The first time you open Bentley OpenRoads Designer with an actual road to design, rather than a demo file someone else already set up, the interface can feel like it’s hiding the workflow from you. It isn’t — but OpenRoads expects you to understand a specific sequence of steps before anything useful happens, and almost every beginner frustration traces back to trying to skip or reorder that sequence. This is a walkthrough of what that first real alignment project actually looks like, step by step, written for someone who has genuinely never done this before.
A road design in OpenRoads is built in a specific dependency order: horizontal alignment first (the road’s path when viewed from above), then vertical alignment on top of it (the road’s elevation profile along that path), then a corridor model that uses both alignments plus a cross-section template to generate the actual 3D road surface. Each stage depends on the one before it. You cannot sensibly build a vertical alignment before the horizontal one exists, because the vertical alignment is defined as elevations along stations measured on the horizontal path. Understanding this dependency chain before you start saves most of the early confusion.
Before any geometry gets drawn, a new OpenRoads file needs the existing ground terrain attached as a reference — typically a digital terrain model (DTM) surface showing the existing site conditions. This matters more than it might seem: later, when you create a vertical alignment, OpenRoads can show you the existing ground profile directly beneath your proposed road, which is essential for making sensible elevation decisions (you want your design to work with the existing ground, not fight it with excessive cut and fill). Skipping this step, or attaching terrain late, is a common early mistake that forces rework once it becomes obvious the alignment doesn’t actually make sense against the real site.
This is where most beginners spend their first real session. The horizontal alignment is built from a sequence of straight lines and curves that define the road’s path in plan view — essentially, where the road goes when you look straight down at it. In practice, this means drawing line segments along your intended route and inserting curves at the points where the direction changes, rather than trying to draw one continuous freeform path. OpenRoads lets you define these elements precisely — by bearing and distance for lines, by radius for curves — rather than relying on freehand sketching, which matters because road geometry has to meet real design standards for curve radii and sight lines, not just look reasonable on screen.
Once your horizontal geometry exists, you define a start station (essentially, the zero-point reference OpenRoads will measure all distances along the road from). This station labelling is what lets you refer to any point on your road as “station so many metres” rather than by coordinates, which becomes essential once you start working with vertical design and cross-sections.
With the horizontal path established, the vertical alignment defines the road’s elevation along that path — essentially a profile view, showing how high the road sits at each station. This is where the terrain you attached in Step 1 becomes genuinely useful: OpenRoads can display the existing ground elevation as a reference line directly beneath your proposed vertical alignment, so you can see immediately whether your design is asking for a reasonable amount of earthwork or an unreasonable one.
The vertical alignment itself is built from grade lines and vertical curves, conceptually similar to the horizontal alignment’s lines and curves but operating in the elevation dimension instead of the plan dimension. A common beginner mistake here is designing a vertical profile that looks fine as a 2D line but, once built into a 3D corridor, produces unrealistic cut-and-fill volumes because the designer wasn’t actively comparing it against the existing ground profile while drawing it.
This is the step that turns your two alignments into an actual 3D road model. A corridor in OpenRoads combines the horizontal alignment, the vertical alignment, and a cross-section template (which defines the road’s width, lane configuration, shoulders, slopes, and other typical-section details) and applies that template along the entire alignment at a defined interval, generating a full 3D surface automatically.
For a first project, using one of OpenRoads’ standard template examples rather than building a fully custom template from scratch is the sensible starting point — it lets you focus on understanding how the corridor process itself works (how the template follows the alignment, how it reacts to changes in the alignment) before tackling the more advanced skill of designing your own template from first principles.
| Stage | What It Defines | Depends On |
|---|---|---|
| Horizontal alignment | Road path in plan view (lines + curves) | Nothing earlier — this is the starting geometry |
| Vertical alignment | Road elevation profile along the horizontal path | Horizontal alignment must exist first |
| Corridor model | Full 3D road surface (width, slopes, cross-section) | Both horizontal and vertical alignments, plus a template |
| Terrain attachment | Existing ground reference for cut/fill decisions | Should be attached early, ideally before vertical design |
A few patterns show up repeatedly with beginners working through their first alignment: building the horizontal alignment without first checking it against the attached terrain or any known constraints (like existing utilities or property boundaries), designing a vertical profile in isolation from the existing-ground reference line and then being surprised by excessive earthwork volumes once the corridor is built, and trying to jump straight to a fully custom cross-section template before understanding how the standard template examples behave along a simple alignment. Each of these is a sequencing mistake — doing a later-stage decision without having properly used the information available from the earlier stage.
Once your first corridor model exists, OpenRoads can generate alignment reports — station-by-station listings of your horizontal and vertical geometry, along with basic design checks. Reviewing these reports, even on a simple first project, is a good habit to build early: it forces you to actually read and understand the numbers behind your design rather than just trusting that the 3D model “looks right” visually.
A first successful alignment and corridor model is the foundation everything else in OpenRoads builds on — drainage design, utility conflict checking, earthworks quantities, and more advanced template design all assume you’re comfortable with this basic horizontal-vertical-corridor sequence. Rather than piecing this together from scattered video tutorials in a different order than the software actually expects, Orbit Training Centre’s Bentley OpenRoads course in Dubai walks through this exact sequence hands-on, with real project-style exercises rather than abstract demo files.
Stationing is one of those concepts that sounds simple when explained but trips people up the first time they actually use it. Once your horizontal alignment exists and your start station is set, every point along the road gets referenced as a distance from that start — “station 1+200” meaning 1,200 units along the alignment from the zero point, for example. The practical skill beginners need to build is reading and navigating by station rather than by map coordinates, because almost every later tool in OpenRoads — cross-section views, superelevation diagrams, drainage structure placement — expects you to think in terms of “where along the road” rather than “where on the map.” Spending deliberate time early on just navigating your own first alignment by station, before moving on to vertical design, pays off throughout the rest of the project.
Once you’re past your very first basic alignment, the next concept you’ll run into is superelevation — the cross-slope applied through curves so a vehicle can travel the curve safely at the design speed, essentially banking the road slightly through turns. This is governed by real design standards tied to curve radius and design speed, and it’s not something to improvise; getting it wrong isn’t just a software mistake, it has real safety implications in an actual design. For a genuine first project, it’s reasonable to work with gentle curves and conservative design speeds where superelevation requirements are minimal, and treat the full superelevation design process as a skill to build once the basic horizontal-vertical-corridor sequence is comfortable, rather than trying to tackle everything in the same first exercise.
A few recurring issues show up often enough with first corridor models that they’re worth flagging in advance. If your corridor template seems to twist or behave oddly at a specific station, the most common cause is a horizontal or vertical alignment with an unrealistic or overly sharp transition at that point — the template is reacting correctly to geometry that genuinely has a problem, rather than the corridor tool itself malfunctioning. If your corridor doesn’t appear at all after you think you’ve set it up, double-check that both the horizontal and vertical alignments are actually referenced correctly in the corridor definition — a surprisingly common beginner mistake is having both alignments exist in the file but not properly linked into the corridor object itself. And if your earthwork volumes look obviously wrong once the corridor is built, it usually traces back to the vertical alignment having been designed without properly checking it against the existing terrain profile, exactly the mistake described earlier in this guide.
A few habits are worth building into your very first project, rather than picking them up later after they’ve already cost you rework. Name your alignments and corridors clearly and consistently from the start — a file with “Alignment1,” “Alignment1-copy,” and “Alignment1-final” is a genuinely common outcome of not establishing a naming convention early, and it becomes a real problem once a project has several alignments for different road sections or design alternatives. Save incremental versions of your file as you complete each major stage (horizontal complete, vertical complete, first corridor built) rather than only saving at the very end, since a corridor-building step that goes wrong is much easier to recover from if you can roll back to a known-good point just before it. And get comfortable reviewing your alignment reports regularly rather than only when something looks visually wrong — catching a geometry issue in a report before it propagates into a corridor model, and from there into drainage design or earthwork calculations, is far cheaper than catching it after those downstream steps have already been built on top of a bad alignment.
Once you’re genuinely comfortable with the horizontal-vertical-corridor sequence on a simple project, the next real skills to build are custom cross-section template design (rather than relying on standard examples), intersection and junction modelling where multiple alignments meet, and integrating drainage design into the same corridor workflow. Each of those builds directly on the foundation covered in this guide — which is exactly why getting genuinely comfortable with this first sequence, rather than rushing past it, pays off disproportionately for everything that follows in a real OpenRoads career.
It’s worth being honest about why a structured first project, done with guidance, tends to beat self-teaching from scattered tutorials for most beginners — not because the tutorials are bad individually, but because they’re rarely sequenced the way this guide has laid out the dependency chain, and a beginner working through them in whatever order they’re found online often ends up trying to learn vertical alignment concepts or corridor template design before the underlying horizontal-alignment fundamentals are solid. A structured course with a real instructor catches that sequencing problem immediately and corrects it, whereas a beginner working alone from mixed sources often doesn’t realize they’ve built a shaky foundation until several steps later, when something downstream stops making sense and they have to trace the problem back.
To set expectations honestly: a genuine beginner working through this sequence with proper guidance should expect their first session or two to be spent almost entirely on the horizontal alignment — not because it’s conceptually the hardest part, but because it’s the part where you’re also learning the interface itself, and that overhead is real and normal. Vertical alignment typically comes together faster once horizontal is solid, since the underlying logic (lines, curves, defined by stations) is conceptually similar even though you’re now working in the elevation dimension. The first corridor build is often the most satisfying moment in a beginner’s early OpenRoads experience, because it’s the point where the alignments you’ve been working with abstractly suddenly become a real, visible 3D road — but it’s also common for that first corridor to need two or three iterations as you notice issues in the underlying alignments that weren’t obvious until you could see them in 3D. That iteration is normal and expected, not a sign you’ve done something wrong.
One more practical point worth internalizing early: don’t treat your first alignment as disposable practice you’ll throw away once you “really” start learning. Keep it, revisit it after you’ve learned the next stage (drainage, intersections, custom templates), and try applying that new concept back onto the same simple alignment rather than always starting fresh. Seeing how a new concept changes a model you already understand well is usually a faster way to build real intuition than repeatedly starting from zero on a new file for every new skill.
It’s best practice to attach it early, ideally before you start detailed design work, even though the horizontal alignment itself doesn’t strictly require it. You’ll need the terrain reference once you move into vertical design, and setting it up late often means revisiting decisions you made without that context.
No — the vertical alignment is defined in terms of stations measured along the horizontal alignment, so the horizontal geometry has to exist first.
Not recommended as a first step. Use one of the standard template examples to understand how the corridor process works before attempting a fully custom template.
Designing the elevation profile without actively comparing it to the existing ground reference line, which often leads to an unrealistic amount of cut-and-fill once the 3D corridor is generated.
With structured, hands-on practice rather than self-teaching from scattered sources, most beginners can get comfortable with the horizontal-vertical-corridor sequence within a focused training course rather than needing months of trial and error.
This walkthrough is grounded in Bentley’s own OpenRoads Designer training materials and publicly available quickstart guides (including CODOT’s published OpenRoads Designer self-paced training series), which document the same core horizontal-then-vertical-then-corridor workflow sequence described here.
