When designing a road, it is very important to take the cost into consideration. This cost includes earthworks and material quantities as well as haulage. In this short video we look at how you create criteria for a material takeoff that takes your corridor shapes into account.
To start with you need an alignment in a site for which a corridor has been created. You will find that the section lines, the sampled sources and the material lists display neatly under the assembly within the site as seen within the project explorer.
Then you also create sample lines and space them such that the differential quantifications of swept shapes are relatively accurate. It pays to generate them accurately and carefully the first time around because it’s not that easy to alter them after the fact, at least not if you must space them based on some other alternative frequency.
We quickly discuss the composition of subassemblies within the assembly of the corridor, and we show how these shape codes are displayed using shape styles within sections that can be generated from the sample lines. The shape styles not only control the color line thickness and line type but also the hatch pattern scale and color that is used in the section generation.
We show that there is more than one way to get to the dialogue to generate material lists for the sample line. Once the dialogue is open, we can import a quantity takeoff criteria set or even create our own to map the typical shapes onto materials that we create.
When we load this criteria set, we then map them onto the actual alignment shapes. We also showed that you can import this criteria set into different alignments’ sample lines for a similar take off on that sample line’s corridor.
Once the quantities have been calculated we can then generate a total volume table report that we can open in XML and if necessary, copy and paste into excel or a similar package. Then you can re-work to get the columns into a form we prefer to generate quantities with.
We also generate tables for each material and paste them into our drawing (if we would like to have the tables present).
The fact that these materials are calculated from sample line to sample line, and that the cumulative total is calculated, results in us being able to map the quantities on to the delivery schedules and then also to costs over time. Generating quantities from the assembly shapes is therefore an extremely useful capability of civil 3D and should be used on your road projects.
If you need help adopting the Autodesk AEC Collection in your practice, please contact Micrographics so that we may be of assistance.

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