SAC : My experience, my opinion

My final conclusion considering SAC is that it is only for very-very simple subassemblies.


It has development environ problems.
. Deleting input/output variables leads to freezing. Before deleting you should save or you loose everything until last save. The best way to delete is to save, close, reopen and delete.
. When it starts becoming "heavy" meaning lots of variables, containers, cases etc it responds very slowly. It is impossible to create a complex subassembly.


For someone like me that is used to VB.net...


...development environ is very annoying
.changing a variable's declaration name does not automatically change all its references
.cut and paste leads to renaming variables with _copy


...lucks of simple programming tools
.no arrays
.no loops
.no string manipulation
.variables are visible only after there declaration
.variables can not be private


It has bugs.
.enum size reducing leads to crazy behaviour


It lucks some functionality
.it is impossible to set the desired order for the user input values

SAC 2014 : BUG : deleting enum item

In the past i created a subassembly using SAC 2014.


New needs made me to clone it and create a slightly different one.


Among other changes i reduced by one the population of the items of an enum.
Nothing worked fine after this.


While in SAC experimenting with different scenarios i noticed that when i changed to none a superelevation variable of my own, just after this action, this variable changed by itsehelf to Side!!!
And it happened no matter what workaround i tried.


I tried importing the subassembly to C3D 2014 so to see what will happen. Abnormal behaviour. Changing values to the reduced enum resulted to disappearing points (!) and various error reports.


Finally after restoring the erased enum value everything worked fine!

Civil 3D 2014 : Corridor surfaces tips and workarounds

Creating corridor surfaces can be done by two main ways.
Feature lines and Links.

When created by links there are many cases that civil 3d jump from links to points that do not belong to those links.
So the best way to create a correct surface is to use feature lines.
But in this case when creating custom subassemblies you must assign codes to all points for all cases.
Another disadvantage is that there are cases that surfaces may end to points with various coding.

Another serious issue has to do with boundaries.
Selecting automatic corridor edges in most cases gives a wrong boundary.
Interactive works fine.
By object works fine.
The best of all is to select which feature lines to use.But it can not be used for all cases.

Civil 3D 2014 intersection corridor surfaces. Multiple baselines, boundaries, angled edges and Trimble Link

Two roads end in agle side by side to a third road.
I put them all in one corridor. I used three different baselines.

Trimble Link works only with corridor surfaces. So i had to create surfaces.
I tried both Feature Lines and Links.
In both cases surface was created only for the first baseline.
To create surface for the second one i had to uncheck the first baseline and so on.

Well, i did it this way.
I kept checked only the desired one. I created the surface. No matter Feature or Links the only way to get a correct boundary was to use the Interactive method.
I then tried to create a surface for another baseline keeping only this one checked. Everything went fine. I tried to revert to the previous one and everything got a mesh. I had to recreate the surface from scratch. Even worse the so painfull to create boundary.

So finally although the best way to create Cross Sections at intersections is to use a single Corridor with multiple baselines you cannot create multiple surfaces for Trimble Link and keep them correct.
You have to make seperate corridors.
Afterwards you have to create surfaces to use them in other corridor cross sections.

Finally i tried to create corridor surfaces using interactive boundaries. Ok, i did it. I exported the surface using Trimble Link. I loaded the DC file to Trimble GeoOffice. The angled part was wrong! In one case while importing the DC file i got a warning message. So angled corridor surface finish is possible. But it is useless for Trimble Link.

The whole idea i had was to create a total eg asfalt corridor surface and export it to Trimble. Bummer.

Leica X-Change and Civil 3D 2014 : Offset subassemblies not exported

Well, i created a corridor with some offset assemblies.
When exporting corridor to a Leica Road Job using Toolbox->Export to job->Corridor only main assembly codes were exported.
Damn. At least before going on site i used the simulator and found this disadvantage.