Basic Work Flow (4) 

Open the LineTerra toolbar for a project. This is the entry point to every other window -- Terrain, Plan/Profile, Intersect, Templates, Sections, Earthwork, Export, 3D View and Bake Road. Evaluating it again with the same name reopens that road; with a different name it opens another road on the same terrain:

In[1]:=

Out[1]=

Then the workflow is:-

The alignment and profile geometry is plain kernel code. Cumulative chainage along a three-point alignment:

In[2]:=

Out[2]=

Rounding the corner with a 40 m arc shortens the route from the 200 m walked by the two straight legs:

In[3]:=

Out[3]=

The design level at a chainage, with a parabolic vertical curve applied at the crest. The grade changes from +10% to -5%, a change of 15%, so a K-value of 5 gives a 75 m vertical curve:

In[4]:=

Out[4]=

Terrain (6) 

Terrain comes from whichever source suits the stage of the project. A GeoTIFF elevation raster, with its.tfw world file or with the georeferencing tags embedded in the file itself:

In[5]:=

A LIDAR point cloud, gridded from its ground-classified points. A. laz file needs PDAL or LASzip on the system path; a.las file is read with no external tool:

In[6]:=

A synthetic corridor strip following the assumed route centreline, which keeps a very long route's terrain to a workable size. Make the number of cross samples odd, so one falls on the centreline:

In[7]:=

Work can be carried out in latitude and longitude or in a national grid, and most countries' grids are supported. Converting to the British National Grid:

In[8]:=

Out[8]=

Any UTM zone or other supported projection can be named by its EPSG code directly:

In[9]:=

Out[9]=

Cross-sections export to PDF at an exact drawing scale, to a notebook as named vector graphics, or to true-scale DXF. DXF coordinates are real-world metres -- one drawing unit is one metre -- with geometry separated onto per-section GROUND, DESIGN and SCALE layers:

In[10]:=

Example - Designing a road alignment (11) 

First, evaluate the following and you will get the main menu. Choose New Project then Terrain:

In[11]:=

Out[11]=

Press LAZ/LAS point Cloud. If it is a LAZ file then you must have PDAL or LASzip on the system path, e. g.: brew install pdal. (See “Read this first). If you have or it is a LAS file the file will be read directly:

The preview can be shown in the normal way:

Pressing Plan and then adding IPs to form a road alignment:

Extracting a profile:

Either open a template library or design new ones. Here we have opened the library so we can use the motorway and bridge templates:

Assign sections to the alignment:

Calculating earthworks we get an updated plan:

And earthwork quantities:

Leaving Earthworks on Auto we can then adjust the profile and/or the planned alignment and the quantities and plan will instantly update:

The road can be baked into the terrain and a 3D image produced. Sections or the plan can be exported to scale: