When it comes to civil infrastructure, vehicle access, turning, and control is a vital component of any design, particularly if you’re working in the transportation or retail industries. It may not seem like such a big deal to folks who don’t deal with it all the time but civil designers live and die by our truck turning radii. For decades, we handled this control using Mylar templates that could be overlaid on top of a printed drawing so we could figure out where we needed to change curves or widen fire lanes. It worked well but the problem was you had to red line everything onto a paper plan and then make changes to the plan. Once CAD systems like AutoCAD and MicroStation came along, a lot of civil firms took the time to re-create these templates as blocks inside our files so we could make the changes right in place.
A big time saver, but still a very manual –and time consuming- process. Later, software packages like AutoTurn hit the market and we had some interactive 2D tools that we could actually use to “drive” our vehicles through our projects. Now, Autodesk has stepped up to the plate with Vehicle Tracking 2015. This is a fantastic new package that handles all the traffic control features you’d expect in a system like this, plus a lot more.
Let’s start with the basics of the program. Since it’s called Vehicle Tracking, you’d expect it to be able to do swept path design using manual and automatic features, and it does. The basic system as a lot more than that though. It comes with an extensive library of national and international vehicles types that are easily copied and edited to create custom vehicles for local requirements. Another really nice tool is the Guided Drive feature, which allows you to have the vehicle automatically steered into the best path, using perpendicular lines (such as curbs, building, walls, etc.) to show the program where you want the vehicle to move.
It follows the guides (lines) you choose and easily maneuvers itself into place. You can manually drive your vehicles (forward and in reverse) as well using defined templates and there are thousands of vehicle bodies to choose from.
Another really nice feature is the ability to study vertical clearance for your vehicles. This tool is where Vehicle Tracking start to show its superior ability to integrate with Civil 3D and other Autodesk programs such as AutoCAD and Map 3D. When you select the clearance tool, you can select a feature line, alignment, 3D Polyline, etc. on your plan and in Civil 3D, you can select a profile view, any of which will show you the vertical clearance of the vehicle as it moves over sag/crest conditions. That feature alone puts Vehicle Tracking 2015 at the top of the swept path tracking CAD class.
I like that in this program it’s very easy to delete a turn point, or to continue an existing steered path just using basic grip selection. There are also utilities for calculating the best fit paths and even just a simple tool to drop in truck outlines, without the issue of seeing unwanted paths and envelope layers. If there’s one oddity about the program though, it lies in terminology. Apparently the base program come from the U.K. so some of the nomenclature takes getting used to. For example, the “display properties” I was looking for is called “Report Wizard”. It works very simply but the term was very misleading for a simple American boy like me.
Now, with just what we’ve covered so far, Vehicle Tracking 2015 would be a powerful competitor to any similar CAD system on the market but it has two more features I’m going to cover in additional articles: Parking Layout and Roundabout Design. Great tools, both!
