Road works

[Guillermo1]

Hi, which is the most recommended tool to modelate a road works? Routes with slopes, etc

Operating system used: Mac Intel-based sonoma

[Barry Kelly · Accepted solution]

For a continuous road you could use a complex profile in the railing tool, with everything turned off except the one railing which would be the cross section profile of the road.

Archicad is not really the correct software for modelling roads easily though.

Barry.

[Guillermo1]

thanks Barry, so i have to considerate works with some external civil 3d modeler 

[Barry Kelly]

I guess it depends on how realistic and possibly automated you want the roads to be.

Do a search here in the forums for ... +roads ... and you will see a lot of posts and different methods.

Here is one of them using the railing tool.

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Modeling/Roads-by-Railling-tool-Profiler-manager/m-p/324915

Barry.

[Paul King]

Sadly, the railing tool corrupts curved railing segments where not horizontal.  Does not matter what resolution you give it in settings.

[Lingwisyer]

Depending on how much you are doing, you could look at Eptar's ArchiTerra. They have a trial you can download from their website. I have yet to try it out though so I cannot comment on if it is any good or not. I believe one of the devs and one of the sales people are on this forum.

[Paul King]

ArchiTerra looks interesting, but the cost is far beyond anything I could ever justify when it might get used only once every few years or so (this is true for most of the paid plugins on the market).

That said, I just discovered a workaround with the railing tool: start by placing only the curved segment of the path, including the slope. One placed, I found you can then extend the railing from each end of the curved section without the curved section corrupting. 

Clearly this should have been an easy bug for GS to fix, and it is not like they didn't know about it - but I suspect the developers have pretty much given up, other than adding new superficial gimmicks for marketing purposes.

I hope the product is open sourced when GS finally declare bankruptcy, having driven away their subscriber base. :{  At least that way, some of these things might eventually be fixed.

[Lingwisyer]

Yeah, it is not cheap... pretty sure we only paid a few hundred AUD for the second perpetual release of the Cigraph one back in the day... Eptar apparently rebuilt it though.