Overview
Every manual road made with Draw Road or Convert to Road is built from a 2D centerline that stays in the drawing and can be edited. The road stores its width, inner corner radius and rack setback. The outline, the rounded bends, the rounded junction corners, the 3D lines, the label and the fill are all derived from the centerline. To change a road, you edit the centerline and run Rebuild Roads.
Prerequisites
Manual roads in the drawing and the road layers unlocked. Roads drawn with an earlier version are taken over the first time you run Rebuild Roads: they get an editable centerline and keep their width.
Step-by-Step Guide
1. Know the parts of a road
- The cyan centerline on PVXAI_Roads_ManualCenterline. This is what you edit.
- The road outline, labelled RO-1, RO-2 and so on.
- Rounded junction corners on PVXAI_Roads_Junctions, where two manual roads meet.
- One merged fill for all roads on PVXAI_Roads_Union, and the 3D lines draped on the terrain.
2. Edit the centerline
Reshape the cyan centerline with grips, STRETCH or by adding and removing vertices. Keep it open: a centerline that is closed, or whose ends meet, is refused. Do not drag vertices of the outline: the outline always follows the centerline, so an outline vertex edit is undone on the next rebuild with a message. Moving or rotating a whole outline is fine; its centerline moves with it.
3. Run Rebuild Roads
On the Site Layout panel, open the Road dropdown and click Rebuild Roads. PVX.AI compares every road with its saved definition and rebuilds only what changed, in place, as one undo step. The command line summarises what happened, for example how many roads were rebuilt, which outline edits were reverted and which junctions were redrawn. If nothing changed, nothing is touched.
4. Understand bends and junctions
The corner radius you enter is the radius of the inner edge of a bend. The centerline radius is that value plus half the width, and the outer edge is that value plus the full width, so the road keeps its width through the bend. If a bend is too short for the radius, PVX.AI uses the largest radius that fits and reports it, for example 1 bend(s) could not take the 8 m inner radius; smallest used 5.2 m. Lengthen the short legs if you need the full radius.
Where two manual roads cross or meet (a cross, a T, an L, or a road ending on another road’s bend), each inside corner is rounded with the smaller of the two roads’ inner radii. These corner pieces keep racks out like the road itself.
5. Change the rack setback
Open the Road dropdown, click Road Setback, select road outlines or centerlines and enter the new setback. Only the stored value changes; the road is not redrawn. Build the layout again for racks to move. A rounded junction corner uses the larger setback of its two roads.
6. Change the width or corner radius
There is no command that edits the width or radius of an existing road. Copy the cyan centerline with COPY, erase the road outline (this also removes its old centerline, label, 3D lines and junction corners), then run Convert to Road on the copy and enter the new values.
7. Build the layout
When you click Build in Build Layout and a road is out of date, PVX.AI shows Roads out of date with Rebuild roads, then build, Build anyway or cancel. Choose rebuild unless you have a reason not to, so racks keep clear of the roads as they will be.
Tips & Recommendations
- Convert to Road takes lines, arcs and open polylines. Closed shapes are skipped (A road is drawn from an open centerline), objects that are already part of a road are skipped, and objects on PVX.AI layers are skipped.
- Erasing a road outline removes its centerline, label, 3D lines and junction corners. OOPS brings them back. A copied road gets its own RO number.
- Width, inner corner radius and rack setback are the only settings of a manual road. Road Width, Shoulder Width and Min Turn Radius belong to roads generated in the Grading window, which also flags curves that are too tight for the design vehicle. Generated, boundary and corridor service roads are not edited through a centerline.