[Credit to Paul and Rohit, Bentley Colleagues]

Have you ever wanted to create civil drawings with plain MicroStation graphics and without references?
Well now you can do this as a post process on the OpenRoads Drawing production.

There is a new hidden configuration variable that can be used in OpenRoads Designer 10.09.00.91 and MicroStation Update 15.
If you set _USTN_MERGE_INTERNALREFERENCES_SAVEASV8=1 then references within the same file will be merged when using Save As DGN / Export to DGN.

This means that when you export a profile sheet model to V8 DGN the drawing model will be merged into the sheet and the resultant DGN will have plain MicroStation graphics without reference attachments (also remember to use export options to set external references to merge).

For cross sections, select all of the drawing models and sheet models in the filter tab and then the output sheet models will have the drawing models merged as plain graphics (no longer referenced).
Alternatively, if creating cross sections using cached visible edges by setting MS_REF_VISEDGE_ATTACH_STATE=CachedAutomatic prior to creating the cross sections then when you export to V8 DGN only the sheet models need to be selected to export and the drawing models will automatically merge.

This workflow may also be useful as an alternative to the downgrade civil model – remove civil model option in some cases.

There is one final improvement we need to merge the cross section drawing models onto sheets by only selecting the sheets to export… but for now we have some good progress that will help our users!

Note that OpenRoads Designer 2020 R3 was not built on the same platform as MicroStation Update 15 so you will find that the export works better using MicroStation that had some additional fixes applied.
When using ORD 2020 R3 you may experience some exceptions at the end of the export (although it generally still exports ok)