Topic: Lessons learned.

[jpostlewait]

You know when I started this thread I really expected it to be over by now.
But it's not.
A change of this magnitude isn't accomplished in a short time.
I don't want to scare anybody off but it takes years.
To realize the benefits of this change the crucial members of the design teams, the project managers, have to participate in the design process. To fulfill the promise of the product the guys that go to the meetings and wear ties have to do something different.
Rather than type meeting minutes and red line sheets they just have to go in and move the inlets.
They went to school to learn design not how to make powerpoint presentations.
When they return to actively participating this has a real chance.

[Dinosaur]

. . . Conklin Associates is a success story for James, Dana & the good folks at EE. We were up & running spitting out stuff in C3D in a two to three months. All new projects are in C3D . . . We are a 10 person firm. Survey crew, surveyors & engineers. A typical job in this firm is most likey tiny in magnitude compared to most other firms but it includes property & topographic survey, design, construction stakeout & as-built.

This is exceptional John.  Excepting the training, our company is nearly identical to yours.  Something special for you to look forward to is the creation of points for construction staking.  sinc has started to get a handle on this and has posted a link to some of his custom tools that you will find most valuable.  As-Builts are an absolute gas as well.  Most of our C3D As-Builts have been for a jurisdiction that not only requires the drawings be modified to reflect any deviation from design but also have completely different standards for plotted line weights screening and text size and completely different labeling.  Quite a challenge when you are still designing the adjoining phase.
 

. . . They should forget about & drop all new features until the beast tamed.

This has been my lone wish list item the last two years

[John Mayo]

Dino,

I look foward to finding Sinc's post. We have yet to get a C3D project to the as-built phase as approvals do not come fast or easy. We are always looking for insight & experiance to help plot our own course & I am sure Sinc's knack for, "telling it like it is" will help illuminate some dark corners as we proceed. Thank-you both for sharing.

Now I am off to see if a couple fixes were left out of the Readme file for C3D SP1.

1. Will a C3D corridor recognize the choosen alignment when setting a profile target for the alignment that was previously targeted

2. Will the add Breaklines dialog box remember the user input for min-ordinate & supplement factors or can I set them in a template.

These two drive me nuts.

[mjfarrell]

John,

Not sure what #1 is about, could you be clearer.

For Item 2, that would be, or should be a setting under the Command Settings for building surfaces however it is NOT there at this time.
And from reading the Service Pack 1 information it does not appear to be adding that functionality to the Surface>>Add Breaklines feature settings, or command settings that you are after.

[John Mayo]

When you get into targeting in a corridor. You may tell a link to attach to an alignment. You then go to target the profile & you need to select the same alignment & the profile.

Take a look at the screen shot. This dialog should call up the alignment that is typically already a targeted alignment for a region if you work from top down in the target dialog box(s). You actually have to tell the region to target alignments two times if you want to also target a profile.

[mjfarrell]

OK, I don't really get that part either, also not being able to use the same PGL for offsets as the baseline pgl....because well sometimes this is what needs to happen.  So one winds up copying the CL PGL to two new names to get the corridor to allow this.

Also I don't like that it presumes that the user has created a profile under every alignment name, so it goes looking for your Right ETW profile under the RT ETW alignment name, only often it is far easier to create these offset alignments in the CL profile view, much like the DT/Transition profiles worked in LDT.

[John Mayo]

Found SincPak3.

Looks like some real good stuff. I will try to play this weekend.

Big thanks for making it public Sinc.