Dos and Don’ts for Creating Civil Geometry in Bentley Products
Civil geometry is the foundation of an effective design workflow in Bentley applications such as OpenRoads Designer. How that geometry is created—and what it is connected to—can affect everything from future revisions to corridor modeling.
Following a few best practices can make your geometry more reliable, editable, and useful throughout the life of the project.
DON’T: Use MicroStation Primitive Elements as Alignments
Avoid using standard MicroStation lines, arcs, line strings, or complex chains and then change them to civil geometry. The number one culprit of corrupted geometry and corridors is geometry that started out as a MicroStation line.
Before creating an element, ask whether it is simply graphical information or whether it needs to participate in the civil design. If it will be used for modeling, stationing, profiling, annotation, or corridor development, use the applicable civil geometry tools.
DO: Use Civil Geometry Elements
Create alignments and other design geometry with Bentley’s civil geometry tools. Civil elements retain the rules, relationships, and intelligence needed for downstream design workflows.
If the element is intended to function as part of the civil model, create it as a civil geometry element from the beginning.
DON’T: Drop Complex Active Geometry
Dropping a complex alignment or profile will permanently break associations with corridors, superelevations, named boundaries, and civil labels.
DO: Make Civil AccuDraw Your Friend
Civil AccuDraw helps you create geometry in both horizontal and vertical, using bearings, distances, angles, offsets, slope, Sta. Elev., and other civil-specific inputs. It gives you greater control over how elements are constructed while supporting a rules-based design workflow.
DO: Use Persistent Snaps and Snap Rules—Purposefully
Persistent snaps and snap rules allow geometry to maintain a relationship with other elements. When the referenced element changes, the dependent geometry can update with it.
However, not every relationship should be persistent. Before creating a snap rule, understand how the geometry will be used later. For example, avoid creating snap rules to corridor linear features if you plan to use that geometry with corridor-editing tools. That dependency can limit or complicate future editing.
DO: Create Geometry in a Common Direction
Whenever practical, create related geometry in a consistent direction. Consistent element direction makes relationships easier to understand and can help prevent unexpected behavior in downstream modeling and annotation workflows.
What would you add to the list? Comment below!
