drawings

OpenRoads Designer: drawings

The humble drawing finally comes of age with Bentley introducing automated drawing production in its new-generation civil design tool, writes Greg Corke

Bentley has a bold vision for civil engineering and construction. Its ‘constructioneering’ partnership with Topcon presents an entirely digital future, where engineering models drive autonomous construction vehicles and reality is captured in real time for QA and as-built asset records.

It’s a compelling narrative, but in an industry that is often slow to embrace new technologies and processes, the humble 2D drawing continues to be the essential deliverable in civil engineering projects.

This has not been lost on Bentley’s civil design software development team, which has dedicated considerable resources to automating drawing production in OpenRoads Designer Connect Edition, the successor to Bentley’s civil engineering stalwarts: InRoads, Geopak, MX, and PowerCivil.

Laying the foundations OpenRoads first appeared in 2013 as a common modelling technology for InRoads, Geopak and MX, acting as a stepping stone to a unified civil engineering detail design tool. It delivered intelligent 3D design tools with parametric constraints and dynamic civil cells that adapted to the design as it changed. At the time, standards-based 2D deliverables were still handled by the individual applications. This remained the case until the launch of OpenRoads Designer Connect Edition last month.

The big difference with this new-generation software tool is the level of automation that has been built into drawing production. Previously, while drawings were derived from 3D models, they still required a fair amount of manual finishing and management.

“[OpenRoads Designer] is more interactive, in that a user can set up different ways of looking at the same information dependent upon the phase within the project that they’re at,” explains Steve Cockerell, industry marketing director, road and rail, Bentley Systems. “You might have a very simple view with a minimal amount of geometry showing whilst you’re designing, but a country or a project requirement might dictate that you need a very distinct set of infor- Laying out a plan onto geometry and they are not mation export for all of the intersection points — so it’s literally profile in OpenRoads Connect Edition left floating in space. Drawing title blocks can also just picking a style for that par- be automatically populated, as ticular phase for the same information to Cockerell explains, “I know it’s a simple be drawn or exposed.” thing, but every drawing has got to know

Cockerell’s use of the word ‘exposed’ is what it is and be referenced back to a plan important here as, in OpenRoads set. Then, if the design changes, you’ve got Designer, the drawing is inextricably to go back and change every set of plans linked to the 3D model. “It’s looking back that are affected by that, so it [OpenRoads to the geometry and extracting that infor- Designer] allows those design changes to mation and presenting it in the style, as automatically ripple through to the drawopposed to the more manual process that ing production end of things.” we’ve gone through before where you’d have to annotate your plan and other Conclusion items. It was semi-automatic.” With OpenRoads Designer Connect

In OpenRoads Designer, the new docu- Edition, Bentley has developed a fully mentation centre can deal with different automated drawing production system. changes in scale in different areas within This means that once the drawing sheets a single sheet and manage that for you. are set up, engineers can concentrate on

“It gives us complete flexibility to stitch the model, without having to worry about drawing sets together, to federate them the knock-on effect that last-minute with a set of named boundaries that con- design changes might have on documentatrol the drawing set in a ‘motif’ file,” adds tion. In essence, modelling and detailing Bentley’s Ian Rosam, director, product can become much more fluent. management, civil design. “And we can Working in this way, the time savings utilise that motif file to produce the draw- alone could be huge. However, by making ings for different series and requirements.” a drawing a 100% by-product of a model,

Importantly, any changes made to the trust in the model will likely grow, model automatically ripple through to the encouraging its use as a key deliverable. drawings. Edits can also be made directly And this could open doors to ‘construcin the sheets and OpenRoads Designer tioneering’ workflows, where the design updates the source geometry accordingly. model is digitally connected to construc-

This ripple effect extends to annotations tion and beyond. — so long as the user snaps them directly ■ bentley.com