Have you been looking for an interference checker for Civil 3D? Well, your long search is over, because it’s here in the 2007 release. Here’s a short how-to on using it:

First, I’ve drawn two pipe networks. For this example, I have a sanitary sewer line that has a storm sewer crossing it. Where I’m from, storm sewer and sanitary sewer have to have a minimum distance between them of 5 feet. So what I’d like to do is see if there are any interferences anywhere in this network. I’ve done a simple one, but this works for multiple pipes in the same network (i.e., I can check along an entire sanitary network for crossing pipes.) Here’s my design example:

Now, I’d like to see if there are any interferences along that pipe network, so I go to Pipes>Interference Check. The program asks me to select a part from each network that I’d like to check, so I pick the sanitary line and the storm line. That brings up the following box:

This shows that we have both networks selected, and an interference style applied. To view my interference areas, all I like to see if just a marker that shows where the interference is. The most important part of the interference check is to set up your proximity distance – this is done with this button:

Once I pick that button, I can select to apply a 3D proximity check. This will not only tell me if I have one pipe hitting another, but tell if there is a pipe with “X” distance of my pipe. I’m going to apply a proximity check and set it to 5′ here in this box:

Now, I click OK, then OK once more, and the program starts crunching. After a few seconds, it tells me that I have one interference:

Now, the problem is finding the interferences once they’re detected. In this example, I know just where the interference is (hey, I created it), but what if we didn’t know where, or if we had a lot of interferences? We go to our Prospector tab of Toolspace, and go down to Pipe Networks. When we expand that tree, we see Networks and Interference Checks. Expand Interference Checks and then highlight the interference check that you just created. Then, in that window, right click on the interference and select Zoom To:

Now we can see where our interference is, and edit from there:

Have fun!