This article explores how to conduct a drive analysis using alignments in Civil 3D software. The process involves creating a 3D visualization of a corridor, adjusting the view height, and driving along the corridor to view the design.
Key Insights
- The drive analysis process begins by selecting the desired alignment and choosing the 'Drive' option under 'Analyze' in the contextual ribbon bar.
- Adjustments can be made to the view height and offsets when visualizing the corridor in 3D. This allows for a customized view of the design details from different perspectives.
- The speed of the drive can be adjusted to balance between a quick overview and a detailed look at the design elements like curbs, roadways, and how they interact with the existing surface.
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.
Now that we've created our pasted surface, we're ready to go ahead and do a drive analysis on one of our corridors. So to do that, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go to our alignments inside of our tool space.
We're going to expand out alignments, we're going to expand out our center line alignments, and we're going to go and do a drive analysis on our dev branch alignment. I'm going to go ahead and select dev branch. I'm going to right click, and then I'm going to go ahead and choose select.
When I choose select, the contextual ribbon bar comes up, and I have an option under analyze to do a drive analysis on this. So I'm going to go ahead and select drive, and Civil 3D is going to ask me to select a profile that I'm going to use along with my dev branch alignment. So I'm going to go ahead and I have the options of driving along the surface of our Civ 202 or the design align or the design profile that we created, which was dev branch prof. So I'm going to go ahead and choose dev branch prof and click okay.
So from here, now Civil 3D has dropped us into a 3D visualization of our corridor. What I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to drop down under our visualization section here. I'm going to go ahead and choose an option of realistic so that we can see some of the surfaces showing through over on the outside edges.
And then I'm going to go ahead and change the view height on this. So I'm sitting a half a foot up off of my profile. I'm going to go ahead and raise this up to about nine and a half feet.
Learn Civil 3D
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And then you can choose a left and right offset. I like to drive down the center of the road, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it as down the center with a zero offset. If you wanted to offset to the right, you can do that or offset to the left.
You can do that as well. I'm going to go ahead and leave this as zero. So from here, now we can change other information so we can change.
This is basically the wheel height. This is our eye height. So maybe it would have been better to leave this at point five and change our eye height.
And so what you can see is the eye height makes it so that you can look down on the road and kind of shift around your point of origin. So maybe I'm going to do a combination of these two. I'm going to go ahead and raise this up to three and a half, and then I'm going to raise this up to five and a half.
So they're kind of looking down on our road from a little bit higher. Now that we've got our views set up, so our eye and our target, now we're going to go ahead and navigate. We can start driving this by hitting play.
The other thing that you can change is you can change your speed. I do like the 40 miles an hour. It's a good combination of getting through it quick, but not going so fast that you don't get to see everything that you've designed.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit play pause. So as we're driving along, you can see the corridor, you can see how your cut and fill are working out. You can see your curbs and your roadway.
You can see how it's interacting with the existing surface, and it just gives you a great visualization of exactly what you've designed. Now that we've done that, I want to say thanks for walking through all this learning with me, and I hope you learned a lot, and I'll see you in another class.
