into this area between the existing stream and gray. You can see the tight contours in this new string.

So I thought, well, OK, how can I do that? So what we're trying to do-- we knew that iterations were inevitable. We dealing with the drainage authority. We're dealing with the flood protection people.

So they're going to want some-- they're going to want some changes. I can guarantee that. We're also going to want dynamic volume reporting as well. So we're going to have to compare flood storage at different levels.

We're also going to want to know how much material we've got to move. So I thought I can do that. How would you model it now?

Feature lines? Yeah they work. But when you come to edit them, you can edit them, but they're not in the dynamic to each other. They tend to-- you move one and you don't forget-- you forget to move the other one. They don't necessarily work.

Feature lines and grading. Grading works, but sometimes it misbehaves. And again with the feature lines, you've got to keep changing lots of them.

Alignments and corridors. Again that would work, but there are some areas on here, particularly where some of these-- [INAUDIBLE]-- these kind of areas that I'm highlighting in the-- where the side streams run in. You've got some quite tight corners there and trying to manipulate the corridors to wear it around there, it's going to be a bit of a pain.

So I did it with some dynamic offset alignment. So a creative-- some plane alignments down the middle. Put a couple of offsets in that I could control, and then I hung some grading off of it.

That gives me that dynamic base. So the grading will respond to the surfaces, but if I need to move that baseline up and down-- so the bottom of that channel-- everything else is going to move with it. If I need to move it left or right because all those alignments are dynamic to that parent, everything will just move with it.

So you can see in the example at the bottom, I actually made some changes to one of the levels. And because I had everything south in the volumes dashboard, you can see all that stuff just reflects. So every time I make a change, all those volumes update automatically. See I haven't got to go back and touch them.

So this was one example. This is quite complicated. This is quite a long video, so I'm not going to play this video today. But again that's on my Screencast page, so you can take a look at that for yourselves after the event.

But I thought there was another-- there's another way. I do a lot of utility design. That's generally parallel to your road corridor.

This is one from the UK, so this is an extract from our national joint utilities group guidelines. So this is where we're supposed to put stuff. Ever dug it up and found it in there? Nope. Don't think so.

Particular [INAUDIBLE] is it this one right here where it says communications. What's that 250 mill-- 8 inches down. My record is we broke it when we were taking the tarmac off.

But when you are designing a development, quite often you're working with architects, landscape architects, building architects, housing developers. That lot changed their mind a lot. So quite often I end up having to redraw all these utilities. So I thought at the outset, how can we get to that 80% design quicker?

I know at the final stages, I'm going to have to fiddle with it, move things around, do my clash detection, make sure everything works, move things I can put chambers in, move things I can put signposts, lamp columns, bins, street furniture, all the other stuff that they like. But how can I get it done, that first bit, that first layout, quicker? Back to my videos again.

Let's try that again.

We're back through our video again. So this is using the same data that we used before. So this is that first road that you saw earlier. And we've put our little-- we used our dynamic offset profiles and our connected alignments to create this little junction. We've not modeled the corridors yet.

We can do that later. This doesn't affect this process at all. So I thought again how can I use these offset alignments and dynamic profiles to make this work. Oh, there's my picture again. They're still not in the right place.

Oh, I obviously talked a lot when the-- on the video voiceover. So I've jumped with a more finished version here. So you can see I've put lots of utilities in. And these are all created using offset alignments and working out a percentage grade from the edge of the channel offset alignment to where they need to be. So I know exactly where they are and what depth they need to be.

But I've left one of them out. So I'm actually in this video. I'm going to show you how to do one of them again. Look at the-- when you see the video, the video's got voiceover on it as well so you can go back to it like today. So again we give it a name, so we're going to do that-- we're going to do that communications cable.

So we're going to do an on site alignment on the main road. Want nothing on the left hand side, want one on the right. We know our distance, 12.55. I've created some styles as well, so my alignments look the right [INAUDIBLE] so that I can see what's going on while I'm doing it. Don't want any labels, don't need them.

Again here's our profile going in. And I've got quite a little Excel spreadsheet that I worked at what least percentage on. This is a minus 7.46, but that gets me to 250 mill below the surface, so it did the-- but again, it's a standard table, so I've got to do it once and I can use data again and again and again. So that's putting alignment in there. We're going to do the same with the side road.

Probably causing the cameramen trouble because I'm pacing around. So we do the same with the side road, so we'll call that side road cones. We're only going to do a short section of it. But notice you got to make sure that the side road-- the main road alignment. And the side road alignment cross over each other because in a minute, we're going to put that connected alignment in, and if they don't cross, they don't join.

I said it's not per-- it's not a perfect solution, but what I'm after is to get me to that 80% done. So again put my--

So again you can see-- don't know how well it shows up. You can see two purple lines represent the comms. So we'll then go in and make our connect to the alignment.

I move the mouse around a lot, don't I, without actually clicking anything. Oh, dear. It's not very efficient is it. I need to get better at that. I need to sort that out. So there's my job for when I get back from AU. Don't move the mouse so much without clicking.

Now you can see it's a very simple process to connect to the alignment. You'll see more of this in the video about doing the junction design, so you-- by the time you've been through that first video, you'll understand what I'm doing.

Here we go. So we'll give it a name, so this is our curb return comms. The radius bit of an overlap so that they-- everything lines up properly.

So you can adjust. You can set your k values there on those curb return profiles. And no labels if you don't want any labels. Get the styles right.

So now you can see we've got our dot run that is going to connect. Or have an alignment that we're going to use to correct dot run. So the next thing is how are we going to get pipe network onto there?

Again we want to keep this dynamic, so we going to extract features. We're going to take feature line from an alignment. Again they can be static or dynamic.

So we're going to keep those dynamic. Again so if everything moves, those feature lines are going to move. And we can attach pipe networks to those.

Think I got a bit ahead of myself here actually. So what I've actually done here is-- what I'm doing in this bit-- because that dot run is going to go under a side road-- can't go under a side road at 250 mill down. It's got to go deeper, so we're going to use that same thing that we did with a superelevation and use costful regions to make that pipe network-- to make that alignment dive down, to move-- and that pipe network on it. Your pipes are going to dive down with it. Now the-- we just skip past-- skip past this bit a bit. So again we're just putting some regions on the--

So here we go. So we're going to-- now we're going to extract some feature lines from those. Again, I've got some styles in my template for all my different utilities. Have you built-- any of you built templates? Simple 3D templates?

Worth doing to get them right. They take a bit-- takes a bit of time. They will save you a lot of time if you've got all your styles working right.

As good as some of the country kits are, some are better than others. It's getting the styles right, particularly when you're using these new features in a way that probably they weren't quite intended to use. So you do need to customize template to make it work. And so you can see, you don't want to end up with a load of design alignments where you're using it for utilities. It just doesn't work.

Where are we?

Let us finish now, just catch myself out. We were only supposed to be in my notes.

Now we've attached-- we've created-- I'll do that with all of these-- [INAUDIBLE] lines. We just skip over that bit. So you see me create some feature lines again there.

That purple doesn't really show up very well. I hope it's-- but a few can see it? That's not great, is it?

Let's skip over that bit.

So here we're going to go and-- so this is the other thing you've got to remember. Where these-- got to make sure these alignments-- sorry-- the feature lines that you extract from those alignments, for each of those utilities sit on different sites. Because you know what happens when the feature lines cross over each other on the same site?

They'll start to interact with each other, and you don't want that. You want to stay the same. So you do have to remember to go and put them on their own site. And that will resolve the problems of it forcing where it crosses other feature lines.

So we are now going to go and start putting some pipe networks on it. So you have to do this in three parts really. So you have to do the main road, side road, and the curb return.

But will then use at the end, we'll go in and merge those alignments back together again. Sorry, merge those pipe networks back together again. So we're just going to have simple dot run.

And we're going to again find the best thing to do is to set-- when you're doing this, you set the structures to null, and then if you want to put a structure in a particular location, go back in and put in later. If you put it in-- if you want to put it in now everywhere where it changes direction, it will put a structure in that might not be where you want it. So I found the best way to do it is to set it to null. So now we're going to use the-- use those feature lines to set the vertexes on these pipe networks.

Again, we've done that one there, so there you go. There's your-- there's our communications dot run going in north-south and on the main road. We do the same with this side road. Again we'll just skip over. Exactly the same process if repeated.

So here we are. We got our pipe networks in. But you notice it's carried on this one going towards the main road along the side road, so there's a bit we want to take out there. And you see over just [INAUDIBLE] edited it, which was a mistake because it actually messed up all the verticals in it, and I have to get back in and repair it.

But we'll skip over that little mess. We'll skip over that. See. Didn't want it to do that.

So this is where we start to think about OK, what happens if there's a change? This road alignment's going to change.

So if I get ahold of this road alignment and drag this IP point little bit north, you can see the alignments have all moved, but the pipe networks haven't. This is the only downside of this method. You have to redo your bits of pipe network.

All the alignments and the feature lines have moved, but it's-- I found it much easier to go back in, just delete those pipes off, go back and just reapply them and rejoin them to the network. That's far easier than having to go through every single profile, move them across in plan and then go through every single profile and readjust all the levels on it. Just delete them and put them back in again.

Now we just [INAUDIBLE] later.

So screenshot on the right, you can actually see what it looks like in 3D with a vision-- with the visualizations. Realistic to realistic. It's actually done a pretty good job of sorting it out. The positives of this alignments and profiles are all dynamic.

Depth of each utility is controlled by those cross slope regions, so you can change it. If you need to move it up or down, you need to deepen it up to go across a side road. You can do all of that.

Alignments and profiles, they're not date. If you move anything-- if you move the parent profile, it will update the alignment and profiles but won't update the pipes. So the negatives-- and you saw this-- pipe networks don't want to automatically update when the old [INAUDIBLE] or profiles change.

You can't automatically place chambers, but I say we're going for the 80% design. And you get a few little glitches like this. They don't quite line up, but I can go back in and edit those. But when I'm doing the 80% design, I'm not really bothered at that point.

So the conclusions. What I was trying to do was just get myself thinking about it and give everybody else the opportunity to think about what is feasible with these new tools. They're designed to do road alignments and junctions.

But after seven-- six years, seven years coming to AU, the value I find from all these classes is what you see other people doing with Civil 3D with a software. You see them trying to make you do things that it wasn't designed to do. You think, yeah, I can use that. And then you come along in three or four years time, and that functionality is migrated into the product. So I want to help people try and do that for themselves, which is why I wrote this class the way I did.

So with me skipping through that video, that should come a lot shorter. We got a bit of time left for some questions. Anybody got any questions they want to ask? Come up to the-- we got some-- and we got some mics.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

So how do you set the [INAUDIBLE].

IAN PHILPOTT: No. In the-- when you're setting so for the-- again because we are on camera-- so the question was how do you set the transition regions in the model? So what you do is you define a series of points so the first point at that transition you define what the start gradient is. So if we're going from minus 2.5% plus 2.5%, so the start of that transition chainage 100, we put a marker in at minus 2.5%.

We want to 60-meter transition, so we put another marker in at 160 chainage and set its value at plus 2.5. And it will actually do that transition over that given length. Anybody else? Yep.

AUDIENCE: That curb return alignment [INAUDIBLE]

IAN PHILPOTT: So the question was about the-- so the dynamic behavior of the curb return itself or the utility?

AUDIENCE: Curb return itself.

IAN PHILPOTT: The curb return itself. So that's where the connected alignments come in. So you pick the two offset alignments. You set an overlap of straight or-- and then the fillet radius curve between it.

So if I move that side road quite aggressively, that will all adjust for you. It will just keep that set radius a set overlap, and it will open up and close-- it'll close to the angle as it needs to. Anybody else?

Yep.

Oh, yes. That's-- so the question was we've used our new tool to create this transition where we've gone from minus 2.5% plus 2.5%. So if you're using the superelevation wizard, you can obviously attach a band set style in your profile and show it. So the question was about how do I show that in the profile. That's one I actually hadn't thought about because I don't tend to show that in my profiles.

I use the superelevation triangles displayed on the actual alignment themselves. So they will pick up the details naturally. I haven't tried to put it onto the profile yet, so that may be something we can-- we'll have to have a look at and see what's-- well, that's a great question. Anybody else?

So the question was once you've created those offset alignments, can you break them-- break that dynamic behavior? Yes, there is-- there should be a drop down on one of the things that makes them static. So you can do-- you should be able to do that. Yep.

Yep. Yep. So the question was what happens to this dynamic behavior with the offset profile regions when your roadwidth changes. That will continue to follow. So if you put a bump out and say increase the roadwidth over a section from 4 meters to 5 meters, say, it will naturally increase the-- continue that crossfall based on that region. So if you're set at minus 2.5%, it will just extend that crossfall out to your new edge of channel line.

So it works just like any other. So whenever you're using any kind of targeted widening or offset lumber widening, it will follow the gradient you've set. Any more? Nope. Got some.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

IAN PHILPOTT: Yep. You can-- so the question was what happens when you're doing new-- sorry existing modified existing road? You can still carry on designing your profiles like you did previously. So if you've got an existing grant-- an existing ground surface, you can create the offset alignment and not put a dynamic profile on it and then just apply a profile based on a surface.

So none of that functionality's going away. This is just a way of extending that functionality to do something different. I saw some more questions. Gentleman over here.

No. So the question was am I using this stand alone or am I using it to create junctions? I've actually used it to create junctions. So the first example I skipped over quite quickly is a junction design. If you've got the handouts, when I live the Screencast up, you'll see I've actually used it for a junction as well.

It works really, really well because you don't have to have-- when you're trying to do those curve returns and you need to target both the centerline profile of the side road and the edge profile of your main road, instead of having to extract a feature line from your corridor, you've already got an alignment there, so you can just pick up an alignment and profile and use that as your target. So it works really well like that. Any more questions? Yep.

So is there any upcoming feature upgrades to this to extend it beyond the single curves? I don't know. I'm part of the beta forum-- beta group for Civil 3D and have been for a number of years. I've raised that one with the dev team.

I'm off to my technology preview at 4 o'clock for the 2019th. I will see what they've got to say for themselves and all of them. Give them a little [KICKS]. Give them a little prod. See what we get. Any more questions? Yep.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

IAN PHILPOTT: Yeah. When you so-- how do you deal with non-parallel offsets? So the way I would do that would be to set a parallel offset and then use either the widening feature or the awesome targets to move that alignment. And it will continue that crossfall out to that new alignment based on what the profile-- what that setting each of those surface regions of that alignment-- of that profile.

AUDIENCE: One more-- [INAUDIBLE]

IAN PHILPOTT: So again, for the-- so what's been asked here is when you create-- when you obviously-- it's in-- the profile it creates is an offset of your parent profile. And if you overlay those profiles on the same profile view, you'll see them drop down by the given percentage, which is what I was showing there. So it will-- if you've got no changes in crossfall, it will be a consistent distance across below your parent profile, and it will match everything. So straights, curves, vertical curves, transitions, everything.

It's only in that case where you are changing the crossfall and that changing crossfall occurs in an area where you've got a vertical curve in your main parent profile. At the moment, it can't compute that new vertical curve because it's not a direct offset. It's relationship is changed, so it can't compute that. So it just straight lines it. Any more questions?

We've wrapped up a few minutes early, but thanks for the questions. Those some really great questions that come out of there. And thank you for listening. Hope you had a-- hope you found it useful.

My contact details are on the handout. If anybody wants to reach out and discuss anything further, there's links to the videos. I'll put those all from unlisted to public later on this afternoon, so you can download them all if you want. PowerPoint is up on the site as well. So that should go live in a few days when they release them all. But, again, thanks for coming.