Civil 3D Best Practice Series: Corridors

again welcome everybody my name is Syed llama the industry and manager for Soledad specialized in the supermarket so today we may have Matt over from Vancouver and Jake Juan from New Brunswick both are technical consultants for civil market as well so a few things first we're gonna be recording this so I will make this available to review afterwards or to share with your coworkers so it's gonna be in our YouTube channel you will have access to this series as well as a lot of other technical videos there's a couple of nice stuff at math put together too so the easiest ways to go to our website click on the YouTube icon at the top of the page and there you go so this will be your second best practice series and today we're gonna be talking about industry best practices when working with corridors so let's get into the agenda so today we have brief intro we're gonna talk about creation techniques surfaces performance split roads and we're gonna have a finish we're gonna be finishing up with a Q&A by the way we're not gonna be opening up for audio there's a lot of us in this webinar so please use the question panel and go to options on your right and we're gonna be addressing those questions along the way some of them gonna be taking them at the end so let's get let's get this started so as many of you know we're part of the cancer group of company and what this means it means that we can provide solutions from our partner companies ensuring that you have all your software and our needs in one location so for 25 years we've been helping a lot of customers making faster increase their margins and with this their business risk to some of our services like training data management customization Werfel assessments or the classic services these are the market we serve obviously a sea in manufacturing we have the largest team in Canada all time zones both languages even other languages so these are products that will work you know you all know we're good out of this but we have other products like Blue Beam with a review solution for those who don't know is a PDF markup creation and collaboration tool specific for an industry so this product comes very handy these days with the kovat time they make people doing remote meetings and and working from home we also have the FME solutions and CPC which are productivity tools for civil3d and rabbit so we further get into Matt's agenda today I like to remind everybody our upcoming events so the third version of our series is coming next week we're gonna be talking about tribe I'm pressure networks we also have prepare a blooping webinars specific for the civil industry that's gonna be happening May 6 and our productivity worship and our classic courses that you all know finally service bundles it's right now we have a lot of demand for Ben 360 people needed access to the data so they're looking for class solution so this is like like a bundle where you can kick start your you've been to six you portfolio we also have several blue bean bundles people depend on how deep you want to go but this is something that you can just deploy and start using free user-friendly and we can we can help you if you need any kind of help and finally a seller to BIM so this is a bunch of services that we've been running now remotely like we're follow assessments we're doing the template standard developments automations obviously training and civil tools and our technical support so with that I'm gonna hand over to Matt Matt can you please take ownership of this absolutely ok all right my name is Matt Kohlberg been with saag CAD for well pretty much ever and so today we're gonna talk about some chord or best practices it's sort of assumed that you know a little bit about corridors already so I'm gonna make that assumption I don't get myself set up here alright let's go I'm using civil3d 2020 currently most everything I'm gonna talk about today is doable for almost any version of civil3d 2018 and above because there's a specific tool I was released in 2018 that I'm going to talk about a bit later first is creation techniques and some tips about surfaces and how to get the sort of the best performance out of your corridor the object viewer etc and then we're gonna talk split roads really that's just an example of some of the stuff you can talk about with corridors the debt ting technique I'm going to show you for split roads can be employed for lots of other pieces of the corridor so creation techniques the first thing I'm going to talk about is baselines let's switch over to civil 3d here and I'll open my baselines file when corridors were first released by autodesk on you could only create a corridor using alignments and profiles over time people wished that you could use let's say creating feature lines to make it quarter and we have that now it's been around for quite a few releases you can create a corridor using alignments and profiles yes but you can also create a corridor using a corridor feature line and so this part of the the webinar really isn't about which one you should use there's not really any best practice per se it's really about how you prefer to work you know if I'm gonna create a road some linear type object and my brain and it sort of makes sense to use an alignment and profile because that's typically how civil engineers have worked forever if I'm creating some kind of a nonlinear feature like a detention pond or something you might not think you would use a alignment and profile for a detention pond but you could let's say here's an example this one here that's my typical road and I've used an alignment in profile this one is a ditch and I've chosen to use a feature like you know could I have used an alignment in profile for that absolutely but just because I can i wanted to use a feature line for that instead so really it's about you are you more comfortable in this particular situation using an alignment in profile or is it make more sense to use a feature line what if what if you want to use a feature line because you're going to be using some grading maybe you're not even gonna use a corridor at all and you want the benefits of alignment in profile well this one isn't really about corridors per se but it's about using alignments profiles and feature lines together okay this here is and Len it you can tell because it's got typical station labels by the way I think Syed mentioned it and I'll mention it again if you have a question there is a questions panel in your GoToWebinar tab feel free to ask the question there and we're gonna address the questions every 20 minutes or so all right back to these regularly scheduled program my alignment complete with its design profile because this is a berm let's call it with a spillway in the middle and for me I would like to use grading tools for my berm but because I like I prefer to edit my verticality using profiles it makes more sense to me to edit this and a profile as opposed to a feature line I can do it a lot faster it's it's easier for me to adhere to you know like a 10% grade here and a 25% grade for this bill way it's easier for me to do that with a profile so alignment in profile makes sense but I want to grade from this thing no problem right now it's not a feature line but I can certainly make a feature line using this tool I just really quickly go through it because it's a you have a choice whether or not it goes on a site I've chosen an alignment and and to get the elevation data I can choose one of the two profiles I have that's my design profile right there and the feature line style and what layer it goes on and tessellation factor there happens to be curves and then this magic button the feature line that gets extracted from this alignment and profile combination will be a dynamic feature line feel free to grade all you like but the moment you change that alignment and its associated profile of that feature line will update and therefore your grading will update as well so not corridors but sort of along the same line so this part again really isn't best practice per se it's it's about how you feel about it you can use alignments of profiles or you can use feature lines it's up to you which which makes the most sense now here's a situation where I'm designing a detention pond using a corridor I've decided it makes sense for me to use a corridor and because it's a detention pond it's a closed loop I'll open that file and this is fine you don't feel free to create your detention pond with a corridor I understand that detention ponds often have corners with no radii and so you're gonna be susceptible to those nasty bow ties by the way I'll talk about those later as well but if you've got a handle on how to deal with your bow ties and you still want to use alignment profile feature line let's say you want to make a corridor for your detention pond heed this advice I've got one detention pond there and then over here it's not a detention pond yet but it's ready to become one it's important where you start your alignment so with this alignment the green line that you see I just drew an AutoCAD rectangle and I defined an alignment from it and when that happens rectangles always begin at one corner and you know if you're just doing a normal feature line or grading or alignment starting it there it's not a problem but because I need to make a corridor from this closed loop and I'm going to rely on the automatic bowtie resolution or even not just the automatic bowtie resolution but the manual bowtie resolution here's what happens at the corners okay that's perfect that's the automatic bowtie resolution in action normally you know three four years ago we would have had a bowtie and we would have been very upset how the corridor handles those things and you know now we've got something a little better there's another good one this corner there's another good one and then finally oh that's our start point because we started at the corner civil3d has no ability to clean up this particular bowtie even if you tried to do a manually it's not really gonna work so if you're gonna have this kind of closed loop corridor and it doesn't have to be a detention pond right it can be a loop road in a subdivision let's say it's important that you start the alignment station zero somewhere along one of these straight stretches along I'm in the middle of a tangent doesn't have to be the middle of a tangent but somewhere along that tangent so here's my example here there's my detention pond and station zero and station 375 are at the same spot okay it starts here it goes clockwise and it finishes at station 375 exactly on that same spot so if you want to do a closed loop the the magic bullet for this one is you need to start your alignment in the middle of one a year Tanja's okay assemblies it's tough to say exact best practices of assemblies here again tell you which assemblies you have to use you sort of have to fear that one out on your own but there's things that you can do that are gonna give you grief all right let me open up my somebody's file I teach a lot of civil 3d and when we talk about corridors by the way if I had to pick a feature in civil three that I don't know I'm the best at not I'm not saying I'm the best that I feel is my strong point um I like all of a civil 3d but I think corridors are probably my favorite part of it and so I I teach a lot of quarters and we do advanced classes there's one thing that I always show my students when you think you're finished making your assembly so here I've got it your typical Road I think I'm done so I'll go to this guy and when I think I'm finished all right I don't think there's anything else for me to do I'll always go into the assembly properties and look at the construction tab what I'm looking for is for this to make sense alright look at my assembly I have one two three sub assemblies on the left one two three on the right this jives with that on the Left I've got three things on the right at three things okay that one's good about this one mmm-hmm the left seems okay but the right there's only one lane why did that happen it looks fine well as you know looks are deceiving you can get into this situation by using the AutoCAD copy command to copy things here's what I mean I can use AutoCAD copy to copy this sub assembly from that point to I'm just gonna put it here there okay so I AutoCAD to copied that thing and yes obviously it doesn't look in place right now but when I go to the assembly properties still in the construction tab that thing hasn't been added so that's the most common way to get yourself into this problem you've you've AutoCAD copied something and it looks okay but it's not actually attached to this sub assembly it appears that it is but it isn't really now to fix this this is called a a detached sub assembly by the way when I right-click that kirb I have this option add to assembly that means this curb is not attached to any sub assembly so I'll right-click and I'll choose add to assembly and then I'll choose the appropriate marker point to add it to and that'll be the end of my lane there I didn't look any different but let's take a look at me assembly properties its construction tab hah there it is all right it's now actually part of the assembly so when you're rebuilding your corridor and you realize there's a kerb missing or there's something missing take a look here in the construction tab I'm going to finish it off by adding this daylight add to assembly I'll choose my curb Kenny doesn't look any different but have a look at the assembly properties and construction tab there it is so good so that's tip number one when you're managing your assemblies the last thing you do before you build your corridor is go into assembly properties construction tab just to make everything seem like it's going okay one other common thing that can happen is is you can have two lanes on the same side you know especially when you're new to civil3d you're clicking away and nothing's happening but in reality every time you click you're adding a new lane I've seen that happen before so when you have let's say multiple sub assemblies here you got to get rid of one of them by the way you can right-click and you can delete sub assemblies from here because sometimes it's difficult to pick now tip number two is about marked points I have a sub assembly here this sub assembly is called link between two points and it requires the use of a marked point in fact I'll show it to you assembly properties construction gate link slope between points that's the link and there's the mark point that it links to so far so good not gonna go into details about that particular sub-assembly but here's our corridor now I'm just gonna go ahead and set the targets because this sub-assembly needs some targets all right targets are set let's try rebuild and I'm gonna go into region properties I have a look and I quickly switch to a different sub assembly and then back just so you can see what happens all right switched assemblies let's just switch it back so I want you to be able to see there's gonna be an error that happens there it is so first of all target object not found and then we get into these errors if you've ever used a marked point you've probably seen this error you may not have but I'll show you why you've seen it so it says no mark point found when clearly it's part of my sub assembly when I go back into assembly properties construction tab there is the link to mark point there's the mark point it's there why doesn't this software find it the reason the corridor can't find it is because the order that marked point must be above the link to it because this is how the corridor works when the corridor is built in this case it's going to process from top down it's gonna process the left side it's gonna process the lane the gutter the daylight then it goes to the right side it processes these and then when it gets to here it's trying to process that it's looking for the mark point but it hasn't had a chance to process it yet and the error so how did we get that mark point above the link to it we click the group that it's in and we choose to move it up now that group is above this group therefore the mark point is above the link to it now when I rebuild a corridor it's all gonna be good because the mark point gets defined or processed before the link to it rebuild there we are no errors by the way just so you can understand what this sub-assembly does I'll quickly go into the section editor link between two points it starts here it slopes at a slope in one direction and it slopes from the marked point in the different direction and I've chosen to give it one meter top so in this case I've chosen to create berm you could make this slopes negative and then you get a ditch so that's how that's up assembly works so moral of that story make sure the mark points are defined prior to the links to them simply by changing the order all right Jay if you are there unmute yourself and let's let's review any questions that we have so far I'm here we haven't had any questions related to corridors yet so ok very good I know the same thing happened last week and then all hell broke loose a little bit later so we'll see what happens in a few minutes thanks Jay yep I'm Pro a couple more things with assemblies before I move on I mentioned you shouldn't AutoCAD copy those things and I stand by that you might think well how do I copy from one assembly to another let's say and I want to want to copy this curb to the other side of the road don't use the copy it's all about right-click see these sub assemblies must be attached to other sub assemblies that's why the software always asks you to select the appropriate marker when you're adding sub assemblies it's these three tools right down here copy to move to a mirror so copy to then we choose the appropriate marker it's clearly that's not what I wanted to do but that's how you copy a sub-assembly if I wanted to move it it's the same thing for example maybe this is daylight I don't want it there I want that daylight to be down here for some reason oops and so don't use the AutoCAD move and don't use the grip what happens when you use the grip edit it looks like it works and guess what it it probably will but you've just introduced an offset by manually moving a sub-assembly you've created a sub-assembly offset how do I know when I right-click it I see something that says clear offset and assembly that tells me that I've manually moved now sometimes you have to do that in various situations but not usually so if you have an offset I need to clear it first then if I actually need to move it I need to right click move to then choose the appropriate marker obviously I don't want that so I'm gonna undo undid one too many now the other one is mirror and so in honor if I was to use the AutoCAD mirror command see I'm gonna pick here but if I use AutoCAD mirror what's gonna hit you think should happen is if that red line vertical line is my mirror point we've got a gap between here that's how AutoCAD mirror works but the civil3d sub-assembly mirror is different oh I have a mouse problem there we go it's different because these sub assemblies must be attached to other sub assemblies when I use the mirror tool by right-clicking and then choosing the appropriate marker the sub assemblies yes indeed will be mirrored but they must be attached so they attach at the point where I pick and that they mirror about that point so right click copy to move and mirror the only tools you need to use for those three things with sub assemblies corridor anomalies the two most common things are waterfalls and bowties I'm gonna open up those drawings and close these first don't need to have so many drawings open come on anytime so the top image is a bowtie it happens when typically when you have a corridor that has a change in direction but no curve right there I've got a corner in the corridor no curve the quarter ends up crossing itself as you can see so bowties have been around since quarters have been around and we've only really been able to fix them starting in 2017 all right there's our corner right there now if we had a little radius there that would have helped out a lot but if the radius is too small we're still going to get a little bit of a bowtie so to fix this really I want a big radius but but what if you can't have a radius what if it's a tailing spawn and you're not allowed to put a radius there well if we're gonna have a bowtie and we have to learn how to fit the bottom image that's what a waterfall looks like in plan view waterfalls are a little more easily seen with the object viewer there that's what a waterfall looks like in three dimension and everything is going along great here and then all of a sudden yeah right down to elevation zero same thing on the other side a lot of the corridor is fine but the beginning in the end seemed to jump all the way down to elevations zero for some reason this is probably the most common problem you're going to run into with corridors and it happens for one of two reasons the first reason is you as the designer made a mistake designing the profile okay the blue profile here the cyan profile that is my design profile and what I'm looking for is this right here that is station zero right there the alignment starts at station 0 the corridor starts at station 0 but guess what my design profile doesn't start until station 0.7 so what elevation do you think the corridor uses between here and here if there's no design elevation well zero that's why we have a problem in this case it was my fault so if I were to actually edit this and move it to the right spot and rebuild a corridor at station 0 there is a valid elevation and so I won't get a waterfall on that end on the other end I don't actually want my profile to end here in this case my alignment is 300 meters long or actually what is it 360 370 meters long roughly but I don't want my corridor to go all the way to the end of the alignment I want to stop my corridor before the alignment ends so this profile is in fact drawn correctly it stops at station 340 because I want my road to stop at station 340 problem is when you first create your corridor it's gonna be the same length as your alignment it's gonna go from 0 to 370 I need to tell the corridor to stop early I would like you to stop at station 340 all right corridor properties parameters tab I've got one region it starts at 0 and it finishes at the alignment finish I would like to change the in station to 340 rebuild no more bow ties I fix the error in the beginning and I chain the in-station of that of that corridor so that's how waterfalls happen you either make a mistake designing your design profile or you need to stop your corridor before the alignment stops our friend bowties this bowtie has actually been fixed as has that one as has this one even though I've got an error there that's not an error that's a warning it's a tangency warning I've got a tangent and a curve that aren't tangent to each other no problem that's what I wanted it's just telling me so in this case the bowtie has actually been fixed automatically how okay this feature actually came out in civil 3d - 2017 and it's a feature that you actually have to turn on clearly I have the feature turned on if you have a civil 3d template that you've been pulling forward for many years it's possible that this feature has actually been turned off for you so I recommend to go back to your office have a look at your template and make sure that this feature is turned on automatic fixing of the bowties and where is that feature well it's gonna be in my tool space it's gonna be in my settings tab find my corridor collection and I'll go to the feature settings for corridors automatic clear bowtie options they're there there's two options do you want to fix tangent tangent intersections yes do you want to fix tangent arc arc tangent yeah why not I'm gonna set them both to yes so set those both yes then go ahead and make your corridors and if it can fix bowties automatically it will what about that if I just said why does it fix some and not others okay this corridor does not change with the assembly is too generic links there's my centerline there's a generic link that goes this way there's one that goes that way there I don't know two meters wide let's say but they never change width I haven't applied any targeting you know if this was a road I might have a bus bay or something well that's the corridor changing width and the second you start changing the the automatic bowties do not fix so if you have a quarter that never changes with you can use this feature it's fairly rare though because you know a lot of times we have these daylight lines and that's the cohort or changing width so that's what you're not gonna be able to use automatic in that case what if we have a quarter that that does change with and and we still get bow ties so quickly I'm going to change to a different sub assembly here good okay this one because we have daylight it does change with and therefore we've got a problem with bow ties how do we fix it and you know before I say how you might want to say well why do we want to fix it maybe you're okay with this it doesn't look very good but maybe you have you know dummy line work that that you've trimmed and extended in your actual dummy line work that you print looks good does it matter if the quarter is sort of screwed up is it affecting your volumes not too much really but guess what if you want to make a chord or surface from this and you want to use the automatic outer boundary option for corridors because the corridor crosses itself that boundary is going to results in an invalid boundary and the boundary will not work so you need to fix the bow ties if especially if you want to make a surface clear cord our bow ties is the tool we need to pick the starting sub entity which is essentially the piece of the alignment that's coming into the corner then the PC alignment that's going that's going out of the corner and then we have to pick an intersection point easier for me to show you what's going to happen I'm gonna pick the intersection between those two daylight lines and it says do I want to specify another bowtie yeah sure I know there's another one over here so I'll just know this command I'll come over here fix this one didn't pick the alignment there it is intersection point and I'll just leave it at that that's how the software fixes the bowties that intersection point that you pick all of these corridor links generate to that one spot same thing over here so it fixes the inside of our corridor very nicely be outside well it's not my favorite it doesn't really do anything to the outside because guess what the corridor is not crossing itself so there's no actual bowtie problem for me I wish it would do that but that's going to be on the wish list item for later I suppose we don't do that yet but at least the corridor doesn't cross itself now and I can generate a surface without an error now I think what I'm gonna do is pop up a little pole for you you're gonna see in a minute a couple questions that pop up on your screen and now of course I completely forgot to do the first poll so I'm gonna do two polls in a row here so the first poll I'm going to launch right now all you have to do is click yes or no question is do you sometimes use feature lines as corridor baselines curious how many people use feature lines for corridor baselines all right there is everybody already answered thank you very much I will share the poll I'll close it share it I heard it so really it's pretty close to half and half no I didn't ask how often you do it but I just wanted to know how many people actually use feature lines sometimes as corridor baselines this is more than I expected so thank you very much okay I'll hide that one I'll pop up another poll this one is interesting so think about it for a second I'm gonna launch the poll you'll see the question all right the question is if you've used the clear bore bowties tool how successful are you with it this is 0 to 20 means it's not really successful very much 80 to 100 it's successful almost all the time so think about that for a minute curious what kind of success rate you have with clear bowties okay you've got 24 people have 24 percent of you who have voted so far so I'll give you another minute or so so when you've used the bow tie tool how successful is it now I'm not expecting a hundred percent of you to vote because probably not 100 percent of you use the bow ties tool okay it's a race there's a lot of you 36% of the people who voted voted zero to twenty percent that's a little bit surprising to me now it did it work success you know define success I suppose all right close the poll and I'll pop it up for you all right there's a success rate so far 35% are in the 0 to 20 then it's it gets less as it goes up 10% are seemingly you know good if you're having trouble with the bowtie tool there there there could be varying levels of success I suppose I would highly encourage you to contact us if you're having trouble with the bowtie tool number one it's possible that there's a technique that we can show you that that could make it work for you it's also possible that well it's just not doing a very good job you know when I was doing some beta testing for this particular feature a bunch of years ago when it first came out there were a lot of things wrong with it and every time we discovered something wrong we would send it to the developers and they'd look at it and say oh this is a whole different sort of scenario and and the more actual real-life examples Autodesk and get their hands on where this doesn't work for better is gonna work for us so I highly recommend either at the very least creating Autodesk case yourself directly with Autodesk or better yet you know contact us and maybe we can work through it with you okay thank you very much I'll close that poll and we shall move on oops surfaces you can add corridor features like feature lines or links to a surface then once you've got a surface sometimes you have a bad surface so I'm gonna start opening my drawing and I'll flip back to that screen in just a second you have a look at this image look at the triangulation specifically this is supposed to be a kerb right this is what a kerb looks like you've never seen curb before I know you have that's what a kerb looks like the triangulation I can see that there's a triangle going from the top a curb all the way down to the edge of pavement that's bad triangulation it happens a lot of time when you build a corridor the triangulation is just right but there are certain circumstances that cause bad triangulation and by the way you can see it over on the right side here to the green the purple and the blue lines of the corridor they're being crossed all over the place by my triangulation and so if this was you making a surface from survey basically you've forgotten to have brake lines if this wasn't the corridor the tool you would use as brake lines because this is a corridor we have to do a little bit more okay most users when they're making it a surface from a corridor they use what's called top links and almost always that's good enough where's my bus bay there it is right here's my problem bad triangulation okay when you're building a quarter surface that is I'm gonna forget about the datum for a second and having a look at the top most people used simply just top links there it is right there as part of the quarter and that works fine and that's great but when you create this type of bus Bay and this happens to me almost every time I do this kind of bus bay I have my lane that's widening to accommodate a bus bay or a passing lane and then it comes back again this type of bad triangulation happens almost every time for me but it's easy to fix you can't just use top links you have to now start using feature lines which once we have lots of feature lines to choose from it's it's the feature lines in the vicinity of the curb so flow line gutter is one that's let me just draw this okay flow line gutter is that point right there top a curb is this back of curb is that I need to add at least those three and at the same time I'm going to add this that's etw this is just like adding brake lines to a regular surface I'll add back a curb etw that may not need that one but I'm gonna add it anyways is there a problem with adding too many of these things no not really you could add them all if you wanted to well I wouldn't recommend adding them all because we definitely don't want to do these ones because those are underground so do I have top back curb etw full-on gutter talk curb that is fine I think I'll hit okay it's gonna rebuild and let's take a look at our triangulation oh yeah that looks pretty good so if you spent a lot of time using you know the flip face or the swamp edge tool for your surfaces from corridors you've been spending too much time add those feature lines in that manner and that will probably get you all the way it's very likely that your surface will be perfect after that you won't have to change anything all right so that's adding links of feature lines what about this overhang correction thing by the way I highly recommend adding your surfaces to a sample line group or even just doing a quick section or quick profile through your corridor and just have a look at your surfaces to make sure they look good cause guess what that one doesn't look good that's terrible it's down here goes up to the back of curb there it comes back down again this is a datum surface it's supposed to follow the bottom of the corridor this is for volumes this is perfect that's what I want to see goes down the bottom the quarter I can calculate volume metrics this way why does this happen I'm going to do a really quick explanation of what happens but the fix is actually super simple here's why it happens I need to go over to my assembly when you create a datum surface from your corridor you're typically using the datum links there's a datum link at the bottom of every sub assembly that datum link is defined from the crown to here the curb datum link is defined from here to here and the datum sorry the daylight datum link is defined from here to the daylight you'll notice that they overlap a little bit right here okay the curb datum overlaps with daylight data that's exactly what causes this funky surface anomaly usually with datum surfaces it's these overlapping datum links that's your basic explanation before we have the tool to fix it it was really quite a pain in the butt to fix this I had to go jump through a bunch of Hoops now we've got one little setting Kord our surfaces datum right here overhang correction bottom links I'm gonna go out and say it do this every single time you make a datum surface every time there's I can't think right now off the top my head and I've been doing this for many years I can't think of any time where this has been a bad idea so just do it you're making datum surfaces just make it a matter of course set the overhang correction to bottom links guess what while you're at it when you're making top surfaces set it to top links it's less common but you can have overlapping top links in your corridor but it's very rare that I've encountered that but it can happen so set your top surface is the top length set your bottom surfaces to bottom links every time I'm there I said it surface boundaries every surface needs a boundary why well I like to teach it this way when you're making surfaces there's two types of corners there's an outside corner or exterior corner that's an outside corner that's an outside corner that's an outside but that is an inside corner when you have inside corners civil3d always triangulates outside that corner not where you want it to be that's typically why we need an outer boundary corridors have the option to create an outer boundary extremely easily after you record our surface use the corridor extents wherever the corridor ends we want to use that as the boundary that suits probably 90% of people there's other options though add from polygon basically you draw a polyline and you can use that as your surface boundary not unlike a normal surface boundary add interactively interesting there you may not have used that that is using your corridors feature lines as boundaries you pick one and it sort of follows your mouse around I'm not going to demonstrate that one and then lastly add automatically you may or may not have seen this one sometimes you get very few options here and sometimes you get lots of options um add automatically works in one scenario when you have exactly two feature lines of the same name for example Center of the quarter crown there's only one crown feature line so you would almost never get the option to add a crown is automatic but we very often have two etw edge' travel way feature lines because we have exactly two one on the left one on the right it's gonna show up as an option for add automatically see maybe you want you record our surface to stop at the edge of road you don't want it to go all the way to the daylight you don't want to use the corridor extents you want to stop your surface at the edge of the road so you can use the etw feature lines as automatic boundaries or the back of curb or the back of sidewalk but what if you have this scenario you have a hedge travel way but you only have sidewalk on one side right there's my sidewalk there's no sidewalk on the left side well because you only have one back of sidewalk feature line you are not gonna get back up sir yeah you're not gonna get back of sidewalk as an option you must have exactly two feature lines of the same name so I'd walk on one side sidewalk on the other you can't have three you can't have one has to be exactly two when might you get three feature lines of the same name if you've used generic links generic links always have a point code of p2 so your corridor is gonna have all these feature lines if you've used generic links whose name is p2 you've got four on the left sorry four on the right two on the left there's six feature lines whose name is p2 I have six I have to have two now luckily with corridors with assemblies you can actually rename your generic links so that you have exactly two you want to go to much more detail with that if you're interested again call us up we were definitely happy to do a short training session on how to sort of make this happen for you all right just before we get into performance I'm gonna call on Jay again mr. Kwon do we have any other questions yeah we have a few questions now the first question is from Lee and the question is how do you define the start point of alignment created from a rectangle were you able to answer that one I said that I just tend to draw a rectangle as a closed polyline to control the start point yeah well I guess it depends on how you want to create the alignment if you've drawn a rectangle with the rectangle command you have this and it's going to start there so before you turn the polyline into an alignment you just need to edit it in some way and probably just break it here and then join it and now we have a start point but if you're if you're using the alignment creation layout tools don't start at a corner just start here go 100 meters this way 200 200 200 100 again so it depends on how you want to do it if you're gonna create your alignment with the alignment tools it's easy because you just start here but if you've already drawn that rectangle I would recommend maybe breaking it right here and then connecting them up so that you have a vertex there and one of those is gonna be your start point okay next question okay a question to is from Stuart outside bowtie can you have an outer curve versus tangent I'm not sure I understand that one what did you say I kind of put you under the bus typically you don't have a bowtie on the outside no you you bow ties always happen on the inside I'd be curious to see what could happen on the outside so who was that what's his name again that's that was Stuart Radloff so maybe it's something we can kind of follow up a little bit definitely yep yep certainly I'm gonna show my email address at the end of this and so feel free to email us after and we'll we'll address that question further any others yep next one is from Caitlin and the question is how do you know where to choose the intersection point for the bowtie fix and your answer was I answer typically the outermost intersecting point of the corridor sections where it's giving you trouble or slightly further out yeah I know it's pretty hard to answer that question with text right yeah so in in my case here that's the intersection point usually fee yeah like like Jay said the outermost feature lines like that's my daylight line here and that's my daily line here the outermost feature lines where those two intersect that's almost always your your intersection point all right good question yeah it was and the next question is from Chad did you have to create the feature lines or were they automatically created for the curb etw flow line etc and I answered that they are Auto Corridor feature lines that are generated by the assembly code like point codes connecting together that might have been a little bit too much jargon put together so I'm not sure maybe you can explain better than I can sure yeah I'll do that so the answer the question is they're created automatically right when you make a corridor all these lines that are sort of roughly parallel to your alignment those are called feature lines those just happen there's nothing you need to do with those and they all have names by the way when I hover on this guy right here it says that's etw hover on this one that says that's flow line gutter let's back a curb so all those things have names and those names and those feature lines come from your sub assembly okay here's a curb all these little circles the markers those have names right that's our flow line gutter that's our top curb that's our back curb this one I'm circling that's the etw or edge a travel way and so the feature lines come from these codes that are built into each and every sub assembly and so when you make your corridor it connects up all of the flow line gutters together and it connects up the et w's together that's where the feature lines come from nice alright um if there's more questions great I'm gonna move on Jay thank you very much I'm pretty much gonna finish up and then Syed is gonna come back and he's gonna do his thing and we'll take the last set of questions at the end probably 20 after 25 after or so okay thanks Jay yeah you're welcome so my last poll question of today's seminar for those of you who have used the object viewer with the corridor are you happy with the performance or does it seem like the corridor is like this Pig when you look in the object viewer what do you think huh as expected Oh No Wow it's not expected all right everybody's answered already thank you that's so your hands are so fast how many people are there 105 people here by the way thanks for attending that says it's a really good number I'm really impressed with if your attendance Thanks so I'm gonna close this poll and I'll show it to you if this is actually not what I expected I was expecting a lot more yeses because I get a lot of complaints the corridor and the object viewer is just slow as heck holy crap it's I can't even hardly use it but we're 5050 here pretty much but I'm still going to show you what happens all right here's why the corridor is slow in the object viewer this corridor is fairly intense now guess what if you have a small corridor and you haven't set your frequency very dense you're probably not going to have performance issues but if you have a really dense corridor you probably will have performance issues in the object viewer here's why it's all about how many objects were asking it to orbit we open up my performance drawing while that's opening all right let's count these assemblies are made of three things points links and shapes wherever you see a circle a map I'm sorry I'm sorry I my 13 to Robbie we were still looking at the poll if you can swell crap I'm sorry thank you took there is that better much better thanks all right great so points links in shapes every sub-assembly has these points links and shapes I'm gonna zoom in to my curb here so we can figure out what that means the points aka markers are all the little circles that you see how many circles we have one two three four five six seven eight nine circles that's just for the Kirk there's two more for the daylights ten eleven and there's five on this side of the lane that's sixteen and there's five more circles on the other side of the way and that's 21 so twenty-one circles then how many links do we have one two three four five links there one two three four five six seven eight nine ten that's fifteen sixteen anyways I'm not gonna continue counting there's a lot of links and then the shapes are these enclosed areas those are called shapes and there's a bunch of shapes too and guess what I've only done one half so maybe there's 40 objects on this side and there's 40 more objects on the other side so every corridor section we're asking it to display 80 to 100 different things and when your corridor is really intense 80 or 100 objects times how many sections we have you're asking the corridor to do a lot of work so how do we fix it help me make it better well instead of showing all these things to tell the corridor to show only the links but not even just all links only the top links I'm not going to show you how to do this cuz interest of time I've created something called a code set style code set Styles show cross sections and so I have one called top only that I've made it only displays the top links it doesn't look any different in plan which is great because I don't want my corner to look different but in the object viewer this is a pretty intense corridor it's pretty big and it orbits very quickly if you've had a corridor this size before you probably know that it really doesn't orbit very well at all and mines orbiting with no leg whatsoever and guess what I don't even have a really great computer it's good but it's certainly not top-notch so it's all about the code set style you need to make sure it shows only top links for your corridor I recommend that you set that as your default code set style for corridors so when you make a quarter top links just happen so that's the object viewer but there's other performance considerations such as assembly frequency you know I get asked the question all a lot which what should my chord or frequency be if you don't know what frequency is it's all these little corridor sections that happen and my answer to that question is just you know what it depends if you're in preliminary design there's absolutely no reason to have a super-dense corridor you know in prelim design I go 100 meters you know if if it's only a 200 meter corridor I'm fine I'll go 5 3 meters it doesn't really matter because it's it's so small if I have a 30 kilometer corridor free limb design there's almost no reason for me to go really dense so in the beginning I'll start 100 meters detail design you know that's when I start tightening up my corridor frequency but it doesn't have to be tight for the entire time now really the important part is ready to the end when I want that final volumetric number when I want that final top surface or datum surface I wait to the very end to set the density to something really tight five meters 10 meters whatever it is yeah sure I'm gonna take a hit I'm gonna wait the five minutes or that the two minutes for the quarter to rebuild but if I wait till the very end I'm not having to rebuild it for five minutes every single time so your choice and assembly frequency depends on where you are in your design cycle also regions I don't have to have the same frequency for the entire corridor I've got some funky day lighting going on here I need my corridor to be a lot more dense in this area so I'm gonna split this region into well multiple regions okay Mike doing something interesting trying to split it and it's not happy right now but give me one say oh yeah okay it did split it I'll split it again you is what I want to do is I want to set the frequency to two meters or something really tight but just here west of that I want to keep the frequency the same east of that I want to keep it the same bit right here so I can split the corridor up into multiple regions so that I can affect the frequency on a just a smaller basis here I think I'm getting this performance issue because my house ocean app is turned on there that works better so I now have a brand new region right here and so I'm going to set the frequency but just for that one region right now it's at 10 I want to make it to so your frequency you don't have to set the same frequency for the entire corridor you can have bits of it different regions at different frequencies what if you have a long quarter like a hundred and fifty kilometers huge well what you can do is you can just split your corridor up into multiple regions and you can turn the regions off you can isolate regions you can hide other regions for a long corridor you know you may not need to cut your corridor into regions for the typical reason usually people cut corridors into regions for different assemblies but if it's a long corridor 150 or even 30 kilometers maybe you're only designing it 2 kilometers at a time I don't need to see all the corridor all the time what I can do is oops shoot well that's it in the wrong button try again what I can do is isolate I switch drawings interesting what I can do is isolate a region here we go corridor the magic ribbon I want to isolate this region right here so for the two kilometers or the five kilometers that you're currently working on I just don't need to see the rest of the corridor I can isolate this it's going to perform way better in the object viewer it's going to rebuild faster I can show all the regions they all come back it's going to take a second to rebuild and then I can use the other options maybe I want to hide a region or even delete a region so use regions to help you with performance isolate hide show elite all of its gonna help and lastly multiple drawings you know I don't I don't want to have to get to this level but guess what if you're doing a long highway hundred fifty kilometers you are going to be hard-pressed to design the entire corridor in one DWG file sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and that's 150 kilometers and so maybe 50 kilometer DWG files right every drawing has its own little piece of the highway the first 50 K 150 kilometers 200 kilometers etc you're gonna have one alignment and one profile for all 150 kilometers but because of performance issues sometimes you need to split up your drawings into maybe 20 kilometer sections so make liberal use of data short cuts their references data referencing your corridor is making top surfaces and datum surfaces liberal use of data shortcuts in that case okay finally let's talk about the split road now I chose split road but you can use the same technique for intersection design or highway on ramps and off ramps there's a couple of pieces in here that that tips and tricks that you sort of need to use all right here's what a split road is in in my opinion I've got one road with one eastbound lane one westbound lane and so this Lane we've got this big rock formation and there's not enough room on either side to pull the whole road through so one lane has to go around this side and the other one has to go around that side that's what I call a split road so a couple things what do we do with the alignments in my case I have two alignments ones blue ones red this is my main alignment that goes from zero to the end the secondary alignment is just for the one lane that goes around that rock formation and that's it that's where that alignment ends how do I create that alignment you'll notice that they overlap a little bit on either end some users would say well they don't need to overlap so I'll just start the alignment exactly right here exactly where this where they diverge don't do that it's gonna help you later when you're creating your profile it's a great idea to overlap them a little bit how much doesn't really matter 1020 meters that's fine see the piece of the corridor I'm not gonna have a corner that starts here for the for this piece it's gonna start where that average but it's nice to have the line is overlap for profiling reasons so definitely make them overlap what about that profile cuz that's always the hard part right this alignment the blue Main Street alignment it's got a design profile and it works but then this red alignment where the two diverge this point right here where the two alignments diverge I need to match the red profile exactly with the blue profile cuz that's the crown of my road they have to match perfectly that's historically been difficult unless you follow my advice so number one build this part of the corridor first don't even think about designing the profile for this red piece until you've built this piece of the corridor then make a corridor top surface for that so my blue alignment is complete with a corridor and its top surface then I go ahead and create the red alignment with this is the profile the existing ground profile for the red alignment I then sample the corridor top surface in this profile view it's shown as this sort of magenta line right here that's my corridor top surface of the other quarter these magenta vertical lines indicate where my alignment changes a direction by the way that's done as part of your profile view style it's it's a grid component it's called grid at horizontal geometry point so in your plan view alignment where you have a PI or where you have a tangent curve intersection it's showing me that so I know exactly that that's the point I want to start at because I have a PI there and because I've sampled my corridor top surface it makes it very easy for me to design the profile for my red alignment cuz that's my start point not only that I know because I can see it what my incoming grade is and I designed a profile all the way over here and same thing on the other side there is my outgoing grade and that's the point exactly that I have to tie into so for my diverging alignment and profile I've got points that I can click this is by far the easiest way to design this type of profile build part of the corridor first create that top surface and sample that top surface in this profile view so you have something to click on you have something to snap to after that it's just sort of managing a bunch of different regions and assemblies yeah I've got different numbers of assemblies here like what happens you know if we're gonna diverge here I mean what do we do that's getting into more advanced and if you're gonna do something like this definitely we can schedule with some kind of small training session for this but the hardest part people have trouble with in my opinion the phone calls I typically get are how do i how do i match up those two profiles how do I deal with my alignments and so that part I think hopefully I've shown you well so what we talked about we gave you some tips and tricks on some creation techniques do you use baselines to use feature lines some tricks with surfaces you know we've got that overhang correction surface boundaries performance tips the top only code set style will help you with the object viewer performance splitting your corridor up into multiple regions and setting the frequency per region will help you there as well and then some profiling and alignment tips for a split road so again this is being recorded is gonna be available on YouTube sometime in the near future and I'm gonna pass it on to Syed again he's gonna do his thing and wool Jay and I will address the final questions at the end by the way we'll stick around for a few minutes after time to address the questions if there are any at the end so side it's you Wow Matt that was a fantastic presentation I I can't believe like I watch a lot of your presentations but you always impressed me oh thank you very much so excellent guys I hope you have enjoyed the Matt presentation so I just want to emphasize about a couple of things for those who miss it at the beginning so we're having a lot of people looking for a centric platform in the cloud to collaborate with other fellows other colleagues people are different locations right now so that's why we we're helping customers we've been to 60 this is super straightforward there's not a lot of things to setup also remember our blooming blooming has 90 day trials so if you ever thought about trying blooping why you I don't I don't do it now right so you can try your your cold remote meetings with blooming studios and it's free right now 90 days so please go to blue be calm and start crying and our classic service is workflow assessments we're running a lot of those right now people are holding back a little bit just evaluating what they're doing and good what they're doing bad and just improving getting ready for for when this thing is over it's gonna be over yes okay fellas so next week I hope to see you all at the piper pressure networks please go raise it right now we're over 75% of capacity right now is limited so please register and also on May 6 a blooming civil engineering this is this is gonna be mine bobbin I think Matt's gonna be with us that day too so looking forward to that for pipes yep definitely them know and for Blue Beam for sale blooming yet may 6 2014 half-day session it's gonna be in the afternoon for those in the Eastern Time and just reach out to me we can we can talk about this we can do something private if you need to so finally I like to remind you for like most of you know but we have solid assist this is complementary technical support we have issues with the phloem in setting up your home licenses accessing your out of this account anything like I just reach out it's there's a phone number and an email there or you can reach out to your rep this is totally free so take advantage of that okay finally our contact so we have our emails direct numbers in case you want to reach out you want to have your now for a conversation about what we what you guys saw today there's Matt Jay and myself so please reach out so Jay I think this is the time to address any final questions that we have missed yeah sounds good okay so we have a great question from Shannon can the points within the corridor be export exported to a CSV I mentioned the tool box report manager the corridors section points reports but if you can think of anything else I can so points from corridor to a CSV I assume they're going to be using these for layout and so the best way to do that is to select the corridor find your launchpad now my resolution is such that you can't see the values here but one of them is called points from core dark it's not one of those three it's down here that that guy right there so after you've built your corridor use this launchpad and choose points from corridor and you have the choice you got plenty of choices here so you can say and I want all the points in the entire corridor or some kind of station range we can add them to a point group and then you can choose the feature lines that are generating those points so if you're if you're planning on laying out just the crown of the road uncheck everything except crown and then that's where you're gonna get your points so I'll just gonna do it like this I'll uncheck crown and pick everything when I hit okay as long as my styles are set up properly I should see a bunch of points exactly along the center there there hopefully that answers your question now now that you have points in your drawing how do you make a CSV from it well we just go to that particular point group now and export points that'll export to a CSV you'd show you choose the appropriate point file format and the file name hit OK you're gonna get points from a recorder I want me to see they're not going to be dynamic but it's a pretty quick thing all right good question great we don't have any more questions well we have an earlier question that maybe you might want to speak to someone asked earlier any chance the sub-assembly composer will be explored and the method for custom codes and they basically said that we're gonna have a sort of a session on sub-assembly composer workshop totally yeah for sure somebody sub-assembly composer doesn't really fit into the best practice series because not many people use it and it's it's if you use it it's sort of it's you need it and so it's not really necessarily best practice to use sub-assembly composer so we have that as a separate thing I'm not sure I think we have a half-day seminar yes Matt next week on the 22nd we'll be running a half-day workshop for slickly on on sub-assembly Composer so if you ever thought about using something composer or if you ever try using the composer this is the moment so it's a half day you can take care of your kids in the morning and then dedicate a couple of hours used to are just to work on your skills this is a very nice model and I think I think is gonna be forward perfect thanks 8 yeah that's um it's it's a good class they're gonna talk about points links and shapes because those are really the key if you've never heard of points links and shapes before as part of your sub-assembly you need to understand those in order to in order to be good if it's up assembly composer you also need to understand targeting this guy is the limit with that software J I'm looking at one question in here and I'm just gonna reiterate it only because it's a good question it's a good answer to another question so the question earlier was you know how can you set we were talking about the closed loop and I said well if you make a rectangle you know maybe break it but if you've already created the alignment right the zero zero is already on one of the corners who was it Raymond Clarke suggested for the rectangular lineman just simply edit the alignment properties to change the start location of the alignment you can move 0 0 to anywhere you want using that tool yeah that's totally the best answer so Raymond you got that gold star for that one Thanks yeah definitely looking through the other questions let's see intersection we and we pretty much address the rest them so idea I just wanted to make a note of Raymond's comment there because he has the right answer and that's pretty much it look at that timing it's 11:30 exactly this is the perfect man yeah thanks everybody if you have any questions after this I'm gonna put up my email address on here yeah let me let me let me put the define there slide oh okay that sounds good so hey it's gonna put it the final slide it's gonna have email addresses and some of our information sorry about this yes yes and and yeah I would like to thank everyone for joining us today I hope you learned something and I hope to meet you again for our next session about pipe and pressure pipe and pressure networks and yeah I hope you how about wonderful week whether it's in Windows yes it looks like you have the questions panel open there because it's covering up for the better thanks all right we'll leave that screen up for the next couple minutes but for now we are going to sign off so thank you very much we'll see you next time to everyone take care thanks good day everybody

Channel: SolidCAD - A Cansel Company

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Id: hwr7baf7RYw

Length: 88min 38sec (5318 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020