Do you know an enterprising salesperson willing to provide a full working demo of PowerCivil for me to punish for 60 days? If so, PLEASE forward my contact info from my profile to him or provide me with his.
This is a wholly unacceptable situation. At least 80% of my work involves storm and sanitary sewer design and then just for grins, trying to thread water mains in between them. I HAVE to know where everything is designed within .01' in X, Y & Z directions at every pipe crossing. Every job has at least 1 or 2 collisions that I have to massage just enough for minimum clearance unless I lose a lot or change the layout. Either case is a disaster that correct information may prevent.
addendum
OK . . . a couple hours cooling down and a short distraction of bashing the old standby grading, perhaps I can now make a few suggestions . . . that is if you think it worthwhile to try the procedure I was using that frustrated me enough to post this topic in the first place. I do know that the program will return accurate numbers for length, slope and bearing of your pipes from inside face of structure to inside face . . . until you do something that makes it want to correct your foolish error of moving the pipe end via grips to the structure face. To accomplish this you must confuse the daylights out of the program with your pipe properties and use a workaround I had to come up with for pipeworks in LDDT 2005. There is an equivalent Civil 3D version involving null structures but things got very ugly in record time when I tried it so . . .
You must first make sure your pipe lengths are determined by 2d length from center to center of structure (yes, exactly opposite of what you are trying to define). Also make sure your structure walls are the thickness you want and make you pipe network creating pipes and structures with your usual method. Being quit anal about such things, I have stick built the entire storm system in my layout with all structures precisely placed and then create my alignment first with PIs at the center of every structure and at the midpoint of each face where a pipe will penetrate. I then rotate my structures to their correct orientation from my layout plan and adjust them to the correct dimensions. At this point, the pipes all still meet right at the center of the structure but I have never seen them created by any method they do not meet there at first. From there it is grip a pipe end and move it to the desired wall at the alignment PI, correct the elevation and move on to the next and continuing through the network. At several points along the way something will happen and one, two or a whole run of pipes will be recalculated and the ends will revert to center. After retrieving your mouse from the next cubicle, repair those end conditions as before and continue. There is good news at the end of your struggle though. Once everything has finally stabilized and is in position, you can lock the layer your pipes are on and you don't have to worry . . . until . . . you need . . . to adjust the blasted . . . . . . .
I do agree that a sharpened burning stick to the eye might indeed be preferable, but sadly that method does nothing toward creating your storm sewers.
