Pressure Pipe Networks: The Next Generation

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Welcome, everyone to our class. This is Pressure Pipe Networks: The Next Generation. My name is Brian Levendowski. I am a firmwide CAD coordinator at Kimley-Horn.

CHARLIE OGDEN: And I'm Charlie Ogden. And I'm a product manager at Autodesk.

And in this presentation today, we're not planning on mentioning any forward-looking statements. But in case, we accidentally do, the purpose of this slide really is just to, don't make any purchasing decisions. And don't rely on those types of statements for things that aren't actually already in the product. Things can change. Since this is a recording, maybe just pause this and read through this slide. Thanks.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: So talking through an agenda a little bit, we want to start with some history of pressure pipes. We're going to go into a demonstration. We're going to be focusing first on plan layout and design. And then we move into a demo on profile layout. Then we'll conclude with some setup tips, some template configuration tips, as well as some conclusions on next steps for you moving forward.

CHARLIE OGDEN: So we just wanted to briefly talk about the history of pressure pipes. Initially, there were-- well, not initially. But early on, there were gravity pipes or pipe networks were added to the product. And we got a lot of feedback-- or Autodesk feedback that those didn't really support workflows for pressure piping like water and gas and things like that more closely follow the surface.

So around 2013, 2014 releases, there was an initial version of pressure pipe networks that let you lay out pipes, fittings, appurtenances, which represented valves and hydrants and things like that. That work continued into the 2014 release.

And then as customers started to use it, I think we got a lot of feedback that there were some gaps, I guess, in the workflow related to what gravity had. There was maybe clunkiness in the way that you laid out in the workflows and also maybe some gaps in content as well. And we started looking at filling in some of that, built in some content gaps first, while we also kind of researched what needed to be done to make the tools better and more usable.

So we got a lot of feedback and a lot of direction. A couple of things that came out of it was doing more of a path-based layout so you could control the pipes, the fittings based on the path instead of individual parts. And also, just it was clunky before. So making layout and editing much easier, which included being able to just automatically put in the right bins, rotate them correctly as you're doing edits.

So a lot of that work was done for 2021. And then we continued on with some additional improvements just to complete the workflows a bit. Where we saw feedback from customers, we were initially-- we started following in alignment. There were some stability issues there that we fixed since that initial release, trying to keep the parts tied more closely to the alignments and the profiles. And that's where we're at today.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: So we're going to jump into a demo a little bit first on plan layout. And I'm going to show off this path-based layout that Charlie was talking about. We're going to show it using it a few different ways, tracing an xref site plan or creating it directly from objects like polylines line or alignments. We're going to show how those fittings, the bends and tees and things are auto created.

This is kind of a big part. It's a secondary feature to it. But it really makes the tools that much more user friendly. We'll create some tees and some hydrants and show you how all that works together. We'll do an example of a horizontally curved pipe as well and finally, some labeling and show you how that works.

So if we jump into Civil 3D here, Charlie is going to walk us through an initial creation of pressure networks. And then I'm going to show a few more examples as well.

CHARLIE OGDEN: Yeah, so there's more than one way now to create a pressure network. What we're going to do, though, is start with the creation tools on the pipe network pull down. And this will let us free draw a pressure network. This is creating a network first. So Brian's just naming it there. And it's also creating this new concept of a pipe run, which is essentially an alignment underneath.

But this is used for the path of the parts along this pipe run, so just naming it there. Similar to early work earlier workflows, we're selecting a parts list that's made up of pipes fittings and appurtenances, choosing the starting pipe size and material, a reference surface so that the elevations of the pipes are set correctly according to a cover beneath that surface.

And if you want to use a reference alignment for labeling station and offset relative to something else, like Brian's selecting the roadway centerline alignment here, you can do that. And then we just say OK. And that's going to create the pressure network and then open up this toolbar that's changed since the initial version of pressure pipes. But now we're in this mode where we can lay out a pipe run.

And we just freehand draw it. Brian does have some line work underneath. So we're just kind of tracing it. But really, you could just be drawing this free in space. There is the compass still from earlier where it's constraining you to the available bend angles. You can see 45, 22, 90, at each pick you make.

One change since the earlier release, I think you could see is it's holding this 45 degree. It's not going to quite hit where you wanted it to. So you can turn off snapping to give a little flexibility. He also has dynamic input turned on. So as he zooms around, you can see the angle that it is making. So you can see if it's within an allowed tolerance there.

So then you can click to finish that off. And now it goes and creates the parts along the pipe run. Now when you first select this, it is an alignment. Like I said, the pipeline is an alignment underneath. So the first pick, you see alignment grips. And you can edit the path of this pipe run just as easily as you can edit an alignment, so just moving these PI points around.

And what it's doing is automatically changing now those elbows at the bend. So it just made that a 90-degree elbow here. You can also remove the append or bend and PI point at the same time. So it's remove that out. There are tools to add them back in if you want to add a bend. And again, it'll put in the closest matching fitting here.

Now I think what it's showing here is kind of a 3D view of the parts and the outside or inside lines from the pipes. You might want to display your pipes differently so we can change styles to control that. There are center line options both for the pipes and for fittings and appurtenances. But you could also use a style that shows a symbol instead for say the fittings here.

You could choose centerline. But I think Brian's here is going to show a symbol there more for the fitting. So different ways to display that now beyond what we had before. Now I guess one other thing we could look at adding things, so adding in appurtenances.

You can search in this keyboard. Maybe there's a certain gate valve. You could type that in there, find the pertinence you want to add, and then hit Add Appurtenances and then just click a point along the pipe run and it'll place that in.

It breaks the pipe to put that appurtenances in. But it's not breaking the pipe run. So there are now a pipe on either side of this. But it's all part of one pipe run. And again, when you pick it the first time, you get the alignment. If you pick it a second time, you'll get the individual part. And in this case, I think Brian had the wrong sized part. So maybe we can swap that out to an 8-inch gate valve.

And say OK and so swapping parts similar to before. But these now stay-- actually, Brian, if you do one more thing and move one of those elbows around, the elbow on the right, or sorry, the elbow on the left but just next to the appurtenance. The appurtenance broke the pipe. But it didn't break the run.

So it stays in line along the path of the pipe run. Yeah, I miss anything there? Just a quick overview of one way to lay these out.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Yeah, yeah, so it's a big change over how pressure pipes used to work. I've tinkered with them over the years. And at Kimley-Horn, we've been pretty excited about what these new tools look like. So let me walk you through some other ways to work with these. Let's come over here, for example. Let's say we have a tee and another run here. And I've got some geometry and an xref.

But instead of tracing it, perhaps I just want to create it from an xref object. So I can do Create pipe run from object. I choose xref down here and pick this polyline. I know this is a residential scenario. So I'm going to follow that same procedure where I prefix my alignment or my pipe run name with water. And then I type in my street name.

This is going to be an 8-inch DIP again, same reference surface. Reference alignment will be Monroe and then the same cover. And it just creates that pipe run. Now to clarify what's happening, if we look in tool space and prospector, just like we're used to with pipe networks or the old pressure networks, your networks show up right under here.

What's different now is you have a fourth item type in here. You have pipe runs. And these are alignments. And so like any alignment, they also show up under alignments. And in this case, under miscellaneous alignments. So these objects right here are the same as these objects here. Just for convenience, they're listed in both places.

You have pressure pipes, fittings, and appurtenances as well. Fittings are all your bends and tees and crosses. Appurtenances are gate valves, hydrants, and so on. So when we create a new pipeline like this, it doesn't automatically just put the tee in there. You have to help it out a little bit. So what I find works great is to grab this little arrow grip and slide it back along that same bearing.

Then when you bring it forward, you want to look for the glyph that shows that it's going to break the pipe. And when you do that, it's going to find the size of these pipes and put in the appropriately sized tee. You can break pipe runs, just like you might break a polyline. I can choose break pipe run up here. And I get that same break command. And now it's two separate pipe runs.

I can merge pipe runs, pick those same ones, merge them back together. Because those were two separate alignments, it picked up on a PI that was there. And it thinks a fitting should go there because there's now a PI in this pipe run alignment. So you can just simply choose Remove bend PI and get it back to that single pipe. So it does a lot of the work for you. But you have to help it along a little bit.

We'll come back to this one a little bit. But let me show you another way to create a pipe run. Oftentimes, we have a centerline alignment. And our pipe run is to be 10, 15, 20 feet off of center line parallel to it, right? Old school ways, we might run the offset command and then turn that into something else. We can do that same Create pipe run from object.

This case here, I have a D-reft alignment. I can choose this. The name of this street is Roselle. So I'll call it Water Roselle. We'll do the same pipe size. My reference alignment for my station offset will be this center line now. And then the difference here is we're going to use this horizontal offset.

So for this client, for these standards, I know that should be 19 and one half feet to the right. If it's negative, we put it to the left and then that same four-foot cover. And it takes that alignment, basically runs an offset command of it and then creates the pipe run for us. Now, it's not dynamic. If I move this alignment, the pipe run doesn't move with it. It's a one-time offset.

Some things to look out for like this white line, this is the boundary of my reference surface. If your pipe run goes outside of that, it's going to dive down to zero. So be aware of what you're doing with that. So I'll snap this right back to here. Notice, there's a few other grips on there. The square grip is to just totally control its standard grip. Change the bearing of that pipe run.

The arrow one you saw the plus grip is to launch you into the pipe run freehand drawing again. And here I've got it with snaps off. If I turn snapping on, it locks into those fitting sizes.

Now one of the things that came out with one of the recent releases of pressure pipes is the ability to re link a pipe run. And I wanted to point this out because there's a lot going on behind the scenes. All these parts are linked to alignments. And with some of those dynamic relationships, sometimes we can see problems. And so there's a very easy fix to it.

Sometimes you might see our line would become disconnected from your parts. There's a relink option in here. That is your friend. It relinks the alignment back to the parts and you're off and running again.

All right, let's come back here to this Monroe pipe run. And say we've got this hydrant to add in here, every time we have a new path, we have to create a new pipe run. So I'm going to run Create new pipe run. This time, I would name it something like water Monroe hydrant one. So depending on the size of your project, you're going to generate a lot of pipe runs and resulting alignments.

So be kind of choosy about how you name them. You can rename them after the fact. But it helps keep things organized. In this case, I'm going to do a 6-inch DIP. And my reference alignment will be a back to the center line right here. So I'll hit OK. This time, I'm going to freehand in. And I'm going to snap right here.

Now you can see that break pipe showing up. But if you have an exact point to snap to, you want to turn on your O-snaps as well. And you have to kind of hover around to get both glyphs to show up. Once you get that, click. And now those pipe runs will connect there. I'll snap to the end point here. And I'm off and running.

Here again, we can see that tee was put in there, an 8 by 6 tee. Automatically, it sized it for me. Let's go ahead and put a hydrant in. To do this, I want to jump into a couple of view ports here so we can see the parts in 3D. And here, we can see that tee.

And this is I mean this is part of the reason we use pipe networks and now pressure networks is because we're generating 3D parts. Even if you show in plain view just a single center line, to have the 3D parts means crossings. It means profiling all of that is done for you. Who wants to draw things manually in profile view?

So let's add a hydrant. As we mentioned before, hydrants are appurtenances. They'll show up here. And you could type some letters in here to filter it out. And what I'm showing here is the Kimley-Horne catalog. And we've got offices across the whole country. And so we have all sorts of different buried depths.

These are hydrant assemblies, meaning it's the vertical bend, the vertical pipe, and the hydrant itself. And that's really what we recommend you do. You can put in hydrants only. But this is quite a bit easier. And like I said, this is the Kimley-Horn catalog. But the out-of-the-box catalog has some examples of these hydrant assemblies as well.

So go check them out. Make them your own. And you'll be off and running. So I'm in a four-foot cover. This project is in Texas. So I'll choose that. I'll choose Add appurtenances. And you get a glyph that shows up. This is not an O-snap. This is, I see a pipe run. And I'm going to connect to it. And then the result is that hydrant assembly.

Behind the scenes, this thing isn't dynamic. It doesn't stretch. It's an AutoCAD solid with an attachment point right down here. So that's why you need those different covered depths.

CHARLIE OGDEN: And we have heard customers would like these to be more parametric, something that would be nice to do. We do have on our list on our public roadmap. So something would be great. People can vote for it. That is important.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Yeah, for sure. Let me show you one other example. We mentioned curved pipe. I'm going to come up here where I've got-- the initial plan was to do 11 and 1/4 bends through here. But I'm going to curve this pipe instead.

So I'm going to add a new pipe run. And this time it'll be-- let's say it's PVC, a 10 inch. And my reference alignment will be this one here. And if I start right up here, we'll do an intersection snap. Come down here, I'll do an end point snap. And this is snapping at the PC, the start of where the curve would be.

And here's where you want to follow in the command line. Click curve down here, type C for curve. And then it says, specify point of the initial direction. This is the PC bearing. So you want to keep your snapping on. And using that compass, just snap straight forward. And then it launches you into like, if you ever freehand draw a polyline, it kind of feels like that.

Do an endpoint snap at where the PT should be. Or if you're just freehand drawing it in, go ahead and do that. Snap there. And then you have to come and click Straight to get back to straight pipe drawing. Now, because there's a PC and PT in there, the toolset is going to think you wanted a fitting in there. You can swap that out for another sleeve or something like that. You can also just pick it and delete it.

Now, different pipe materials have different flex requirements for them. For example, I can jump into the properties of this pipe. And one of the parameters in it is the minimum flex radius.

I haven't configured this in my parts list. But for a given material and size type, you can set that minimum flex radius. And then when you run the design check on here, it will flag that pipe if you have a radius that's too small for that type and size of pipe.

So one last thing we want to cover here before we jump into profiling our water lines is just the labeling. And I just want to show briefly here how it works. It's pretty much the same as pipe networks or the old pressure networks. I can choose any of these one-off commands or do the Add pressure network labels and from here.

I've got different label styles I can choose from. These are very much, like I said, similar to the gravity networks. You can jump into the styles, label anything any way you want, pretty straightforward. So we can do an entire network pressure plan, choose that, and our labels come in.

There's drag state to them. And I've got mine labeling stationing and description. And so part of building out pressure pipes and making them work for your organization is making sure that your parts list has the description that you want to push all the way to the labels because it first pushes to the description field and then to your labels. Now, you can reference other parameters in the parts as well. This is a really handy one though because it gives me my full part size and name and everything.

Let's talk a little bit about profile layout. We're going to start with adding a pipe run to a profile view. And there's a few ways to do it. We'll show you a couple of those options. We're going to move on to discussing cover-based design versus fully design profiling. And the other option here is like just a standard four-foot cover. The lower one here is where I'm actually designing the profile as I see fit up and over pipes, depending on what's required.

We're going to show you how to do some utility crossings, including using standard vertical bends like this to get perhaps under a storm line as well as using curved pipe for a directional boring scenario. Finally, we'll add some labels at the end as just an example of how you might label and profile view. So let's jump back to Civil 3D. And Charlie, why don't you walk us through how we get this stuff in a profile view and some of the basics of pressure pipes?

CHARLIE OGDEN: Yeah, and there are different ways. Like Brian said, we'll show some different ways. One way you might be used to putting parts into a profile view is draw parts in profile view. So we could just start with a profile view. And since this is an alignment, the pipe run is an alignment, we can create a surface profile from that. And then we'll create a profile view for it. Then we can add the parts in there.

So here, by just creating a surface profile, and then we'll style and draw that in profile view and just create a new profile view here. And we won't have the parts yet. This would add parts for the whole network. I want to show a better way just to add like a pipe run, the parts associated with this alignment basically.

So we can place this profile view in here. And then you're probably used to just adding parts using the draw parts in profile view command right here. But what we're going to do instead is go to the command to the left of it, pipe run profile. And this will let us create profiles a few different ways.

What we can do now is just add or draw a profile, draw the parts an existing profile view, so that middle option there. And if we say, OK to that, what it's going to do is add the pipe run parts to this pipe run's profile view. And you'll notice here, we talked about cover. And this doesn't look like it's following that surface profile the entire way.

What it's doing is there's a fitting at the start and the end. And it's following at those locations. And if we go back into that pipe run profile command, you'll see there's a couple of ways to display or to do the offsetting. Right now, it's set to offset at bends, which is at the start and end. So you just get a straight line. If instead we change it to cut length, this is similar to the old follow surface option in the old pressure pipe networks.

And this will follow at that 4-foot cover. And now it's following that profile pretty consistently. It's basically following at each cut length. I think we select this pipe. You'll see the grips there at whatever cut length increment these pipes are set at.

And you could directly make some edits here. Maybe this isn't quite as smooth out as you want it to be. So you could tweak these PVI points here just to smooth that out, make some editing. Now remember, we told it to follow the surface basically at a certain cover. So what all these individual edits are actually doing in the background is creating some overrides.

And if we go back into this pipe run profile on the Overrides tab, you can see it created a range of overrides. So that's where Brian made those edits. So basically, the rest of the run is following the surface at that 4-foot cover, except for this overridden range. Now you can delete that. And it'll get you right back to following the surface as it was before.

So you see the pipe kind of went back there like it was. And then I guess we can go back into the pipe run, some other settings here. We could change the cover. That'll change the entire path here to follow a different cover, so just lowering that from four to five. And then I think, yeah.

And then Brian can show some other ways. There is the Overrides tab there. We could do a few other things in there too just to do something differently in a certain range. And I think Brian will touch on some of that.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Yeah, thanks, Charlie. So as you can see, it's a pipe run as an alignment of profile. And it controls the pipes. You move them around, the pipes move with it. It's as simple as that. But just a standard cover doesn't cut it a lot of times. We need to design this in more detail.

And so what I'm going to do is add in some of our storm crossings here. And we kind of get a situation where we need to design this in more detail. So I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to use a Kimley-Horn tool. We write a lot of internal software here. And we've got one here where I can choose a profile view. And it will search the entire drawing for all crossing pipes, whether they're pressure or pipe networks.

So it found some of these crossings here. I'm going to remove the labels for now. And then I just need to set my profile view settings-- these are standard pipe network options here-- to use an override style for those storm crossings. Oftentimes, you get in profile view and you realize, well, where is some of my other parts too? I thought there was a tee around here.

Let's zoom back down here. We made this pipe run here. We've got another one here. The tee was never created. So we'll do that same trick where we grab the arrow grip, get it to break the pipe like that. And now you're wondering, well, should it just show up? It will. Because we've added the entire pipe run, and all the parts associated with it will just show up in the profile view.

So as Charlie said, at this point, we could just sit here and edit PVIs all over the place. But if you're showing your profile in your sheets, it's likely not going to cut it. So we've got another option here. We can create our own layout profile. And so here's what the workflow is. Choose your profile view and, either through this method or any other, create a standard layout profile.

So I'm going to call this one, top of pipe Roselle. That's the name of my street. And TOP for Top of Pipe. And I'm going to choose no labels at this point and hit OK. Now I've already got a guide of where my minimum cover is, my 4 feet. So I can use this to snap to. But I want a much simpler design. I don't want I don't want it to deflect every 20 feet. I don't need to show that.

So we can come along here, put a PVI right there. Bring this below this pipe. This looks like we would need a bend. But keep in mind, my profile view has vertical exaggeration. In this case, it's 10 to 1. So that's really a very small bend there.

I'm going to bring this across here. I think we have a little bit of a slope there. And I'm not going to trace the whole thing out. But this is what it would look like. You give yourself as an easy of a profile as you can to work with. And it doesn't have to be final. Just put something in to start with. And then go from there.

So there's our layout profile. Now what we need to do is to tell the pipe run to follow that profile instead. So that pipe run profile dialog box that we were in before, you're going to jump into this often to manipulate how your pipeline behaves. So what we can do in here, instead of leaving it as 4 feet from this surface, I can choose my new type of pipe profile and have it follow that now.

I don't want to be 4 feet below that because I actually drew the top of pipe. So in this case, I want it to be zero. Now if you wanted to draw invert, you can. You've just got to play with the offset to get it to work out. The offset is relative to the outside top of the pipe.

I can hit OK to this. And now my pipe run will follow that alignment, which gives me that profile. If I change that profile, the pipes move with it. OK, so pretty powerful compared to how it used to work before. There's a few gotchas. You've got to be careful with it.

If I pick my pipe, just like in plan view, it highlights the profile. So there's a profile right there. There's the one with the 20-foot interval of PVIs. I also have a profile right here. This is the one I just designed. So you got to kind of keep it straight. The one you want to edit is your new one. The other one just follows this one. That's just how the tools work behind the scenes.

What I do to kind of keep it straight is to come into my profiles and turn off the one that the toolset is generating for me automatically, just so I don't get confused by it. And now when I pick my pipe run, it doesn't highlight any profile. And up here, I just have my design profile.

All right, let's take a look at dealing with a crossing like this. Now it would be great if it would just see that pipe and put in all the bends for us. But it doesn't know what you want to do. It doesn't know the size of the bends. So let's do something fairly typical.

And what we found at Kimley-Horn is to give ourselves some kind of a block to help us put in these bends. So here, I've got a simple dynamic block. And the way it works is I snap to the bottom of my crossing pipe. And I've got a few options. And by the way, this is in the sample drawings that we're using. You guys are welcome to this. Take this block make it your own.

And I've got a few different things where I can first grab this and snap to perpendicular to the pipe. I've got a bit of a slope to the pipe. I can change what the middle portion, that length will be. I can control that. I can choose what size bends. I've got 11 and 1/4. If I choose 22 and 1/2, that would make it steeper. Again, 10 to 1 vertical exaggeration so it looks way steeper than a 22 and 1/2.

Another option here is to, when you're designing this stuff, put your profile view into a nonvertically exaggerated view because if you've got different vertical exaggerations, you need a lot of different block iterations. Anyway, lots of options there. The key, have some kind of block that helps you along.

So once you have that, you've got things to snap to. And it's as simple as some profile editing, insert a PVI right up here. This is that original design profile that we created. And then snap down here as well. And when you do that, it's going to automatically bend that pipe, not bend it but deflect it to go around there.

It's going to put in deflections at those locations. Now, it doesn't add an actual fitting. That's an edit to the pipe run. So you have to put that in there after the fact. So the first process, and the PVIs. Second step, pick your pipe run and choose Add bend.

And just like in plan view, you don't have to tell it what size. But you do have to snap to where it should go. So it's grabbing those. It's putting in 11 and 1/4 bends. If I look at the fitting properties, I get 11 and 1/4.

So I put this together the first time. I was like, well, that's pretty cool. But what about when it changes? What about the 1,500 changes we deal with through the project life? Let's do that. I'm not going to go move the pipe. But let's say this storm moved.

Well, the first step I would do would be to come move this block and reattach it to wherever that storm crossing is. And now my pipe run needs to shift with it. This is all pretty dynamic. If you change the PVIs of your design profile, the fittings move right with it.

Grab this. I'm doing a parent intersect between this and that. I missed it. Let's do the pipe first, a parent intersect between this and that. There we go. Fitting moves with it. Same thing down here, snap to your block.

Grab the right grip, though, and finally this one. So does it do 100% of the work for you? No. Does it do 98? Yes. So it's pretty handy. So that's dealing with conventional crossings like that. What if we're dealing with a big directional drill scenario? It could be 1,000 feet long. Maybe it's going under a stream, something like that.

Let me show you how something like that might work. And to do this, I'm going to expand my profile view to be a lot deeper. We're going to go down 15 feet or so to deal with this. I'm going to move my profile view down. And I'm going to steal this same block right now, bring this over.

First thing is attach this where you'd like it to be. Now, you could base it on the surface or the pipe itself that's running through there. I'm going to use this grip and snap to perpendicular. Again, you don't have to use this block. This is just one we to use Kimley-Horn. But we found it to be pretty handy.

Perhaps that's the depth of my drill. And maybe the length of that is going to be 500 feet long. And just like before, what we want to do first is to set the PVIs and the profile.

Let's check our bends as well. Let's say we've got 22 and 1/2 foot or degree bends in there, stretch these up. So then it's editing that PVI. This is actually easier than over here because all you got to do is edit the profile. We'll put in fittings at the top. But down here, all we want to do is bend the pipe.

So I'm going to pick my profile again, edit profile geometry, and insert some PVIs. I think I picked the wrong profile. Let me undo that.

There we go. I was editing the pipe run profile. You want to make sure-- this is what I mean. It can be easy to edit the wrong one. Make sure you're editing the one that you're designing. So I'll insert those PVIs again. There we go. And we're not putting bends down here. But we've got to give ourselves PVIs first.

So now that we have our PVIs in there, we want to put in a circular curve. So we'll come down here to a free circular curve PVI based. And I'm going to snap to that location. I'm going to do a radius of 250. And it drops that in there. And the pipes, based on my cut length, will follow that. I can do the same on the other side, 250.

So I'm putting a circular curve in my profile. And now you might be thinking, well, that's not very curvy there, right? So it comes down to the cut length. Much larger radii, the 20 feet is probably going to cut it. But let me show you another pipe in here where I've got a cut length that's much tighter interval.

It's at 20 right now. I've got a pipe in here. Let's go to the PVC 8 inch, go in their pipe run profile, hit OK. And now we get a much more curved-looking pipe. Again, it's vertically exaggerated. Depending on the deflection that's happening there, it might flag this error on you. You can always clear these pressure pipe warnings out of there.

So then right up here, of course, all we do is add our PVI and our bends. And we're on our way. So this would be right up towards the top of the drill. And this would be down below. You can do curved pipes themselves. What we found is more people find it easy to put curves right in the profile instead of curving the pipes themselves.

So one last little thing, we'll throw some labels on here just to give you an idea what that would look like. Go to Add pressure network labels. And I'll choose our fitting style to be profile. We can add these in here like that.

If you have the wrong style, this is very similar to gravity networks. You choose a different style and everything updates for you. In this case, I wanted those to label vertically like that. And again, that information just reads right from the parts themselves. So really handy, easily labeling in that way.

So with that, I've got a few closing remarks we want to make. First around setup tips and tricks, you have to build a complete parts list. This is critical. We were just dropping parts in there because we had them ready to go. You've got to have this. Out-of-the-box part list is great. You're going to have to make some modifications though.

One improvement, a big improvement though, is with parts lists, you can now set the catalog right inside of it. In fact, you can set multiple catalogs within one pressure parts list. That means that the catalog path is safe to your template, not to your AutoCAD profile. Like I said, work with that out-of-the-box catalog. And then Save As, where needed.

A catalog consists of a SQLite file and then a folder with a bunch of content files inside of it. You can copy that, open it up in the content catalog editor, and work with it there. You want to design your parts list, name them in such a ways that feed your sheet creation, your labeling, and clash detection, but nothing more. Don't obsess about having perfectly modeled parts.

Make sure they look decent in all your views, the labeling works, and then move forward. It's not worth putting in details that aren't necessarily needed there. Create some blocks and styles that help with this. Here's that block I was using in profile. We have a label set that you can put on a profile that will tell you the grade in and the grade out and what's the closest angle at that PVI? What kind of fitting should go in there, handy things like that.

And then once you've got that stuff set up, configure command settings to really speed up processes like default depth of cover, default cut lengths. Those kinds of settings can really help with your template. A few conclusions, use the path-based workflow and create a pipe run for every street, every run that you have to make.

The old parts-based method is still in there. It's kind of hidden. But it's still there. If you use the ribbon the way it's intended, you're going to use the path-based method. The automatic bend insertion, that works in plan. But if you remember in profile, we had to automatically add bends.

It chose the right one, it rotated it for us. But you got to tell it to put them in there. If you're not designing vertically, if you're not profiling it, just set the constant cover. And set the offset to be at cut length. And it'll just follow your surface.

For partial or full profiling though, you need to create a design profile or multiple profiles. We had chosen one override profile right here for our reference profile. But on the Overrides tab, you'll find that you can choose a profile for say one crossing. But then have the rest of it just be based on surface cover.

I can't stress this enough, let the tools do the work for you. Don't try to pick fittings and rotate themselves. Edit your alignments or profiles to get the fittings to rotate and size automatically for you. Sometimes they take a little bit of finessing. But they really do the work.

And one question we've been asking ourselves at Kimley-Horn is, well, how does this compare to gravity pipes, like old workflows for pressure systems in gravity pipes or just using polylines and blocks? And don't take it from me. But every engineer, all the teams I've spoken with at Kimley-Horn, yes, there's a learning curve there. But hands down, it's better.

And I was showing you water line examples here. But we can do force mane, all kinds of different systems. If it's a pressure cover-based system, pressure pipe networks will work for you. So with that, thanks a lot for watching. And we hope you enjoyed.

CHARLIE OGDEN: Yeah, thanks, everyone.