"Corridor Contour Problems"

Lately, I have been getting a lot of calls concerning Corridor errors and contours. It seems that some users are a little fooled by how Civil 3D shows it's data. For instance in the image shown you can see that this Corridor has a slight problem with contours going all the way down to 0, even though the profile is tying into existing grade, yet you still end up with these contours. What you may not notice is that the EG profile is not being correctly shown on the Profile View. Notice in the next image that at first glance it looks as if my FG Profile is tying into the EG surface. What you don't see is that this is not the true starting point. Now I do understand that a good designer would or should notice the starting station in the profile, but honestly I wouldn't be writing this if users have noticed this. The key to working with profiles is to use the AutoCAD command Draworder or DR as the shortcut. Since the EG surface happens to be lined up with the grid at elevation 116 (in this case), the grid is actually overlapping the EG surface. So by using the draworder command on the EG Profile you can clearly see where the FG profile should begin. I guess there may be a case where the user needs to have the corridor not start at the beginning of the alignment. In that case the user would need to setup his Corridor properties accordingly, in this case at starting station would be 0+52.28.

In all, I know a lot of this seems pretty obvious for the advanced users but since a lot of users are just now starting to implement and use Civil 3D in a production environment, overlooking a small thing such as this can cause quite the headache. Not only with creating data but also with plotting.

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