Two Powerful Updates to Corridors in Civil 3D 2017

While teaching a Civil 3D 2016 class one of my students asked “Can you create a corridor from a feature line?” At the time, the answer was “No, you can’t.” In order to create corridors in Civil 3D 2016 and earlier releases, an Alignment and Profile were required for the horizontal and vertical geometry information. In Civil 3D 2017, the answer is absolutely “Yes, you can," no Alignment or Profiles required. If your feature line has elevation data you get a corridor from that. Yes! And not only can you create a corridor from a feature line, you can also share it across the project team by creating a data shortcut. 

If you have been waiting on the sidelines, wait no more – these two productive corridor updates are enough to justify upgrading to Civil 3D 2017.

With the ability to create data shortcuts for corridors and use them in multiple drawings you can split a huge corridor into multiple drawings and get a performance boost, resulting in a huge time saver; you can create a corridor in one drawing and use it in another.

This does change the workflow of creating cross sections from a corridor. Prior to this, you had to XRef the corridor drawing – that lead to a performance lag because you ended up working with the whole drawing even though you just needed a corridor. With this shortcut you load only the corridor, which is huge in terms of productivity gains.

The pre-2017 workflow would be to create an Alignment and then a Profile view. You had to make sure the Profile view displayed the right elevation so you could create a layout Profile, and only then would you be able to create the corridor (assuming you did not create an existing surface Profile).

The 2017 process doesn’t replace Alignments or Profiles because you cannot create data shortcuts for a feature line, yet. But this new method does gives you an option other than projection grading, aka grading object. Meaning, this will work great for parking lot grading, which has many feature lines for which creating an Alignment and Profile for each feature line is too time consuming and impractical.

So, create a corridor from a feature line and share it using data shortcuts – two powerful corridor updates that save a ton of time and easily justify upgrading to Civil 3D 2017.

Watch this video to get started!

Don’t forget to look through other great features our Ideate Technical Team has found in the new 2017 releases for Civil 3D, Navisworks, Revit Architecture, AutoCAD (and more) on our Ideate Solution Blog.

---

Guarav Bagga

Senior Application Specialist Infrastructure 

Gaurav is a Senior Application Specialist for Infrastructure Solutions at Ideate based out of San Francisco. He has over 18 years of experience in construction and related software industry. With this extensive design technology background he helps engineering and surveying companies, federal and state government agencies, and ENR 500 firms critically analyze and improve their construction drawing production process. He implements Civil infrastructure design technology led by InfraWorks and Civil 3D and has helped Ideate grow Civil Infrastructure Services. Being an industry recognized speaker he has presented cutting edge design technology at several industry conferences such as Autodesk University. Find Gaurav on Twitter.