Explore how to create dynamic assemblies in Civil 3D, with particular focus on defining a highway assembly that accounts for a new lane widening project. Learn about the process of setting lane transitions, considering factors like the insertion point, default width, depth, slope, and options for transition.
Key Insights
- The article provides a walkthrough on creating a dynamic assembly in Civil 3D for a highway, with a new lane that accommodates a widening project. This process deviates from the static assembly set-up, where lanes are set at a pre-defined width.
- The author discusses the selection of the basic lane transition feature, describing the crucial parameters such as the insertion point, default width and depth, default slope, and transition options. The tutorial indicates how to alter the transition to "hold grade change offset" to maintain a consistent slope but adjust the lane's width.
- The piece also highlights how to add features like shoulders and basic side slope cut ditches to the assembly, and explains why duplicating the assembly for both sides of the highway may not be necessary in some cases, such as when there's no modification on the other side of the road.
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So in this video we're going to go ahead and create an assembly that is a little bit more dynamic than the one that we created in the previous video. The assembly that we created in this previous video is static in that we have placed lanes that are set at a defined width of 17 feet.
In our new assembly we're going to be creating an assembly for our highway and what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to place in a lane that's going to allow us to target this new widening that we've created here. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to navigate into this. We're going to go ahead and go up to assembly.
We're going to click create assembly and I'm going to change this to hwy for highway. I'm going to go ahead and do an undivided crown road. In this we're only going to build half of the road though because we don't have the information on the left-hand side of the road and we're not changing what the left-hand side of the road looks like.
We're only going to be changing the right-hand side of the road. So I'm going to go ahead and go with undivided crown road. I'm going to choose basic assembly style, all codes for code sets, and leave it at zero to assm for assembly layer.
I'm going to go ahead and click okay. Civil 3D is going to ask me to specify my baseline location since I'm only associating this with my driveway or my highway alignment ex highway. I'm going to go ahead and put it off to the right-hand side of my profile and then as before when I click civil 3D zooms me into my assembly here.
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I'm going to go ahead and open my tool palette and we're going to start working with this basic lane transition. So from this basic lane transition what we have here is we have information on where's the insertion point, what side we're going to be on, whether or not the crown point is on the inside, default width, depth, default slope, and then we have this new option which is transition. So what we're going to go ahead and do is since we don't have a profile associated with our widening we want to hold the slope but we want to change the width and so what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to change this transition to hold grade change offset.
And you can see here you have different options hold offset and elevation so this would be a static 12-foot lane. Then we have hold elevation change offset so that would be holding the elevation of the edge but changing the offset so moving the edge out to whatever elevator or whatever width we have set on our widening. Then we have hold grade so we're going to hold our negative two percent and change and move out to wherever our offset is.
Then we have the option of holding offset so holding our 12 feet here and changing the elevation based on a profile that we're targeting or we have the option of changing offset and elevation. If we had an alignment that had a profile associated with it we could target that alignment and target the profile associated with that alignment. So since we don't have a profile we're going to do this hold grade change offset.
We want to keep our negative two percent slope but we want to go ahead change the location of our edge. So from here I'm going to go ahead and select my baseline. Now this highway I know it doesn't have a curb so I'm going to go ahead and add a shoulder.
So I'm going to go ahead and go up to basic shoulder and I'm going to go ahead and do it to the right side. I'm going to go with a width of four feet and then I'm going to go leave the depth the same and I'm going to change the slope to negative two. So I'm going to go ahead and select this here.
So I've now added a slope or added a shoulder onto the edge out here. Now what I'm going to do next is I'm going to add a basic side slope cut ditch and again I'm not going to add in these swales. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to change my for slope width to zero.
I'm going to change my bottom width to zero. I'm going to change my back slope width to zero. Then I'm going to hit ENTER to select and confirm that zero for the backslope width and then I'm going to go ahead and pick the location for where I want to place my basic side slope cut ditch.
So I'm going to go ahead and escape out and now I've created my half assembly for my highway and so in like last time when we selected the whole thing and mirrored it we could do that if we wanted to create a whole highway alignment but because we don't have a width target on the left hand side and we're not doing any modifications to the highway on that side we're not going to go ahead and change that we're just going to leave it as is. So I'm going to go ahead close this out zoom out and then I'm going to save and I'll meet you in the next video.
