Corridor design - Part I

Corridor design used to be one of the scariest topics for many engineers, before Civil3D came along. I still remember my good old days with Geopak, when I used to spend days leading up to the anticipation of being able to see my highway in 2D view (cross-sections), let alone be able to view something in 3D. Along came CAiCE, however, and made the job much easier with the aid of Fragments, etc. But when Civil3D came along with its nifty assemblies and subassemblies, I felt like the job of design engineers' is just getting too easy now! It's funny I can back that up because I am currently at Univ. of Central Florida showing Civil 3D to faculty, students of Geomatics program including some survey professionals, and everyone seems to think engineers have it made.

So, corridors can be as simple or complex depending upon the scope of your project. If you do simple 2 or 4-lane rural or urban sections, it literally takes no time, whether in professional or educational setting. Interchanges, on the other hand, could get a bit involved, although same steps are needed to get to the end result. Complex interchanges (cloverleafs, etc.) have many ramps, alignments, etc. to keep track of, which is what really requires bulk of the work. The building blocks of corridor remain simple 1) alignment 2) Design Profile, 3) Assemblies, and 4) ground surface. Once you have these three pieces, it's a breeze creating a corridor model (which is the fancy 3D highway people love to see).

Check out this demo of corridor modeling >>>>

In next post, I will demonstrate the steps to create a simple assembly (think typical section or cross-section image of what the highway section would look like), and then get into putting a simple corridor together.