This tutorial covers how to utilize some of GeoTools Polyline, Block and Text tools for Road development

1. Open the drawing named lesson10.dwg which is located in your GeoTools Tutorials folder. This folder is located in the folder where you have installed GeoTools.

2. You should see a drawing (see Image 11-1) of a small layout of road represented by 3D Polyline.

Image 11-1

3. The drawing file also consists of two blocks by name RoundPole and Rect_Pole which we will be using it for marking electrical poles at each vertex of the 3D Polyline. 

Placing blocks at each vertex of 3D Polyline

1. Click on menu GeoTools => Polyline Toolset 1 => Place Points / Blocks along vertices or type GT_PL_Place at the command prompt.

5. This will pop-up the dialog box as shown below in (Image 11-2)

Image 11-2


6. Under What to place? make sure Blocks option is selected and under Which vertices to place? choose the option All

7. Click on Block Name... button. This will pop-up the dialog box as shown below in (image 11-3)

Image 11-3

8. Select RoundPole and click on OK button. This will bring back to previous dialog box.

8. Under Insertion Settings set the Scale Factor to 1.00 and Rotation Angle to 0.00.

9. Click on OK button this will pop-up the Standard Selection dialog box as shown below in (image 11-4)

Image 11-4

10. Now click on Scan selected objects button and select the 3D Polyline press Enter key when done this will bring you back to the standard selection dialog box.

11. Click on Apply button this will pop-up the Output Control dialog box as shown below in (Image 11-11)

Image 11-11

12. Select the options as shown above in (Image 11-11) and click on OK button to place the RoundPole block at each vertex of selected 3D Polyline. As shown 
below in (Image 11-5)

Image 11-5

So we have learnt how to place block at each vertex of 3D Polyline representing electrical poles. Now we will see how we can replace the 
RoundPole blocks with Rect_Pole block.

Replacing the RoundPole block with Rect_Pole block

1. Click on menu GeoTools => Blocks => Replace Block or type GT_REPBLK at the command prompt. This will pop-up the dialog box as shown below in (image 11-6)

Image 11-6

3. Under Source Block choose RoundPole and in Target Block choose Rect_Pole.

4. Under Replace options make sure you choose the option Select All and click on OK button.

5. This will replace all the RoundPole blocks with Rect_Pole blocks as shown below in (image 11-7). The Rect_Pole block has two attributes attached with it i.e. Pole number and Date of installation.

Image 11-7

So after learning how to Replace the blocks, we will see how we can change the attribute values of blocks. For e.g. if you notice all the blocks are having pole number as 11, lets see how we can change this into a sequential order like (11, 12, 13,14...)

Incrementing the attribute value Pole Number in Rect_Pole block

1.Click on menu GeoTools => Text => Draw Quick Text (running numbers) or type GT_TC at the command prompt. This will prompt you to specify the counter location as shown below in (image 11-8)

Image 11-8

2. At the command prompt type S  and press Enter key. This will pop-up the settings dialog box as shown below in (image 11-9)

Image 11-9

3. Set the following parameters in the settings dialog box.
    i)  Starting Numeric Value => 11
    ii)  Format Width => 2
    iii) Value Increment => 1

4. Under Increment Type choose Numeric and in Prefix box type Pole #.

5. Check the box Update underlying objects, if present and in Search distance for underlying object box type 100.

6. Under Counter object to create choose Block Attribute. You will see that RECT_POLE is popped in Select Block.

7. Under Select counter attribute choose POLE_NUMBER and click on OK button. This will unload the settings dialog box and you will be prompted to pick counter location.

8. Now go on clicking close to the attribute 11 in RECT_POLE block and you will see that it has replaced it as Pole # 11. 
(Note: make sure you are clicking close to the attribute 11, if you are clicking far away from attribute 11 it will insert a new block because it is out of range of the search distance provided)

9. Repeat step no. 8 for all the blocks to replace the attribute from 11 to Pole # 11, Pole # 12 and so on. And in the end you should get the output as shown below in (image 11-10).

Image 11-10