InfraWorks as a Design Tool

RUSS NICLOY: In an effort to keep this moving forward and keeping you guys on schedule, I'm going to start right now. Thank you very much for coming. I really appreciate everybody being here and spending some hard-earned AU time with the session today.

The session is InfraWorks as a Design Tool. Just a special request before we get started here. Please turn off any noise-making devices, and if we could hold the questions to the end.

Honestly, I'm so preoccupied with speaking, I won't hear your phone anyway. But if it's a catchy melody, I might start dancing, and nobody wants that. So just ask you to do that for your neighbors and all that so that they don't get distracted.

My name's Russ Nicloy. I am a civil solutions specialist at MasterGraphics in Wisconsin. I'm in the Milwaukee area. Our company's based out of Madison.

I've been with MasterGraphics for 13 years in December. I've been doing Civil 3D in particular since then. I came on about three months after the very, very first public release of Civil 3D. Came on board. Literally, they pushed a book across the table at me and said, learn this. And it was the program that I always wanted to use.

I'm excited about what's going on with the InfraWorks. That's why I pointed towards an InfraWorks topic this year at AU, however. So I do a lot of support, a lot of training, a lot of mentoring of users in general with Civil 3D, InfraWorks, Map 3D, the Civil suite of tools.

I'm also currently working with the Wisconsin DOT methods development training. The last couple of years, I've actually done AU presentations on Wisconsin DOT method. Decided not to do that this year, not because it was any different, but the method hasn't changed greatly, so it really wasn't time to do that again. So I wanted to plow into new territory here, and that's why I'm looking at InfraWorks.

I am working with their methods development unit in their training arm. Wisconsin DOT is looking at InfraWorks, and is using it on some level. Now, what I'm talking about today doesn't reflect anything that they're doing, so just understand that. I just want to let you know that I'm working with them.

I come from 10 years of production experience in the utility GIS. Gas and water predominately, a little bit of electric. I work with surveyors out in the field, engineers out in the field. A lot of just man-- not manual drafting, but the regular drafting back in the office, I had the good fortune to work with a lot of organizational people that wanted me to know more about what they did in the field, so I got to learn project lifecycle from a lot of different angles.

I'm hoping that some of that comes across in what we talk about here today. InfraWorks is a new tool, so it's not that I can tell you, historically, this is what we did. But I'm hoping that what I say is couched in that kind of history.

So this session, we are going to look at the design functions available in InfraWorks. We're going to analyze the proposed designs in InfraWorks. And then what is available to Civil 3D from the InfraWorks model that you're working with.

By the end of this session, you should be able to understand the road design layout process in InfraWorks. And I'll tell you that I spend a lot more time on that than the other two. I think there's a lot of stuff going on with the other sections that we're going to talk about, but there's a lot of functionality that I want to make sure that you're aware of in the road design portion.

We're also going to learn the importance of the InfraWorks cross-section and superelevation analysis tools, the importance of the cut/fill/material volume analysis tools. I think that's where a lot of money can be predicted in a project, and those tools are really going to pay off for you. And then finally understand, what is going to be moved from InfraWorks into Civil 3D for the actual granular design.

I think I tend to use the word granular a lot in that movement, because in InfraWorks, we're taking big picture stuff. And we get it over to Civil 3D, and we're going to get a little bit more in the weeds with the details of it. InfraWorks is not supplanting what's going on inside of InfraWorks, and InfraWorks is not supplanting Civil 3D, or the other way around.

So really, this presentation is going to be about design. InfraWorks itself has a history of being a presentation graphics function. This presentation is actually born out of a little bit of frustration on my part.

I would hear people on the phone in my office or in conversations out in different conferences and whatnot, saying that, yeah, it's a great presentation design kind of thing. It's a pre-development thing. You can look at stuff. You can make great videos. You can put lots of trees in places.

Yeah, you can. And you still can. It's great at that. But we need to look at this deeper. I've started telling people, stop talking about the presentation graphics. Everybody knows about that.

We need to look at this as a design tool. It can take a place at the very early phases of our design and make the progress of the project to move faster and more cost-effective. I truly do believe that, and that's why I chose this topic specifically because I want to be a champion for that kind of movement.

I will say that, recently, I have been hearing more people say things to that effect. So I think it is catching on already. I'm not going to take credit for it if it catches fire now, but it out there, and people will start to talk about it. So hopefully, you guys can take this message back to your organizations, and we can build this up as we go.

So first, let's talk about the road design layout. I told you that this is going to be the longest portion of it because there's a lot of stuff to look at here. First of all, I'm going to talk about existing roads.

The data that comes into InfraWorks is coming from Model Builder. Love Model Builder. It is so easy to get lots of data through the Model Builder. Also, USGS, there's a couple of websites out there that you can get stuff.

Most of it's free. There's a couple things you have to pay for. $4 here or there, what have you. But generally, you can get a lot of data that you can bring in.

Now, unfortunately, a lot of these end up needing some cleanup because they are based on XYZs of things that are out there. In particular, the one that gets me is that the divided roads are always coming in as two different roads. And that's maybe not a bad thing, but in a lot of cases, I want the median and the roadways in there to work together, and I don't want them to be two separate things. I want it to be one particular item. So you have to go in and clean things like that up.

Also, in the screenshot there is of the one that I really hate, and it's that overpasses and underpasses of the downloaded information a lot of times try to interact. In fact, if you ever click on a road that is interacting like this, you see that the bridges are kind of bent there. They look like they've had some real trouble there. If you ever click on something like that, you'll see that there's like a ghost line that jumps up, and they're actually interacting. They're trying to intersect in those locations.

Sometimes, you can translate those into proposed roads and clean those up. Now, I'm not going to say that it's all the time. It's worth a shot. Just because it's existing conditions doesn't mean it can't be a proposed road.

So just understand that, that proposed roads can clean that kind of thing up for you. Even if it's not part of your design. It's just something ancillary or close enough to get into the picture of your project.

We're also going to talk a little bit about the proposals. You'll see that I start a proposal very early when I get to the demonstration. The reason is is that I download this information and use that as my master. I've always got that to go back to. If I screw something up terribly, I can go back to day zero.

I'll make an option-- and a real quick save there-- make an option or a proposal so that I can go back to my first cleaned-up version where the bridges are cleaned up, and the roadways are now single, and all the little things that I've done to it, whatever that may be. Then I make another option and make sure that I start from there. Again, always giving myself a firebreak that I can back up into so that I don't lose something important if I screw something up badly.

Now, that's the existing conditions. Let's move into the proposed roads, because that's really what we're talking about here. The design portion of this is proposed roads.

Two different kinds of roads that we can use here, design roads and component roads. I love design roads until component roads came out, and then I love component roads. The design roads are great because they do clean up the bridges in some areas, but they do give a level of control. And the component roads take that and take it, I would say, not the next step but three or four steps beyond that yet.

Design roads in particular allow you to use AASHTO tables or custom design tables for your designs. The idea is, you're putting a curve in. Why don't you put it in at the actual dimensions or the parameters that it should be in? It knows the speed-- the roads inherently have that built into them-- so why not use that information to your ability?

I am going to say, and I think I'm going to mention this later, but since I do work with WisDOT, they are not doing this yet. But I have scoped out, can you put in custom information there? WisDOT-- Wisconsin DOT-- uses a different set of criteria a little bit stronger than the AASHTO ones for their data.

I don't know if it's because of the snowstorms that we get or what it is, but we're a little more stringent there. But we can put in custom data in there. So keep that in mind. You're not stuck with what you have.

I will say that the slide deck that I have posted up at AU should have this. The notes for this slide actually have the link or the path to where you can go and change that information. At the end of my presentation, I have a link that you can go to. If you can't find it on the AU posting, I'm not sure if it actually made it up. But I can get you the slide deck and it has all that information. There's a couple other slides that I'll mention that on, and that's what I'm talking about.

But besides design roads and AASHTO tables, you can also do profile views, so you've got the vertical control of the roadway, intersections, roundabouts, bridges, and drainage systems. I would like to go into drainage systems, but because of time-- I just didn't have time to do it justice, so we're going to hang onto that. Just understand that, when you have a design road, you can right-click and drainage systems is an option that you can add to that road. Very nicely built together. Kind of a symbiotic relationship that they have.

Besides that are the component roads. Like I said, I'm now in love with the component roads because there's so much more that you can do. They start out with everything in the design roads and then bump it up a notch or two.

You can add components-- which are lanes, and curbs, and shoulders, and what have you-- to the cross-sectional design of it. Basically, if you think of an assembly in Civil 3D, we're designing and basically drawing a 2D flat picture of what the typical cross-section is and applying that.

Well, here, you're doing that in the length of the roadway, or in some length of the roadway. You can actually tilt it while you're doing it and watch the road come together. So that is a great way to build up a roadway.

I will mention, just an aside, as it stands right now, that information does not come over to Civil 3D. It's not one of the basic building blocks yet, so it's not coming over. But as you're designing things, you certainly can do the calculations off what that provides for you, so it's an important function despite that.

Now, I am going to talk about decorations here only for a second. I'm not going into the presentation graphics, but that's what that's for. The component roads allow you to add decorations at every 100 feet, every 150 feet, every 20 feet, whatever it might be.

If you want to park cars along a roadway to show what this road is going to look like, the component roads allow you to do that. And with that, I'm done with the presentation graphics. I don't think I'm going to return to that any time the rest of the discussion here.

So the custom component road assembly, building one of your own here, you can add this to a library. Basically, what you're doing is you're adding components in a cross-section assembly type method, as I mentioned. Like I said, you can even tilt it, you can look at it straight down.

But you just add these items onto each other so they connect. It's almost like building an assembly. Instead of a cross-section, you're looking straight down as you do it. So it's kind of in context of your project.

Then all you have to do is identify a station at which you want to pick that assembly, and you can push that into your library. Now, what I'm going to show a little bit later is that that is pushing that into the library for this particular project. I was a little bit upset the first time I did that and realized the next project I was in, like, wait a second, I had that great assembly. What happened to it?

Well, you can push that over to other projects, but you have to do it in a certain location. The two files that I have listed there are what you're looking for. The path where they sit is in the notes of the slide. So again, if you download the slide deck, you'll have that path.

There are some other locations you can get it, but I can certainly get it for you if you can't find it. Those two files have to travel together, but they can go into another folder location-- just pick them up, drop them in, and you're good-- and they will appear in your list of assemblies from here on out in your InfraWorks work. Yeah, and then you can copy these from file to file and available to all models from that point going forward.

Now, another thing about the road design, or about the component roads, is it allows you to display information in-canvas. In-canvas is just a fancy way of saying in the drawing file, or in your drafting area, or your model space.

Road geometry in particular, the first thing you'll probably see is just stationing. Just a way to give you an aspect of where you're at as you're working on something. Hey, I know this turn lane starts at this station, ends at this station, transitions from here to here. Gives you that kind of identification.

I'll tell you that, when I'm working in the profile view-- and I'm sure I'll show this in a second-- a lot of times I can't find, where am I in the profile? Oh, wait. Here we are. The station's right there. It helps you identify quickly where you're at. You can turn those off. All these that I'm going to talk about, you can turn off as well.

You can also add in design speeds. Now, this one gets tricky because it's small and it just doesn't pop out. But you see it's a little green check mark, or a little green bar there, if you will.

It does have the station on it when you're having it displayed. If you left-click on it, you will get the red version of it, which is in the other picture right there. And then it will pop up this station and speed assignment at that particular station.

Now, what's nice is, I can type in a station here, or I can grab this and move it, drag it and kind of scrub it back and forth to drop it where I want. So if you graphically know where it should be, or if you know specifically where a station is, you can do either. You've got that at your disposal.

And then there's the superelevation critical stations. Notice that they've got kind of a colored item there, a yellow. There's a red, and I don't know if you can see that those color reds are different.

This is the full super area here, and graphically, when you're looking at your design, you'll see it's a little bit darker red. That way, graphically, you can tell where you're at in the superelevation structures. And it does also list out the critical stations as you go through there.

These are reacting to the AASHTO standards. When I pull this up in the demonstration, I'll point to where you can look to check to make sure that you've got what you need there. And as I mentioned before, you can replace these with custom standards, so just something to keep in mind there.

Another function that the component roads-- and actually, the design roads-- allow you to do is to work with the profile view and design. This allows you to control that vertical nature of all this. You're looking at vertical PVI points as well as curve length indications. The curve lengths aren't changed here. They're changed in the canvas. And let me talk about that for a second.

One of the things about this is that when you're editing in the profile view, you're editing in real time. So you're actually affecting the model that's in the space up above, or wherever you've got the window situated. So if you click on one-- the trick is that when you are grabbing a hold of the road, it gives you a blue highlight to the road.

If you start to orbit, you get to a point where the labels, instead of laying down on the ground here, pop upwards like this. And then you are in the area where you could graphically change the profile data in your in-canvas editing.

Now, notice, I've highlighted this PVI point here, and this one down here has highlighted or vice versa. So if you're over one, you're going to know where you're at in your design and what you're actually doing to it. If you grab this one here and move it, you can actually see the effect of it take place down here.

So I think that's a great way to do it. However, it's a little discombobulating that it's in that orbited view. And you'll see that I can orbit slowly until I get to the point where it actually pops up like that. Just understand that you have to watch for that.

Intersection objects. And again, both designed roads and component roads have this. This one here, I've got it selected. You'll see that I've got the component road here and here.

If they are not both component or design roads, if I've got one of the existing roads out there, it won't become an intersection object. So just understand that if you don't see it highlight, then it's not really an intersection yet. You have the two similar types of roads, it's going to make this intersection.

Oh. Let me back up one here. What I've done here is I've highlighted-- I put my cursor into this quadrant of that. It can see that I've got a way of stretching and actually widening this for a turn lane, or changing the radius of that curve. I can do that for either of those. And if I've got a four-way, it's in all four quadrants of that as well.

Now, what's nice about this is that in Civil 3D, when you move this over-- we'll talk about this later as well-- but when you move it over to Civil 3D, the offset lines actually come in with it, and the curb return alignments come in with it. Most of what we're talking about here are alignments and profiles, but this adds that in. So it takes the intersection object just that one step further. You don't have to work with intersection objects, but I think there's a real reason to do it because it does give you that kind of functionality when you get to the granular state of your project.

Now, intersections have the ability to become roundabouts. You'll see here that I've grabbed a four-way intersection. I've gone over to my properties here and selected on the intersection type, and I can say intersection or roundabout. There's also a right-click option for that, so you've got a couple choices here. But that will translate it from an intersection to an actual roundabout.

Now, what's nice about the roundabout is that it actually does translate into Civil 3D not only as the intersection with all the alignments, but it actually translates into an actual corridor object. It's the most-- I'm going to say verbose, that might be the wrong term for it-- it's the most verbose object that we have in translating over to Civil 3D.

It's using the vehicle tracking module and the roundabout that came from that. Great roundabout tool in itself. And they've utilized that so that you get the right data coming over. And it actually does build the surface around it as well. It's just a fantastic way to build a roundabout.

The last thing that I'm going to show here is the right of way function. Now, I also include the parcel and the easements in this, although that's a little bit away of what I want to talk about in design. I do want to add the right of way option in here because, as I see it, it's a great way to know when your grading is going a little bit too far.

If you've got a road too high or too low, it's going to identify that, yeah, you're outside the edge. Now, it doesn't care that you're outside the edge. It doesn't know that it's a problem. But you can check against the right of way to make sure that you're not daylighting too far away. It's just a great check mechanism.

The parcels and the easements are great. Coming from a water and gas background, we were always doing easements and so forth. Really easy to use. Not really going to pursue them too much here, but just want to let you know that they're there. Kind of work in concert with the right of ways.

So how does this advance your design? None of this makes any sense if it doesn't move you forward, so I want to make sure that we focus on that for each of the things that we talk about here. Fairly complex road cross-section design options, especially for the component roads in particular. You can really get a lot of understanding about a project before you get into spending money on it and getting a full design going on.

A road design at AASHTO or other curve specs. Literally, as you're putting curves in and editing the curves, it's going to tell you what's right and what's wrong, and lay things out for you, help you out. Intersections laid out for space and turn lane considerations, and then the roundabouts laid out for space and measurements as well. And then also those go that step further where they become a corridor for you. So some really great things there depending on what you're working on.

Now let's take a look at this. I've got InfraWorks here. We're at a roadway. The nice thing about InfraWorks is that everybody can show as a display of something that they live with.

I live very near this intersection here, this little curve in the road there. Very dangerous curve. People are going way too fast into it and sliding right off the road. I see an accident there about once-- I'm going to say twice a month, probably more than that.

And once we get ice on the roads, it will be worse. So what can we do to make that better? Well, we can design better things around it. InfraWorks can help us do that.

I'm going to come down here and take a look at the road. This is a road from my existing conditions. I got this from Model Builder. In this particular case-- although whatever format you get it from-- would look like this.

The way I can tell is it's mostly magenta, or has a lot of magenta lines to it. The grid points are all magenta and so forth. So I know that that's not going to be one of my design roads.

If it's not going to affect what I'm working on, maybe I'll leave it that way. It doesn't have to change necessarily. If I right-click outside of that-- where we are, there we are-- I can add a vertex so I can add a bend point to it somewhere here, or I can convert it to a design road.

I can also right-click on the road itself and split the feature. Maybe I want to tie in the road at a point near this curve. I don't want to design all the way through it or what have you. That way, the right-click will allow you to split the feature at that particular point that you've chosen.

Or if you right-click on a grip point, you can also remove a vertex. So you add a vertex at any point, but remove that vertex if you need to. A lot of times, the existing roads are based on-- I think it's the TIGER information from the government. So it's just how many shots did they take in a certain area. And it may bend in an area that really doesn't make sense.

I didn't notice an intersection a little bit further east of this location where the road does one of those little hiccup things. Well, you just go in and take out a couple grip points, and it's straight as an arrow then just like it is in real life. So that's a good function for things that you want to leave as an existing road.

If I right-click on this and convert to design road-- let it run for a second-- then you're going to see it's in a little bit more blue. Now, this is a design road. The component road will look very similar in this case, but it's kind of a bluish highlight to it. The grips are blue. A little bit of aquamarine on the curve information that we have. But a completely different color scheme to let you know what you're actually working with, so you know immediately what you've got.

If I right-click while that road is highlighted, I've got convert to component road, which I'm going to do. I'm headed that direction. I can add the drainage information. Like I said, great functionality here, but a little bit beyond what we're going to talk about. Just understand it's there.

I could add a right of way. I'll be doing that a little bit later. I could add a bridge to this. The bridge functionality is great in InfraWorks. There's a lot of detail to it.

And then you can take those bridges and push them to Revit. So it's not the end of the story if you put in a bridge here. Or you could show profile view. Like I said, the profile view is something that design roads do carry.

I am going to go to convert to component road, because I do really like the component roads itself. Automatic will try to replicate what I've already got here. It's going to create an assembly for me that is mimicking what I've already got.

The manual function is going to let me pick from a list. So in this particular case, I'm going to go manual. Depending on the project, I may or may not.

But now with that, notice that it's highlighting this road from this intersection all the way through my design. Here's that corner that's so bad, all the way over to this intersection over here. So it's going to do the whole roadway here unless you split it at a specific station.

I can come down here to assembly style. Right now it says two lanes, which this is actually one I like to start with in a lot of cases. I can click that, and then I get my list of different assemblies that are here.

Now, things like the curb and gutter here. You're going to see me use those quite a bit. But then there's a lot that are already built out, like a four-lane divided raised Jersey barrier. Well, this is a county road, country road out in the middle of nowhere. They don't want a Jersey barrier in it, so we'll have to pick something else.

I'm going to scroll through this and find one. Actually, I'm going to go with the two lanes. I'm not particularly fired up to do any of these. I want to do my own design here. So I'm just going to click convert, and convert that road over.

And now, there is our component road. So like I said, the color is very similar to what we had with our design roads, so not a lot of difference there. One thing that I will point out is, now we have our stations along here. Beginning and end of curve on a couple different curves in that little area there, and so forth.

One of the things that I guess I didn't really notice-- I knew it was happening-- but if you zoom in, you will get the minor stations popping up as well. So it shows major stations till you get too close in, and then like, hey, you want to see where the 50-foot stations are? Pop those in for you. Just gives you a sense of where you are.

If I left-click off to the side there, you can see that it doesn't look like anything special there. If I left-click on it, it gives you that blue highlight. Even in this orbited view, if I right-click in-canvas here, I can show the road geometry, I can show the design speed, a lot of different options here that we didn't have with the design road functionality.

I'm actually going to turn on the Show Design Speed here. First I'm going to go to a more top-down view here. And I don't know if you can see it real well, but there's this greenish area here. It's a green band that shows that this is a speed along here.

Doesn't necessarily say anything about the speed right now, but I want to change the speed. Going into that curve, it's a little bit fast in here. So let's cut it down to 30 miles an hour instead of 45, and maybe we can save some lives.

So I'm going to pop over to the data card for this overall road. I'm not picking any component in particular. I'm doing this for the entire roadway. The speed here says it's 30 miles an hour. Well, this is actually 45, so I'm going to put that in.

And not that that changes anything, really, but it does put that information into that road. Now I can right-click Show Design Speed. It's on. I'm going to come down to Add Design Speed and tell it, yup. 30 miles an hour going into that curve. That's about what we want. I'll say OK.

And notice, now I can slide along that green band and identify where it's going to drop down to 30 miles an hour. I'm going to left-click it right there. There we are.

And then we get that little stick icon once it comes up here. Here we are. That little stick right there. And it's got a station right next to it. If you left-click on it, there's that station and speed option. You can just type in those fields what you want. I'm going to type in [? 1,525 ?] for my station, enter, and it's going to move that up to 1,525 right there.

Or as I mentioned before, if I left-click, I can drag it forward and backward. Turns on the tool tip, so I know exactly what station I'm at as I do that. Not the most precise way to set something like that, but you've got the option depending on what you're doing, and it might be just as well.

Another thing that I can do from here is turn on the superelevation. Unfortunately, look at the Show Superelevation is grayed out. A lot of roads, as you're starting out, will not have superelevation turned on.

So I'm going to go into the roads data card. Here's where I turned on the speed over here. The superelevation is just simply turned off. When I turn that back on-- left-click there, it's just a slide switch-- it gives me the colorization.

Now, this corner's a little bit awkward for this because I've got a curve here and a curve here. They actually-- like overlapping here. But I've got the colorization as I go into the curve, and as I come out over on the other side there. And it does put in the critical stations as we go in and out of these superelevations.

So those are the things that we can do for the in-canvas editing there. If I select this again and go into the-- actually, I'm going to turn off the superelevation just so it's not in our way there. I'm going to right-click and go into the Show Profile View, towards the bottom there. And in here, this is where we're looking at this.

Now, this road was built from the east going west, so this point here, unfortunately, is to the east. You've got to have that in your head what direction we're going here. But if I left-click and orbit in this field-- now watch, I'm going to do it slowly so you can see it happen. I get to a point where I've just gone too far, and bang, now we're in vertical.

And now, in the vertical-- this won't happen if you're not in vertical. You should have seen me while I was prepping for this. I was clicking on stuff like, why am I not seeing it highlight down here? Because I hadn't orbited far enough over to get into the vertical area.

But once you're in the vertical area, you can left-click on this grip point-- actually just hover over it-- and down here, this grip point will highlight. That's the curve that we're actually working with.

Now, notice at the grip point in-canvas, we've got this plus sign that shows up. That means that you can either go up and down or slide that PVI side to side, basically. You can also type in the elevation in the station and check the grade in and grade out as you do it.

You can't change the grade in and grade out here, but you can maintain it. You can watch it while you make changes. It's important, sometimes, just to know the other information that's in your neighborhood. So that's there for you.

Now, one of the weird things about this is, when I go into the profile view-- I'm just going to zoom into that area there-- I can see that vertical curve here. I can even see the ends of the vertical curves. They have little blue dots to indicate where they're at.

I can't change the vertical curves in the profile view. I have to do it up here in the in-canvas area here. There's a grip point here and a grip point here that I can grab and drag those back and forth.

So again, a little discombobulating that, hey, I can see buttons here. Why can't I use those? It's just not structured that way. You have to go up into the in-canvas to do it.

So that being said, I'm going to close out the profile view. And I'm going to come in here and start building a roadway. Now, I'm going to build one off to the side. My intent here is to give myself a little sandbox to work with.

What I'm about to do, you could do anywhere along this roadway here as well. And I'm not worried about forgetting to leave something there that I don't mean to have, it's just I like to build this stuff off to the side. It's the Civil 3D user in me, probably.

I'm going to build it down here somewhere, just a short little area where I'm going to say, well, this is the structure that I want, add it to my library, and then I can add it to this anywhere that I need to at any point. So just keep in mind that I could do this to the main roadway at any time that I feel.

I'm going to go up and create our component road. I'm going to scroll down here and find the lane. Basically, that's a subassembly piece if you're talking in Civil 3D lexicon there. I'm going to left-click a point and then double-click to end it. There is a right-click and draw option as well.

A lot of times, again, the Civil 3D user in me, click, click, click, right-click, oh, why didn't it end? I'm still drawing stuff. Yeah, I see a couple smiles, so I know my brothers are in the room.

So that kind of thing can be very discombobulating. So they've got to right-click and draw there to help you out. So I've got a lane there. I'm going to left-click off to the side. Actually, I'm going to highlight that again, right-click, and Insert Road Component.

Again, you could be doing this to the main road as well. Insert Road Component. We get that same list. I'm going to scroll down here, make sure that my lane-- for whatever reason, my lane comes unselected.

Now, as I'm moving this back and forth, watch the little yellow line near my cursor. It doesn't take up the whole space. It just takes up a portion of it.

If I move that in here, I'll left-click there. It's going to throw that lane in, but it says, hey, you've got some beginning and some end. We're going to transition for you.

The idea is, if you got a three-way intersection, like a turn lane or a lane to go around traffic, turning traffic, you've got the transitions there. It's already built. Those grip points are there for you to use.

Left-click on this and drag it. I'm lengthening the transition. Grab one of these grip points, and I'm lengthening the widened zone. If I grab one of the end points, notice that I have an Align To field. It's blank.

In fact, the first time I saw that, I was like, what's this Align To thing? It doesn't seem to be doing anything. Click it down, it says end of road. Oh, that's going to advance me all the way to the end of the road.

Here, not a big deal. On this road, though, you saw how far away the intersection was to the left and to the right or to the east and the west. You want to drag it all the way? That's what I was doing. I was dragging those all that way. Now that I know it's there, holy cow, it saves so much time.

So I'm going to say end of road, yeah. Sometimes I have to look around for things like this. A left-click on this one, and-- oh. Why is it not-- there we are. It does not let me link to that. I'm just going to leave that there.

I'm going to right-click and insert another road component here. I'm going to scroll up in my list because there's a curb and gutter out there. Not that we would really put a curb and gutter in this area, but I'm going to throw one in here just so you can see what it looks like out there.

And I'm going to right-click and insert a road component. Scroll down, find my shoulder, throw that in here. And start of road, and end of road. Get that out there.

Now, notice, I've got kind of a hiccup in the road there. But that's why I build it down here. I've got this little sandbox I'm working in. I don't have to do this near my actual roadway, and like, oh, man, now I got to back up and clean that up? All I have to do is not pick this area down here, and my design will be just fine.

Now, these additions here-- you've been seeing me build onto the outside edges. And that's, again, very Civil 3D. You click on the outside edges and throw things in.

But what happens if you realize, oh wait, I need a median in this area here? We're going to really divide this road up as we go around this corner, or something along those lines. I'm going to highlight on the roadway, go back into the insert components, there is a grass median area that they provide.

And then I'm just going to put it right in the middle there. Notice that yellow line that I've been using? Just drop it in the middle. I'll left-click it there.

Now, do you see it pop over to the right-hand side? I don't know why it picked the right or the left. Sometimes it did the left for me. The idea is that, well, that lane is going to the right. It's going further to the right. Well, what if it's not? I want this to be more centered up.

With this component selected-- in fact, I'm going to unselect. I'm going to hit Escape and let go everything. There, you can see it looks like a nice median in there.

If I left-click on that, and then left-click on the component itself where you get that stronger blue highlight on it, go over to the data card and down here-- well, the width of that is 8 feet, so first of all, I'm going to fix that. And the depth, eh, 0.66, yeah, that's about right. The slope is not negative 3%. That's actually a positive 3% in that area.

And then the center line attachment, watch what happens when I change this from right to center. I've got right, center, or left. I'll do center. And bang, it shifts that all over. The lanes shift, everything-- again, just like Civil 3D. They understand they're all related to each other, so they're all shifting over to match.