Pile layout

Define a pile pattern on one reference table in the Pile layout window, stamp it onto every table in the plant, and export the coordinates a setting-out team works from.

The pile layout feature produces a construction document: the position of every foundation pile in the plant, drawn and tabulated, in a form a setting-out team can work from. You define the pattern once, on a single table, and the application places it on every table in the plant and reports the total.

It is a construction output, not a design check. Nothing here validates the pile pattern against a structural design — the number of piles, where they sit along the table and how big they are all come from you, or from the structure supplier's drawing.

One pattern, every table

The window works on one reference table. That is the whole idea, and it is what makes the feature quick: a plant repeats one table design across the whole site, so the pattern only has to be described once.

The coordinate frame

The reference table has its own local frame, independent of the site — the window's strip states it: origin at the bottom-left corner · X east, Y north.

The origin, (0, 0), is the table's bottom-left corner — its south-west corner on the ground.
X runs east, across the table's width.
Y runs north, up the table's height.

Both axes are in metres, and the table's width and height are the table's own dimensions, set by the module size, the module counts and the gaps in MMS-Table Configuration. See Table configuration. A coordinate outside the range 0 to the table width, or 0 to the table height, puts that pile off the table.

The frame is only as big as the table

The extent of the frame is the table itself, so it changes whenever the table changes. Modules per row and the east–west gaps set how far X can run; rows per table and the north–south gaps set how far Y can run. Orientation changes both: a portrait table puts each module's short side east–west and its long side north–south, and a landscape table reverses that.

The consequence is practical. A pattern entered against a portrait table does not transfer to a landscape one, and a pattern entered before you changed the modules per row no longer sits where you meant it to. If you change the table configuration, open the window again and check the pattern against the new frame before exporting.

What a pile is

Each pile is drawn as a circle of the Pile radius, centred on the (X, Y) you entered. One radius applies to the whole pattern; it defaults to 0.15 m and can be set from 0.01 to 2 m.

The radius is a drawing and setting-out figure — the pile as it appears in plan. The pile diameters for lightning arresters and street lights are separate fields on the Structures & Shadow card and are not part of this pattern. See Structures and shadow.

How the pattern reaches the rest of the plant

The pattern is stamped onto every table in the plant. Each table keeps its own position; the pattern is applied relative to that table's own south-west corner.

So a pile's position on the ground is:

the table's south-west corner, X metres east and Y metres north.

That relation is worth knowing because it lets you check the export by hand. Take any table, take its south-west corner, step east by the pattern's X and north by its Y, and that is the coordinate the export gives for that pile. All internal geometry is in metres, projected to the site's local UTM zone, so the exported coordinates and the pattern's offsets are in the same units and add directly.

Opening the Pile layout window

Two routes open the same window. Piles: OFF in the Layout view's tools is disabled until a layout exists; Edit-Pile ▸ Define Pile Layout… on the menu bar is the route to come back to the pattern later. On a narrow window the Piles button folds into the Layers ▾ popover as a row of its own — it has moved, not gone.

The Edit-Pile menu with Define Pile Layout. — The Edit-Pile menu

Generate a layout first

There is nothing to stamp a pattern onto before that, so Piles: OFF stays greyed out until a layout is on screen.

Click Piles: OFF

The first time you use it, the Pile layout window opens so you can define the pattern. Its strip reads One table w × h m with the table's real dimensions, and a chip counts the piles placed so far.

Place the piles on the reference table

The right-hand side draws the one table to scale: click inside the outline to place a pile. On the left, + Add adds a row to the coordinate table, Remove deletes the selected pile, Clear empties the pattern, and the table itself — #, X (m), Y (m) — is the same pattern as numbers, which you can edit directly. Set the Pile radius once for the whole pattern.

Or let Auto grid… place an even pattern

Auto grid… asks for Piles per row (along X, east) and Rows of piles (along Y, north), places them evenly spaced, inset 6 % from the ends and 10 % from the sides, and replaces the piles placed so far. Its button reads Place n piles.

Apply to all tables

The primary button reads Apply to all n tables — n being the table count — and is disabled, with the reason "Place at least one pile", until the pattern has a pile in it. The overlay switches on, the tools button reads Piles: ON, and the status line reports "Piles applied: n per table · N piles across the plant." When the pattern is empty the button instead reads Remove piles from …, which takes the overlay off again.

Export to Excel… in the window's footer writes the pile coordinates to a workbook, and Close leaves without applying anything.

Checking the pattern against the ground

Once applied, the piles are drawn on every table, each with its label.

A zoomed view of one table with its piles drawn and labelled. — Piles on the tables

Piles: ON

The Piles: ON overlay stays visible even with Plant layout switched off in the Layers ▾ popover. That combination — piles on, layout off — is the one to use when you are checking the pattern, because nothing is drawn except the piles themselves and their coordinates.

The same zoomed view with Plant layout switched off so only the piles and their coordinates remain. — Piles with the plant layout off

With the tables hidden you can see the pattern as a field of points and judge it the way the setting-out team does: whether the rows read cleanly, whether the spacing along the table is what the structure drawing says, whether anything lands somewhere impossible. Satellite and the Contour / terrain row have their own switches, so you can leave either behind the piles.

What the Summary view reports

The Piles row of the Summary view is the plant's total pile count, computed as the number of tables multiplied by the number of piles in the pattern.

Two things follow:

Change the pattern and the total changes. Add a pile to the reference table and the row rises by one per table in the plant.
Change the table count and the total changes. Anything that adds or removes tables — an obstruction, an arrester footprint, a hand edit in Sketch Mode — moves the pile total with it.

The full row list is in Summary rows.

Half tables receive the full pattern

The pattern is stamped onto every table in the plant without checking whether that table is a full one or a half unit, and the row counts every table at the full pattern size.

On a plant using half-table infill this makes the pile figure optimistic, and some stamped piles can fall outside a half unit's narrower footprint. Check the overlay over a run of half units before handing the count to a procurement or setting-out team.

If half units are a material share of the plant, treat the row as an upper bound and count them separately. Whether to use half-table infill at all is covered in Maximizing placement and half tables.

Exporting the piles

Three exports carry the pattern, and one of them exists only while the overlay is on.

Export to Excel…, in the Pile layout window, writes the coordinates as a workbook — the list a setting-out team keys into an instrument.
Export ▾ Export PDF (with Piles) appears in the Export menu only while Piles is on. It is the PDF report with the pile drawing and coordinates: the site layout plan with the piles, the design summary, the single-line diagram, the bill of materials and, when energy was calculated, the energy pages — every page A3 landscape. The first page is drawn at 300 dpi for this export, because a pile drawing is printed large and zoomed into on site. Switch the overlay off and the item disappears; the Word report from Export Detailed Project Report is the ordinary report without the piles.
Export DXF writes the piles to their own PILES layer, present whenever a pile pattern has been defined. See CAD export. Piles are not written to the Google Earth file.

The Export menu with the extra Export PDF (with Piles) item shown because the pile overlay is on. — The Export menu with piles on

If you are handing one document to a survey or setting-out team, the PDF with piles is the one. See The project report for what the other pages carry.

Limits

The window holds one pattern at a time, and applies it to every table in the plant. A plant that mixes table types — a different module count, a different number of rows — needs one pass per type: define the pattern for the first type and export, then redefine it for the second and export again. There is no way to hold two patterns at once.

Beyond that:

Nothing is checked against a structural design. Pile count, position and radius are inputs. The application draws and counts what you enter; it does not test whether the foundation works.
Nothing is checked against the ground. The pattern is geometric, so it is applied identically on level and sloping ground. Where relief within a single table footprint matters, that is what Max height var / table in Topography is for — it governs which ground is used at all. See Topography.
The pattern cannot vary by location. Every table gets the same pattern, so there is no way to treat the tables in one corner of the site differently. Export a pattern per table type, as above.
A later Generate keeps piles uniform on purpose. After Sketch Mode edits, Generate re-plots the aligned grid with Maximize placement switched off, precisely so that stamped pile coordinates stay regular for construction. See Sketch Mode.