Corridor design, part 2

Hope you're all keeping up with all the political excitement unfolding around us....I was literally glued to my TV on Tuesday night ("super Tuesday") and past weekend as well, mostly watching CNN. I love their coverage, interactive tools they use on TV and website, especially the touch screen "what-if" tools that John King uses. Perhaps it's the uncertainty of the results along with the unprecedented and ubiquitous coverage of the news are factors for my intense interest.

Anyway, if you are just getting a handle on corridor design in Civil 3D and followed my last post, I hope you're a bit more comfortable with creating corridor models. These models are quite interactive, parametric, and respond to any change you make to components (e.g. changing lane width in Lane subassembly, modifying alignment stationing, updating surface to reflect current conditions, etc.). Essentially, it's very close to BIM (Building Information Modeling) capability in the Architecture world (Revit product) and Digital Prototyping concept in the Mechanical world (Inventor product).

Here is the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Create Surface, Alignment, and Design Profile

Step 2: Create an Assembly: It's quite an interactive process actually, and you'll have fun creating an assembly. After you give your assembly (think: typical section or template on steroids) a name, you just place it ("a red line shows up") anywhere in your design (for once, location doesn't matter!).

Step 3: Access the Catalog from Corridors > Subassembly Catalog menu and take a look at it. It has various subassemblies (parametric cross-section components) that you can drag-and-drop onto your Assembly. Or, better route is to drag-and-drop them into a Tool Palette first so you don't have to open the catalog again.

Step 4: This is the easiest step. All you now do is drag-and-drop subassemblies from tool palette (or catalog) and start attaching them to the assembly (almost as easy as "Lego"). You'll notice that you have the option to change various parameters (e.g. lane width, slope, how to assign superelevation, etc. depending upon the subassembly). These subassemblies are very very powerful and you'd be amazed at the intelligence they have (they're coded in .NET language).