Feature Requests

Good morning and Happy New Year,

I'm currently working on a road widening project and thought of a couple of features that would be handy

Firstly a back fill feature, for example, in my current project the road is widened up to new concrete retaining walls and the ability to quantify the void fill behind the retaining walls from sub-formation to formation level would be a great time saver.

Secondly, the ability to view the completed works in 3D. At present we can only view each element individually.

Only some thought I had which might find there way into future updates.

Cheers

Tim

Good morning and Happy New Year,

I'm currently working on a road widening project and thought of a couple of features that would be handy

Firstly a back fill feature, for example, in my current project the road is widened up to new concrete retaining walls and the ability to quantify the void fill behind the retaining walls from sub-formation to formation level would be a great time saver.

Secondly, the ability to view the completed works in 3D. At present we can only view each element individually.

Only some thought I had which might find there way into future updates.

Cheers

Tim

Hi Tim, and happy new year to you too!

Thanks for the feedback. 

I'm be really interested if you could send us an example drawing for the back-fill problem you described.  We do have a back-fill element planned, but what we had in mind was to return the ground levels of the back-fill area to the levels in a previous phase.  It sounds as though this wouldn't resolve the scenario you are struggling with.  I'd be really interested to see exactly what you're working with before we start developing that one.  We may even have some ideas about how you could do it with the software at the moment.

Viewing a cut and fill map of the whole site should be quite easy in the next LandXml release.  It will have the ability to import surfaces from separate phases of other Kubla Cubed files, and also from LandXml.  This should make the software a lot more flexible.  For instance in your case you could just make a new file, load the existing ground from your original file as your first phase and the last phase of the original file as your second phase, and you will see a cut and fill map for the whole project.

By the way, LandXml is also really useful for machine control and various surveying instruments.  It's quite widely used across the different software and hardware vendors.

Cheers,

Leo

I have the same issue with being able to define retaining walls and then back fill behind these. Some of my project have structural fill to allow buildings on them and others with batters slopes to marry back to existing ground. It would be great to be able to calc all this for fill volume.

I have the same issue with being able to define retaining walls and then back fill behind these.  Some of my project have structural fill to allow buildings on them and others with batters slopes to marry back to existing ground.  It would be great to be able to calc all this  for fill volume.

Hi GTipp,

Thanks for the feedback.  We do have a retaining wall element planned as part of the surface definition in the future.  Then you will be able to define outlines, contours, points, and retaining walls in the take-off form.  I think this will be really useful for your situation and perhaps also for TimO.

Meanwhile I have a suggestion that you might both find useful...  

You could use a narrow path with steep slopes to define the retaining wall, and then a platform behind it for the back-fill.  I think this will achieve the effect you're after.  I've attached some screenshots to try to illustrate what I mean.  For the platform you can define side slopes to achieve the batter back to the existing ground, whereas for the path I would define a batter of 0.01 to make it basically vertical.

It's important the the platform edges along the wall are drawn within the width of the path element, otherwise the platform's side slopes will extend over the wall.

Bear in mind that for back-fill it's best to use the 'fill only' mode so that the software will calculate fill, but  not cut.  This means it will tie into the existing ground where the back-fill meets the ground, or if you define the back-fill above all the ground it will have side slopes with the angle you have defined to meet the ground.

Cheers,

Leo

If you back fill is the same level as the wall you don't actually need the path element as the platforms batter can be used as the wall batter.


Remember to set the platform to "Fill Only".  You can use other elements as well for different scenarios.

Slope Element  : If the back-fill has a slight slope to it.
Feature Surface (With varying levels outline) : if the top of the wall is not uniform.

Brilliant 

How simple, must of tried every method possible, apart from this one.

Thank you, yet again.

Cheers

Tim