Tech Tip #34 - PPG, Part 2 - Zen Engineering

One of Mark's prior students asked for his help with something he was working on. As a note - The initial answer was lengthy and he ended up asking Mark additional questions as he went through the process. For these reasons I divided this tip into two parts (Footsteps 33 & 34).

In this part there are questions and answers back and forth; I made Mark's answers in green text to make it easier for you to follow. The following is the second of the two parts; Enjoy!!!

Last question? How do I manipulate the plan view to get the entire 1500 feet in the view? Or at least more, maybe 2 views each rotated.

Mr. A

Here is the Zen Dude's response:

One way to approach it is to run the PPG with the settings modified to create the drawing you want. But really, if you just want one sheet, you can create it 'manually' . . . Just reference and clip.

But with the PPG you would modify these settings on the PPG tabs to create the fit: (but as I tell everyone, InRoads won't calc these values for you; you have to know how long your job is, what the scale will be, and how much will really fit on a sheet.)

Keep me posted on how it's going.

Civilly yours,

- zen

Wow, Thanks! We are closer than ever before. I ran once with 'Typical Streets' and once with 'Typical Grading', I followed your steps and annotated the profiles that were created in their own DGN, but the annotation does not show up on the individual P&P sheets

You're welcome!

Regarding the annotation:

1) Make sure those Levels are on in the Sheet file (mine where turned off for some reason)

2) Make sure you are annotating the correct set of Profiles in the master file if there are several sets. (Sometime when trying things over a couple sets can be there.)

Civilly yours,

- zen

Wow, you ARE the man! I might have checked levels in a month or so, right after I pickup up my computer from the parking lot.

- Mr. A

Ya, I know a couple things ; ) I'm glad I could help!

And hardware destruction is generally a bad idea . . . but it can feel so good sometimes ; )

Civilly yours,

- mark

I was hoping there would be a way to change the rotation angle in the plan view. I used PPG to create 2 plan and profile sheets to replace the wacked one.

Do you have any idea why those levels were shut off on the individual sheets? They are shut off each time you open each sheet.

Thanks, again.

Mr. A

Mr. A,

Regarding those levels? I took a look but didn't see anything obvious. Unless the PPG is toggling those things off, the only other influence that I can fathom is that they are turned off in the actual sheet, or seed file. They weren't off in my files, but I saw the same level behavior as you did . . . Weird. My take-away on that is to just make sure that you verify your levels (on / off) in your reference files after the sheets are created by the PPG. I'll keep this issue in the back of my mind and see if I stumble onto an answer.

Regarding the plan rotation, there is a way to change the rotation angle, but it's really part of a specific sheet construction workflow, and maybe you want to consider using it in the future, once you understand it.

On the Main tab, at the bottom, there are the Plan Views and Profile Views that are created once the PPG tool is run. Those areas are blank when starting.

Once the PPG is run, you can double-click on one of them to open the details of that 'view' construction and look at the settings.

You'll see it has the Start and Stop Stationing, Overlap, Model Files, Rotation and other stuff.

You can actually change stuff here, and Apply it. The way the software was designed, it was imagined that a user might first set up his sheets, with only the Plan View. That would create these views which would then be edited and tweaked as needed. Then, once the

Plan Views were locked down, the PPG would be run again, and set to

Use Plan Views.

But the way it would work, is that you just change the Rotation value, or any other sheet construction parameters, and Apply.

After you Apply, it will prompt you in some way to address the adjacent sheets. If you are changing things like the Start and Stop stationing or Overlap or Name that will appear on the Match Lines, you may or may not want this change applied to the adjacent sheets.

Then that edit would be locked to that Plan View. . . . but you wouldn't

see anything happen.

If you went to the Sheet Index tab on the PPG dialog box and did a Show Sheet on that sheet particular sheet it would integrate those Rotation settings.

Before the Rotation edit:

After the Rotation edit:

As you can see, if you were to change the Rotation after the full sheets were constructed, it would jack up the rest of the sheet, because it uses that

Rotation value to construct the other pieces of the sheet (Profile and Border), not the Plan. You have to understand how the sheets are really constructed to get your head wrapped around this, because it's not really rotating the Plan View, but the Profile and Border. You'll see this if you look at the Reference files in MicroStation after the sheets are constructed. The Plan isn't rotated, the Profile and Border is.

And the View itself uses that Rotation value.

This should all make sense if you've ever built P&P sheets 'manually'.

Okay, now, with that said. Once you've modified the Plan Views, you can rerun the PPG tool and Use Plan Views. When you rerun it, it will ask you if you want to regenerate Profile Views, which you have to do because the revised Rotation has to be applied to that Reference file.

It will regenerate all the sheets. Now, looking at that edited sheet rotation, you'll see that it applied the new Rotation to that sheet.

But now the Anchors have to be adjusted, and that single sheet Regenerated in order to get it to actually position itself better on the sheet, which might be difficult if you picked a crazy rotation like I did.