Extracting Road Centerline and Driver Path

Besides creation of a graphic, the Graphic Builder Tool also provides you with the ability to extract centerline from road description files using the “Create Driver path” tool. This tool extracts the centerline in a (.ddf) file, which is a teimorbit format or as comma separated value (.csv) format. Similar to the “create graphic” utility, the extraction of centerline is supported for all three types of road visualization: CRG, RGR, and 3D spline road.

The Create Driver Path tool can be loaded by selecting the option from the Tool mode drop-down menu (located in the in Road Tools dialog).


Figure 1.

The steps to extract the centerline path are outlined below.

  1. File Selection:
    Similar to the Create Graphic tool, upon selecting an input road description file, the file is read by an internal parser and the input fields are populated. The driver data file is saved at the provided location. The centerline data can also be saved in comma separated value format by activating the Store data points as (.csv) File check box.


    Figure 2.
  2. Centerline Preview tool:
    Also, before saving and extracting centerline from the road description file, there is an option to preview the centerline. Clicking the Show Centerline Preview button will open up the Road Centerline Viewer dialog, which contains a graph of the centerline along with the shoulders of the road.


    Figure 3.


    Figure 4.