Efficient way to digitise the centrelines of roads or tunnels (plan view)

[srksphillips]

Hi,

 

 

 

Does anyone know of any efficient methods of digitising; orautomating the process of drawing the centrelines of roads or mining tunnels(with junctions) using either AutoCAD 2014 or Civil3D 2014? I also have 3DS Maxif that is useful.

• The roads/tunnels are neither parallel nor consistent in width and therefore OFFSET is of no use.
  
• M2P and MTP are useful for small areas but these tunnel networks are significant in length (and covering vast areas) and therefore it would take too long using these commands.
  
• I've tried creating a surface of the tunnels using 3DS Max and found that triangulated surfaces help in some ways as it provides more snap points for digitising but this isn't perfect by any stretch.
  
• I've looked into EDGESURF to generate a centreline you can snap to but found this didn't work well on steep curves and useless on junctions.
  

If anyone has any ideas, insight, experience or thoughts on how to tackle this I would be most grateful.

 

Thank you,

Steve

[srksphillips]

Does anybody know if there's a way to replicate Adobe Illustrator's Blend tool that creates a new shape (polyline) that is a blend (morph) between two selected shapes/lines? In other words you would select both sides of the road and then it would generate an average polyline between the two; along the middle of the road.

 

I realise the BLEND command in AutoCAD performs a completely different function to the Blend tool in Illustrator.

[RobDraw]

There was a thread about this recently. I think the solution was a LISP. I'll see if I can track it down.

[ReMark]

Looking for this?

 

http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?83644-Centerline-between-two-polylines&highlight=centerline

[srksphillips]

Thank you both - this is exactly what I'm looking! Just tried it now and this would definately save a lot of hard work.