Explore the diverse set of tools and options available in Civil 3D for designing and creating alignments in roadways. Learn about creating alignments from objects, corridors, network parts, and existing alignments, among others, and understand how to navigate these features within the home tab of the ribbon bar.
Key Insights
- Civil 3D offers a single alignment creation tool and multiple options for creating alignments, including best fit alignments, alignments from objects, alignments from corridors, and alignments from network parts.
- Creating alignments from existing alignments and offset alignments are possible, which can be used to widen or narrow roadways based on the input parameters.
- To design a roadway or create an alignment in Civil 3D, one must navigate to the home tab of the ribbon bar, then to the alignments drop-down window, where various alignment creation options are available.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we're going to go ahead and jump into our design file and start talking about what we have to work with and then the first order of business is creating alignments. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is inside Civil 3D, I'm going to go to my open button, I'm going to navigate to where I have my file saved for the class, and I'm going to go ahead and open the civ201beg.dwg. So once I've done that, what I have here is I have a surface, I have a couple of polylines inside this drawing, and then I have some of these red points in here, which we're going to be using as markers for designing our roadways.
So to design a roadway or to create a roadway and alignment inside Civil 3D, first we have to navigate to the home tab of the ribbon bar, and we have to go to the alignments dropdown window. We're going to go ahead and drop this down and inside of this window, we have multiple different options for creating alignments. The most common one that you're going to deal with inside Civil 3D is the alignment creation tool, but we have other options for creating best-fit alignments, which use points inside Civil 3D to make an alignment that's best-fit from those points.
Then we have creating alignments from objects. That's another common one that you'll use a lot inside Civil 3D. You have create alignments from corridors. If you had a corridor, you could use entities from that corridor to create an alignment.
We have create alignments from network parts such as a drainage network. If you’ve built a drainage network inside Civil 3D, you can use that to create an alignment. This is often used when you've designed a drainage network and want to start working on creating a profile for that network. You can use the network you've already created to generate an alignment and move forward with creating profiles.
So next we have creating alignments from pressure networks, similar to network parts. You have the option to create an alignment from a pressure network or a pipe network that’s under pressure. Then we have the options for create alignments from existing ones.
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So you can use your existing alignments inside Civil 3D to create new ones. You can then move on from there to creating offset alignments and connected alignments. Connecting one alignment to another and then creating widenings.
Creating offsets and widenings work hand in hand. What we're doing there is we are creating alignments that are from a centerline alignment and we're offsetting them and then we're using those features to then widen roadways or narrow them depending on the parameters we input. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to meet in the next video and we're going to start talking about creating alignments from objects.
