Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D: Working with corridors

This lectures explains the 5 parts of the course and points out some settings to check, and files to download to follow the examples.

We will recap the various components of a corridor and how to create one. It will cover alignments, profiles, sub-assemblies, assemblies, corridors, and surfaces.

Before getting stuck into the details of the software, this lecture takes a moment to step back and understand what a corridor is, and the advantages and limitations it has over other modelling types.

Confirm your understanding of the introduction topics.

An alignment is typically the main factor controlling the position of the corridor. You need to think about the end product when starting out.

Once you have confirmed the alignment location, you can start to consider the vertical geometry. Although this is easy enough to change later the whole process goes smoother if you think about the levels carefully.

After this lecture you will know easy and hard ways to create assemblies. The choice of sub-assemblies is important and you need to understand what your end outputs are before you begin - in particular what surfaces you want to make from the corridor.

Making the actual corridor is an easy step. What takes time is the problem analysis and tweaking to ensure your corridor is behaving as intended.

Even though the plan view of a corridor looks correct, you need to understand what all the lines mean, and what it looks like in any view.

Test your knowledge of section 2.

A corridor is typically used to model roadways. Whether these be isolated road corridors with daylight batters, or within subdivision with no interface with the existing surface. This lecture highlights the subtle differences.

Remember, Civil 3D is just a tool to help you check your engineering designs and illustrate them to others. A corridor is just one tool, and it can be used in many ways, for anything that is somewhat uniform and over a reasonable distance. Some examples are railways, retaining walls (or noise walls), pipe trenches, carpark kerbs, walkways, and swales.

This lecture looks at how you can use a 'dummy' surface to speed up your carpark design using a corridor. If the term dummy surface doesn't make sense, think of it is a stage 1 design surface, temporary surface, or even a bulk earthworks surface.

A short quiz on the different types of corridor applications.

A surface is the main output from a corridor and is used a basis for other designs such as pipe networks, or earthworks. This lecture covers the key settings you should be looking out for.

Whether you want 1 or 100, it is a similar easy process to create cross sections. The harder part is making them look good and presenting them on a drawing.

You can spend a lot of time working on the presentation of your sections. The trick is to make it as automatic as possible to reduce the time it takes to update them when (not if) your corridor needs updating.

One last lecture on cross section presentation shows you how to project different objects to the section views to assist with presentation.

A corridor can be used extensively within Civil 3D and outside the software. You can extract parts of it for contractors such as 3D polylines, or create output files that interact with other designs such as Revit and Infraworks.

Test your knowledge of corridor outputs with this quiz.