Hi,
I am working on alignment preparation in civil 3d which involves alignment plan production in multiple layouts since alignments are usually stretched over tens of kilometers.
I want to automate this layout and sheet preparation task using dynamo. The requirements include:
sheet preparation with plan view,
Using custom layout template,
Adding some common blocks or layouts to every sheet,
Adding drawing numbers to sheet using excel inputs etc.
Please let me know how can i get started with this.
@jacob.small …can you please suggest something on this? If any resource or anything is there which can help. It would be highly appreciated.
What have you tried so far?
Actually I am new to the Dynamo platform so there is no clue as of now. Please suggest some resources or already available scripts which can be customised or anything like that which can help me to start.
Well, it’s always a learning curve.
Have you checked the Dynamo primer? It’s a good start to learn more about Dynamo.
We have made some progress on this front.
I would consider this workflow pretty difficult.
The idea is to reverse engineer the plan and production template. Only you don’t need the external .dwt to drive layouts.
I think there are some bugs associated with creating the viewports
I also think there are some bugs associated with editing existing viewports.
I would love to have a more focused discussion with a civil group to strategize on this workflow.
All that is to say…if you are working on a paying job with a deadline, I think you would fail trying to be more efficient with dynamo on this task.
If you have plenty of time, I can share a few dynamos with you…just DM me.
Not something I have handy, but I am 90% certain it would be fairly easy… few questions first:
- How common a need is this?
- Is this something you do often (1x a project, 10x? 20x?)?
- Are there global industry standards for the output, or do they vary by region/jurisdiction?
- How does the alignment fit on the sheet typically?
- Do you rotate the outline to fit as much alignment as possible, or leave it ‘north’ even though that might sacrifice 50% of the page space?
@patrick.ericson I would also be curious to hear your perspective on the above too.
As a start you could look into PointAtParameter and CoordinateSystemAtParameter.
- It’s quite often I do in my project. Almost everyday.
- To give you the idea regarding the amount of sheets… currently I am working on a project which has a stretch of 115 kilometres and I am preparing the sheet and layout for approx every 40m so it’s around 115000/40 = 2500 sheets and there are multiple projects like this.
- There are no global standards…except the general sheet sizes like A1, A3 etc. Template for layout varies w.r.t project.
- In portion of sheet, there is a viewport expanding which has approx 40m of stretch, although it varies.
- We rotate the alignment specific to the position so that it can be clearly fitted into viewport and have a straight visibility to the viewer.
Ok…I will check the nodes related to point and coordinate system at parameter.
Can you post a sample dwg with an alignment that is 400m and an alignment that is super huge, and sheets set up for the 400m alignment? Everything else can be deleted. As this isn’t my area of expertise it’d take me a day or so to build the base dataset, and I wouldn’t know if it was accurate.
Sure, it will take me some time but I’ll send you the required files in a day or two.
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In your process, do you use the sheetset manager or do you creates the layouts and set their location and rotation manually?
Do you prefer to have the Layouts in the same modelfile or do you split them up in seperate dwg’s?
Just wonder because as @jacob.small say, are any typical routines to follow or any common workflows.
The biggest client in Sweden demands is to seperate all out drawing defintion files in seperate dwg’s but it won’t be that many as in your Project. The tricky part with that flow would have been placement and to split everything in to seperate files and naming them correct.
- is this a demand for you as well?
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To answer the first question…i don’t use any sheet set manager. I set the location and rotation manually only.
It’s not necessary, it depends actually. Since to have too many layouts in one file makes the file heavy in terms of its size. So then I try to split it. But for now I would just like to start with layout and sheet creation in one file. If this is achieved, then I would like to go to splitting part.
Viewport - Create From Excel.dyn (120.5 KB)
I have successfully created viewports from an excel sheet using this script…
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