Traditionally, adding median and splitter islands in Corridor EZ for Civil 3D has been a manual and often onerous process. The procedure involves creating these islands as either Profile or Draped Strings, then adding them to a Model Builder model. A significant challenge arises when these islands overlap with road centerlines or edge strings, requiring the user to meticulously trim out these design strings. This task becomes particularly arduous when dealing with multiple islands, turning it into a slow and tedious process.
Enter Project Assist
Project Assist offers an automated approach to significantly streamline the process of integrating islands into road models. Utilizing the power of AI and machine learning, Project Assist intelligently predicts how alignments in a project might be utilized, setting up an optimized workflow and executing tasks with precision.
Automating Island Creation with Project Assist
Project Assist enhances the process of adding islands, making it more efficient and streamlined compared to traditional methods. The tool automatically detects island alignments within the project, converts them into strings, and seamlessly integrates them into the Model Builder model. Its most remarkable feature, however, is its ability to automatically trim out the edge and crown strings of roads wherever they intersect with the islands, ensuring a clean, accurate design without manual intervention.
The Benefits of Automation
Project Assist’s automation significantly enhances the creation of median and splitter islands, offering numerous advantages. Its most noticeable benefit is the considerable reduction in time and effort, freeing designers from extensive manual work. The provided example illustrates how the software adeptly trims centerline and edge strings intersecting with islands, a task typically done manually. These modifications are added into Model Builder, marked with “PA” to indicate their origin from Project Assist. Additionally, these automated edits are user-editable, allowing for customization. Essentially, Project Assist executes tasks in the same manner a user would, but with greater efficiency.
Island Deletion
It might be required to delete an island or recreate the island if there are significant changes to the geometry. Project Assist has its own object deletion command that will not only delete the string, but remove all references of the String. So, any references to the string as edits in Model Builder will be removed and if the String was a Draped String, then it will be removed from the Draped Strings list. When using the Project Assist object deletion command, it is important to tick on ‘Remove Alignment/String References.”
Conclusion
Project Assist enhances Corridor EZ for Civil 3D by offering automated string trimming, which not only saves significant time but also ensures a higher level of precision and accuracy in design. This feature streamlines the process of integrating islands into road models, allowing civil designers to achieve more with less manual intervention.