Most effective way to create an XREF from a corridor

[NeilSpoon]

I am still fairly new to C3D and currently working on our first real job.

I have done the design and have a corridor for which I have created a couple of different code set styles.

One of the styles is to show the relevant featurelines only (such as EC's, Back of Footways etc), which I want to use as a Design Xref in order for other disciplines to create their drawings (such as landscape architects etc). They only have access to normal AutoCAD.

So I need to somehow export/save the Corriodor as a normal CAD file. I have so far tried the following:

• DREF the corridor in a new C3D drawing and export that to CAD. But of course you cant DREF Corridors.
• Export the C3D drawing, but this will export the entire drawing. Including some dummy corridors, assemblies, gradings, etc. This would mean a lot of tidying up to be left with just a clean design outline.
• XREF the C3D drawing into CAD, but again this will insert the entire drawing.
• Copy Paste the corridor, but this isnt possible
• Create polylines from the corridor. This works, but have to select each line seperately and it wont inherit the code set style. So this results in too much work.
• Sheet sets, etc.

Is there a simple way to get a C3D corridor into normal CAD? I get the idea that this software runs on the basis of  everyone using it in terms of drawing production and not normal CAD......

I kind of sold this software to my company on the basis that a lot of time will be saved by having everything in an AutoCAD environment and drawing production will be much faster. But so far I cant see a way to set up a simple CAD Xref from a C3D corridor. Am I missing something here? Surely this should be a fairly straightforward operation?

Thanks.

[larryrichards8326]

i guess my first question would be "why would you want to give everyone your drawing that you did your corridor in?"

thats what the actual "Site Plan" is for. i use my corridors for design purposes only they are not used for drawing production.

[NeilSpoon]

I am not sure what you mean with a "site plan". Our workflow is as follows: We work mostly on small type highway schemes. We used to use MX to design the roads and export the design to CAD. This design was tidied up and layered up and saved as an XREF. Together with a topo survey XREF, construction drawings are produced, such as road construction, setting out, drainage, lighting, etc. If the design would change, the design XREF would be updated and all drawings would update to this new design. Now we replaced MX with C3D. So once I have designed my road I have got a corridor. So my question is how I can get the feature lines from the corridor (ec's, back of footways etc) into CAD and save it as the design XREF in order for other disciplines to do their designs on? The don't use C3D. Am I missing something here? It appears the only way to produce drawings is to stay within Civil3D, which is ironic as its called AutoCAD Civil3D but you can't seem to use a C3D design in AutoCAD. If anyone could talk me through a workflow for producing drawings, please do 🙂 Thanks

[c_asg]

If you explode your corridor modell once, you get a block that you can copy+paste to another dwg. Explode it twice and that block is exploded to lines (no polylines/feature lines unfortunately).
Seems like it's rather unusual to actually display your corridor model in drawing production.

[sboon]

Neil your process is pretty much correct for working with Civil3d already.  I suspect that you need to separate your design from your baseplan data, so that when other users xref your file all that they get is your alignment, profile and corridor model.  If you have the layers set up correctly then the other users would be able to isolate only your corridor feature lines while they're working with your file.  The whole point of this is that you don't export anything for other users while you're still designing.

[NeilSpoon]

Thanks Steve. I think that is probably the easiest solution. Thanks for the suggestions.