My first post!!! I do apologize for the delay in getting this up here. Some unplanned and previously planned travel has kept me more or less off the computer for a week. Staying in hotels with crumby wireless internet is not my idea of a good time, the free cooked to order breakfast and free evening happy hour didn’Â’t hurt though. Anyhow on with the show.
Today is the start of a 3 post series, I am a rambling man what can I say. These were prompted by a discussion in the news groups a few weeks back about sub-assemblies not modeling surfaces correctly. Todays post like the title says will be a bit of a history lesson. The corridor model in Civil 3D while a brand new concept and idea to a lot of people out there isn’Â’t entirely new. About 3 years ago after Autodesk had purchased CAiCE software corporation I got the chance to attend some training on this new product. I learned many things, one was CAiCE was a huge leap forward in terms of road design and what LDT could do. What would have been hours of cross sections edits in LDT could be accomplished in mere minutes using intelligent building blocks to form a typical cross section. CAiCE called these building blocks fragments. If the concept sounds a lot like sub-assemblies inside of Civil 3D it should because this is where the corridor concept was spawned. When I first got my hands on a version of 2005 and it had corridors and sub-assemblies I was amazed, the development team had managed to take what was CAiCE’s core strength in the design market and put it into Civil 3D. Better still they had taken what was CAiCE’s core weakness IMHO and make leap and bounds improvements on it, the weakness was the User Interface(I wish I had a copy around just to take some screen shots). So now that you all know where the technology came from(even if you didn’t care) I will be following up with some discussion on how the software actually goes about building the corridor model and some of the common reasons why the resulting model or surface doesn’t always behave like people feel it should. That’Â’s enough for now, according to the definition of a blog this is supposed to be a short bite sized bit of information and I am rambling. Look for another post or two in the next few days. It’Â’s already written but I have to get you all to come back somehow. I am including a couple of screen shots I don’Â’t have CAiCE so I apologize for the low quality of the example but, as you can sort of see the CAiCE model and the Civil 3D model look pretty similar.
’bout time 😉