Explore the process of creating a corridor for an existing highway in Civil 3D, including the necessary steps to modify subassembly properties for a correct setup. Learn how to navigate through the software's features to effectively use subassemblies and set up targets for dynamic interaction.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed step-by-step guide on creating a corridor for an existing highway in Civil 3D. It emphasizes the importance of correctly setting up the parameters for assemblies, which can be modified through the subassembly properties.
- Common issues such as incorrectly set targets are addressed. The author advises to select the 'hold grade change offset' option for optimal dynamic interaction. Incorrectly set targets may result in the absence of desired dynamic interaction in the assembly.
- The article also discusses the process of setting up targets for subassemblies. The adoption of this process aids in achieving a dynamic width along a profile or alignment. It demonstrates how a single assembly can adapt to different changes along a profile or alignment as long as the targets are set up correctly.
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In this video, we're going to go ahead and create a corridor for our existing highway. But before we do that, I wanted to go over one issue that sometimes comes up when I'm designing.
I get a little overeager when I'm creating my assemblies, and I don't necessarily set the parameters for my assemblies correctly. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to navigate over to my existing highway assembly, and sometimes I don't set the targeting correctly. I don't set it to the hold grade change location that we selected previously.
And so in order to change that, all you have to do is you select the subassembly piece that you want to deal with, you go to subassembly properties, and then inside of subassembly properties, if you go to these parameters, then you have the option for changing those parameters that we had in the original placement of that subassembly piece. So I could go here, select hold grade, change offset, drop down and change it to something else. I often find myself creating these subassemblies or these full assemblies.
And then later I realized I didn't set up my targeting correctly. I left it at hold offset and elevation. And so I'm not getting the dynamic interaction that I'm expecting.
And so I have to remember to come back here and change to hold grade change offset. If you didn't follow along or missed out on changing that to hold grade change offset, let's go ahead and make sure we have that hold grade change offset selected. Go ahead and click apply and click okay.
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Let's zoom back out and get over to the existing highway. So from here, we're going to go ahead and go back to the home tab. We're going to select a corridor.
We're going to go ahead and click corridor. And then we're going to go ahead and type in EXHWY for existing highway. I'm going to go ahead and leave this as basic, leave this as C road, leave this as alignment and profile.
I'm going to drop this down and select EXHWY. I'm going to drop this profile down, select EXHWY layout one. I'm going to drop down the assembly and choose HWY for highway.
I'm going to go ahead and drop down and select CIV202 as my targeted surface. And then I'm going to leave this checked for set baseline and region parameters. I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
And now I'm going to look at this. I'm going to go to my frequency. And so because I do have a curve along here, I do want to increase the frequency along the curve, but I don't want to be every five feet because I don't want them this close like we have in this corner here.
So what I'm going to go ahead and do and change my curve increment to something like 15 feet. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and click okay. Now what I'm going to do instead of clicking on set targets here, I'm going to go ahead and click down here at these ellipses for target.
So I'm going to click there. Civil 3D is going to pop this up. Since we're only dealing with the right side of an alignment or of an assembly and an alignment and profile, then we only have rights for our targets.
We currently have our surface targeted, but now we need to set this width or offset target. We're going to go ahead and set this width or offset target to our existing highway right at 18 feet. We're going to go ahead and click add.
And then what we're going to go ahead and do is click okay. Now we've set our target for our width to the existing highway right 18. Now, if our existing highway right 18 had a profile associated with it, we could go ahead and select our slope or elevation targets and target that slope or elevation.
But because we didn't, we're going to go ahead and not target this. We're going to leave it with our negative 2% slope for that subassembly that we created. And I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
I'm going to hit apply. So the Civil 3D is going to ask me to rebuild the corridor. I'm going to choose to rebuild, and then I'm going to click okay.
So from here, what we can see happening is that we have this alignment that starts out a certain width, widens into our transition for our turn pocket, comes around the corner, and then transitions back into a single lane and then out this direction. So this is the genius or the nicety of having these widenings set up and having targets in our subassemblies is that we can have a single assembly do a multitude of different changes along a profile or along an alignment. So whereas we had a static width here, you can have a dynamic width as long as you make sure you have your target set up correctly.
So I'm going to go ahead and save this drawing and I'll meet you in the next video.
