Road, streets in a city

[naitnaru]

Hello all

 

Please, I need to draw the map of a city, roads, streets, squares, roundabouts and the like. I remember a command of parallel lines in autocad to to this, but that was years ago... so if you know links or commands that could help me to map the city I will be very grateful...

 

Or perhaps some links with tutorials or examples etc.

 

N

[Tiger]

MLINE perhaps? Draws two lines at the price of one.

 

ARRAY should come in handy for repeating patterns.

[naitnaru]

Hi,

 

What about for doing curves, and bendings? Any commands for these?

Anyway, with those I will get started. Many thanks.

[Tiger]

SPLINE - for free form curves. I have never gotten a hang of it but it is rumoured to be good at what it does.

 

ARC, ELLIPSE and CIRCLE - for more controlled curves.

 

If you start the PLINE command you can make ARCs part of the line, keep an eye on the commandline and hit A at the right time to change to ARC-drawing.

 

Happy roading!

[Organic]

OFFSET is the one you are after I think.

[ReMark]

Years ago? Maybe DLine or was that only in AutoCAD LT?

[CyberAngel]

For most projects I need to draw a vicinity map, which seems to be similar to what you want. I start with an aerial photo, which comes from a county GIS web site or Google Maps. Once I have that in the browser, I press the PrintScreen button. I can paste that into an image processor, crop out what I don't need, and save it as a JPG. I insert the JPG in a new drawing, scale it (remember not to crop out the scale bar), and trace over the major streets and highways with polylines. That's actual size. Finally, in paper space, I use a viewport to scale down the map, ChSpace it, and create a block with it. A bit clunky, but it works.

[naitnaru]

I remember it was autocad 14, I believe, or one before that.... not sure, but now I am using the 2008 so..... i looked for that command dline, it came as an error

 

thanks guys

[naitnaru]

thanks a lot, I will try that.... actually I was thinking to check google maps.... it covers the whole planet, doesn't it? an image processor? like paint?

[Dana W]

Roads and streets are not drawn with splines. Civil engineers use only straight lines and defined arcs. The shape and size has to be provable in court often.

 

If you are drawing a simple map and not an engineering drawing, the best way is to do as mentioned before, get an image of a map or arial photo and trace over it. I do it often. I use the polyline command. Once begun, draw lines then hit "A" for arc if you need one, then "L" again for line and so on. No need to stop and start the pline command. You change from line to arc and back to line within a continuous action. If the arc's don't quite fit at first, once the pline command is exited, you can go back and manipulate each section as required. You can offset the lines for parallel lines such as the other side of the road, and sidewalks and curbs if you need that kind of detail.

[Dana W]

thanks a lot, I will try that.... actually I was thinking to check google maps.... it covers the whole planet, doesn't it? an image processor? like paint?

It depends on how you can "save as" the image, but you may very well need a better program than Paint. I use Corel Paintshop Pro. You will want to be able to control the image quality, and file size. You will need to be able to save it as one of the file types that will import into AutoCAD.

[naitnaru]

It is not an engineering one, it is just a sketch, so I will do as suggested.... also I need to put names on the roads and since the names I think is best to go parallel to the road, any command to write parallel to the roads, or just a rotate the dtext? thank you

 

I just rotated the text... it will work...

[Dana W]

It is not an engineering one, it is just a sketch, so I will do as suggested.... also I need to put names on the roads and since the names I think is best to go parallel to the road, any command to write parallel to the roads, or just a rotate the dtext? thank you

 

I just rotated the text... it will work...

 

I have used aligned dimensions with suppressed lines and arrows for that, then override the numbers with text. It's the long way to go about it, but for a one time shot it may work. It is faster than mtext, and then rotate to the reference line.

[Organic]

It is not an engineering one, it is just a sketch, so I will do as suggested.... also I need to put names on the roads and since the names I think is best to go parallel to the road, any command to write parallel to the roads, or just a rotate the dtext? thank you

 

I just rotated the text... it will work...

 

You might find this lisp of use to you: http://www.jtbworld.com/lisp/txtrot.htm