Novapoint 17.10

Novapoint 17.10 continues to work on all previous supported operating systems, and is now compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista.

When performing a triangulation the result and source data can be stored to LandXML for transfer to survey equipment or other software.

The Norwegian Land Use Library is extended with more variants of area types for vegetation and paving. New Land Use types have been added; mulch, pebbels, tacktile paving etc.

Improvements in Alignment Design. More possibilities for pavement and road bed design. A new tool to connect roads in junctions. A new Road Wizard for Norway and France, other markets to follow. With the new sensitivity analysis it is possible to evaluate consequences of poor survey data. Drawings can easily be updated drawings when design changes. Valuable analyse tools available for roundabouts.

• When angular points are calculated, the input tables will change so that angular points become available to allow for easier editing. Having this smart access to angular points helps the designer to be more flexible and effective.

• Any line, polyline, arc or circle drawn into alignment designs vertical window can be stored for later use. The help lines will respond to the Novapoint scale settings. The designer can now store valuable information with the alignment. Important! The help lines will be stored on the drawing object only.

• When pick object is performed on a 3D polyline the vertical geometry will now be created from levels in the 3D polyline.

• Reference points can now be drawn to CAD. There is a new setting in options where the designer can enable this option.

• The designer can now choose if reference points should be editable (gripedit) in the drawing.

• When appending angular points it is now possible to enter coordinates to place angular points. X and Y are input in the horizontal, while chainage and level is input in the vertical.

• Insert Line in Arc, new option to split an arc in two and insert a line in the gap.

• Insert Arc in Line is now available from the menu. This function was before known as insert angular point and was only to find in short cut menu.

• The Stretch command is now available from the menu.

• 17.10 Road Models are not backwards compatible. It is possible to save the road models as a 16.30 ind-file that can be imported in 16.30 and 17.00 and also older versions. 17.10 have new features for pavement and road bed that will not be included in the 16.30 export.

• Chainage Interval (from 30 to 100)
• Intermediate Chainage (from 50 to 100)
• Subsurface Layers (from 30 to 100)
• Quantity Boundaries (from 50 til 100)
• Road Surface Boundaries (from fra 25 to 100)
• Override vertical alignment (from 10 to 250)

• French and Norwegian users will now benefit from a new concept in functionality that replaces the advanced road description. The functionality is now divided in three parts for more flexibility.

• Design standard - This is where the designer defines what standards to base design on.

• Typical cross section - The designer can choose from preset typical cross sections based on road standards or create user defined cross sections. The typical cross sections can be inserted in the road model as base for design.

• Superelevation and widening - Superelevation and widening are now separated from typical cross section definition, making the designer able to run calculations at any time without unwanted impact on design. There is more flexibility to choose which surfaces on the road model should be used for superelevation and widening.

• The Norwegian wizard is based on new national standards (Hb 017). The new road wizard will be available to other markets on service packs or future releases.

• New method for alignments as surface edge. “Slope form the surface description, level from a vertical alignment”.

• To prevent unwanted horizontal scrolling the road surfaces are now organized vertically. Flexible solutions for copy and paste are introduced.

• Features that before was hidden in the user interface are now clearly set out. The designer can now easily define design inner slopes, gradually changing layers and steps in the pavement. These advanced features can now be combined with sodding where as before the user had to choose between them.

• Pavement is now defines with templates so that if the designer is switching between multiple pavements each instance is now defined only once.

• If the designer defines a space in chainage between templates a wedge is introduced.

• To meet requirements for more detailed design of road bed the functionality has been substantially improved. The user interface has been simplified and made more intuitively. Designing a road bed can still be a complex matter, so the new dialogue may take some time getting used to.

• It is now possible to have surfaces in the road bed to be controlled both horizontally and vertically by alignments.

• By introducing beam slope and widening the user can add additional width to the road bed. The beam can be used to assure load carrying capacity and widening to add extra width. Beam slope and widening can be used independent of each other.

• By introducing end surface the designer will now have full control on where the road bed ends. The road bed can even end outside the road surface.

• The process of connecting road models seamlessly in junctions used to be time consuming. With the new junction wizard this job is done within minutes. A wizard will guide the designer through the steps of creating a junction. The need for manual hands on with the plan drawing or 3D model for visualization will be reduced to a minimum.

• Uncertainty in terrain and subsurface layers surveys often results in variance in quantities between designed and build roads. The only way to avvoid this situation is to ensure higher quality of surveys, but we are now giving the designer a tool to evaluate the consequence of bad survey before construction. What happens if the peat is deeper than assumed? In cooperation with Norwegian road authorities we have made a tool to do this and more analysis.

• The rehabilitation functionality used to have the limitation to operate with only four layers. It will now work with all 8 layers in the pavement.

• Spreadsheet reports can now be written to two new formats, OpenOffice.org Calc (ods) and Microsoft Office Excel Open XML (xlsx).

• LandXML Breaklines and LandXML surface can now be exported in one file. This file can be read by MX, Trimble etc. Select “Project” in the first column in the setting out dialog.

• Trimble format (pro) can now be produced. Select “Project” in the in the setting out dialog.

• You can now save all terrain layers and alignments used in the road model to the terrain model. This make it easier for an external contact to receive and continue using the design. The recipient does not need to handle all groups and priorities in the terrain model.

• Contours of road surface can now be displayed in the perspective viewer. When starting up the follow road function it will start driving from the current position, not from the start as before.

• Three new methods of analysis have been made for the French market. Reports have been improved for all markets to more clearly present calculated sight in each chainage.

• Contours for the road surface can now be drawn to CAD. It is possible to draw contours for a part of the road surface, or for the entire road structure. The designer can set all cad properties for the contours, including labels. Also model boundaries and property boundaries can be drawn. If there is a Novapoint Tunnel model available the tunnel geometry can also be drawn.

• If the road model has changed the longitudinal drawings can be updated with the new update drawing feature.

• If the road model have changed the cross section drawings can be updated with the new update drawing feature.

• Deflection and entry angle will be calculated by the roundabout function. There is a setting in the application to choose whether to display the result or not.

• A new type of deflection island, Trumpet Island (R-L-R), is made available. This is a trumpet island with arc-line-arc on the side edges.

Several stability and usability issues fixed:

• Draw Horizontal Alignments
• Draw Longitudinal Alignments
• Draw Cross Sections
• Draw Road Model
• Drawing Style Configuration

Draw Road Elevation annotations:

• Will draw according to intervall for cross section calculation.
• Color for text object will be set to byblock.
• When annotations are drawn for centreline (surface 0.0) the text objects will no longer be placed on top of symbol.

• bugfix: Topic sensitive help implemented
• bugfix: Draw vehicle was not in the path after move
• bugfix: Continue path was not working after after move
• bugfix: Draw vehicle with fixed angle – It was not possible to change the default angle
• bugfix: Draw vehicle - The vehicle was sometime outside path
• bugfix: Draw vehicle - “Vehicle” and “tires” was not drawn with the color specified in the settings dialogue
• bugfix: French vehicle configuration updated

The Railway Design model has been changed and are no longer compatible with models made in earlier versions of Novapoint. Please see release notes for the Road Proferssional Module for detailed information.

• bugfix: Some road marking objects was created in a way that it appears as duplicated objects next time the drawing was opened

• feature: Standard symbols added as separate library

• bugfix: 611 - ??

• feature: Standard symbols added as separate library

• feature: Symbol library supplemented with new signs - 555.0, 570.1V, 570.1H, 829.1, 829.2, 920VM, 920H and 920VE
• bugfix: Quantity table – incorrect information about size on rotated directional signs
• bugfix: 701.2 – it was not possible to delete/add intersection number
• bugfix: 705.1 – the text height for intersection name was wrong
• bugfix: 705.2 – it was not possible to delete/add intersection number
• bugfix: 711 – incorrect distance between content and arrow when arrow pointing towards right
• bugfix: 912 was missing in symbol library

Error in summary reports
The summaries at the end of all reports, about number of persons within certain noise limits, was incorrect.

More detailed summary reports
The summaries at the end of all reports, about number of persons within certain noise limits, now comes in two levels. The first has more noise levels and rounds to 1 decimal. The other follows the EU standard for noise levels and rounding to nearest 100 persons.

Simplified installation of Powerpack
See Noise Powerpack.

Novapoint Tunnel is a brand new module now launched on version 17.10 of Novapoint. The module has been developed since 2005 and includes a lot of exciting and useful functionality for tunnel design and production, such as:

• Modeling of tunnel profile, both inner profile and perimeter
• Modeling of pavement, mounting bolts and designed base
• Control of free driving space
• Flexible tunnel profile library
• Support for seamless dataflow of tunnel geometry to the drilling jumbo.
• Export of survey data for tunnel.
• Automatic drawing production: Plan-, longitudinal profile and cross section.
• 3D visualization of designed tunnel
• 3D triangulation and visualization of scanned tunnel surface

Novapoint Tunnel connects the tunnel geometry to the road geometry. The road model decides the location of the tunnel. The tunnel profiles are parametric. This means that the user can describe the whole tunnel geometry by just specifying a few key geometry values, such as wall radiuses and angles to the radius shift points close to the abutments.

Novapoint Tunnel supports seamless dataflow from Novapoint Tunnel to the controlling software developed by Bever Control on the drilling jumbo. Bever Control supports further dataflow to all other existing software based controlling systems for drilling jumbos, which is Atlas Copco and Sandvik Tamrock. By using Novapoint Tunnel, and the software from Bever Control, the data from the design process can now be transferred directly from the designer to the production equipment without any manual work. This has been a goal for this industry for quite a while.

Novapoint Tunnel contains a nice feature for the designer who wants to reduce the time spent on making production drawings. Cross section drawings of the tunnel can now be produced automatically, including annotation and measure lines. In addition functionality for producing plan-, longitudinal profile- and 3D-drawings with just a single mouse click is included in Novapoint Tunnel.

The module has been overhauled to facilitate easier localization work. This overhaul is not visible for the user.