Best Way to Present Corridor's in Drawings

[boberdorf]

I am new to Civil 3d, and have just completed the first pass on a design that includes several corridors.  I am confused on the best way to prepare actual drawings.

I initially thought that plan production would be useful, however it seems that these are fixed.   It seems odd that draft drawings cannot be present for review and editing. Is this correct or am I missing something? 

It also seems like a huge task to generate the styles required to present the corridor in an appropriate format for a drawing, let alone several drawings that may have different requirements - in particular for a new comer who would not have set up the range of styles.

Therefore I consider two approaches are feasable - XREF the corridor or Extract Polylines.

I now think the best way to prepare drawings is to export polylines of the key components of the corridor and prepare drawings using this.  This would be combined with the alignment, pipe and surface data, that can be used in the drawings via Data Short Cuts.

I would appreciate any guidance from old hands.

Thanks

[castled071049]

Honestly, we don't show corridors at all in our plan sets. We have an underlying BASE PLAN that is just plain old Autocad lines and arcs, etc., representing all the horizontal elements of the corridor (face of curb, back of curb, road centerline, etc.). We data reference in the corridor surface to give vertical information.

My advice is, don't bother with the corridors themselves as it is too time consuming and any solution/workaround would not be dynamic.

[Jay_B]

We do the same here.

To add to what's been said, Corridor Feature Lines don't display as curves

so additional corridor frequency Lines are needed to make them look like curves.

[tcorey]

Good morning,

I recommend you read-up on Code Set Styles. There are some in the templates that come with the software and they allow you to automate the plan and section view styles for your corridors. As an example, using Code Set Styles, you can have the pavement in plan view automatically hatched with a pattern of your choice, you can have labels placed at strategic points on cross section views, etc. The investment in learning this functionality is well worth it because it can save huge chunks of time on future projects.

Best regards,

Tim

[Neilw_05]

Don't you end up with tessellated arcs when you display corridors in plans Tim? You would have to increase the sampling interval to very high numbers to get a good resolution, which in turn increases processing overhead tremendously. How do you handle that?

[Hammer.john.j]

Corridors have 3 main purposes: Surface out put/contours with close frequencies Sections EW and computations then there is the fun stuff like renderings which i've used for a couple of projects.... but this is rare. what is your deliverable?

[boberdorf]

HI John,

I am only preparing very basic drawings and was looking for the most efficient way.  I think I will export the key polylines for this project.

Are you able to confirm if drawings prepared by plan production are editable.

Thanks

[castled071049]

The plan and production process just prepares and organizes a large set of plans quickly. Once they are prepared, the plan and production process has no further bearing on the set. They are as if prepared individually the old school way (one at a time) and therefore completely editable.

However, let me strongly advise you not to export "key polylines" from the corridor! This is a waste of time. You don't need the corridor for anything but designing the road/ditch/whatever, and for the surface generated from it.

[Jay_B]

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@castled071049 wrote:

However, let me strongly advise you not to export "key polylines" from the corridor! This is a waste of time. You don't need the corridor for anything but designing the road/ditch/whatever, and for the surface generated from it.

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Agreed, except it can be very beneficial to Extract the Daylight Lines as polylines if required to show Grading Limits.

After they've been extracted, convert them to 2d polylines at a zero elevation keeps things cleaner.

[Hammer.john.j]

I agree, extracting the daylight lines and converting them to 2D polylines is practically a must.