QTO: Just the Basics

Occasionally we have customers asking questions such as “how do I compute the <measurement unit> of the <object> in my proposed road design?” Well the answer to that question is QTO, and usually the follow up to that is “Well that’s nice, but how do I do that?” As you may or may not know “how to” types of questions and general training are out of scope for us in Product Support, but it is nice to pass as much information along to the customer as possible in order to get them started. This is my attempt to pass along a little more information if you find yourself asking these questions.

In this example we are going to compute the area of pavement on a particular corridor. We will start off by selecting the QTO Manager from the Analyze tab and loading our associated .CSV and .XML pay item files. Examples of these can be found here:

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\C3D 2010\enu\Data\Pay Item Data\Getting Started

Windows 7 & Vista: C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Pay Item Data\Getting Started

I already went ahead and created a pavement area pay item, because by default the pay items for pavement in this Getting Started file were calculated by Ton, and I would like to illustrate this by calculating area.After loading the Pay Item files click the green check-box in the QTO Manager and navigate over to the Settings tab of Toolspace. Here we will apply that pay item to a specific link in this corridor. Expand GENERAL>MULTIPUROSE STYLES>CODE SET STYLES, select the style you are using for you corridor, right click, EDIT. Under the Codes tab expand LINKS, and look for the PAVE link. This is where we are going to assign the Pavement Area pay item. Click the dump truck icon under the pay item column, and select the pay item from the list in the resulting dialog. Click Apply>OK, and rebuild your corridor.

Now to compute the area of pavement. Back to the ANALYZE tab, click on the Takeoff icon right next  to the QTO Manager. Up will pop a dialog, accept all the defaults, then click COMPUTE. Now the actual report will be generated with the calculated square footage of pavement. From here you can choose how to save it through a number of options available from the drop down located at the bottom of the dialog.

Of course this is a simple run down of how this functionality can be applied, and as you can imagine it can get way more complex. Hopefully this can help get you started on the right foot with QTO in Civil 3D.