The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show

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posted 05/14/07 by Daniel Philbrick Kaprun, Kitzsteinhorn, and Corridor Sections....

Jack Strongitharm had a good summary of the EMEA Tech Camp - check it out! You may also be wondering why we have our laptops open on a nice sunny afternoon at the conclusion of the training event. If you could see the screen, you would see the topo of a fine set of mountains in the town of Kaprun, Austria. In fact, here is a 3D DWF file of that region viewed in the Autodesk Freewheel Viewer (Click here for more information).



The highest peak is called Kitzsteinhorn (3203 m). Yes, we are geeks and we were using the Google Earth data to generate this terrain model. There was a rumor that snow could still be found lurking high in the hills. I was trying to convince my Tech Camp friends that they should stay one more day and we would go see if we could find some snow. We were in the process of cutting some profiles down the slopes! That is when Jack got scared.

Jack claimed that he had a Giant Rabbit that he had to get home to feed. Now I have heard a lot of excuses but a Giant Rabbit? He even sent me a picture of his Giant Rabbit. That rabbit does not look that big to me - some water and a dish of food and we would have been off to Kitzsteinhorn.

Onto more important topics...

Sectioning the Corridor through an Xref!!

The new plan production feature is a great tool for generating plan sheets. There is another related gem in the Civil 3D 2008 release and that the ability to section a corridor through an Xref. This allows you to keep your Corridor Section plan production drawings separate from the Corridor Model drawings. As a result, edits to the corridor are not impacted by the display of the sections. Let's take a look at how this works.

The first step is to create a Corridor. Next you are going to need a Shortcut to the Alignment so that you can create sample lines. You can do this via Vault or by using the Data Shortcut UI.

Now comes the fun part. Create a new drawing and Xref in the Corridor drawing. Next create a Data Reference to the Alignment. Now invoke the create sample line toolbar and you will see that you are given the option to sample the Corridor and Surfaces which reside in the Xref drawing. Be aware that you will see surfaces listed from both the Xref drawing and the drawing you are working in.

The final step is to plot the Multiple Section Views. For this step, you get all the same options for styles and labels that you have had in the past. This has also been improved by allowing you to change the styles or labels for a group of sections. This is available by selecting one of the Section Views, right click, and select Section View Group Properties. This dialog will let you change style or labeling properties for the entire group of Section Views.

The key benefit of this feature is the Corridor and the Corridor Sections can be distributed between multiple drawings. If the Corridor changes, the Sections View drawings will be notified via standard Xref notification. Once the Xref is reloaded, the Corridor Sections will be up-to-date.

Dan

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