No, this isn’t some kind of weird SPAM post or hack or anything. This is, in fact, a genuine Civil 3D article. Actually, it’s a little pun regarding the upcoming Autodesk University in Las Vegas. You know…The Strip. I had to throw in the obvious definition for Jason’s sake 🙂

I’ve been plagued recently with people asking how to calculate stripping using a corridor. They know the old standby method, you know the one; copy your OG surface and drop it by the depth of material to be stripped and then calculate cut and fill to this new surface. It works, but this way is cooler.

Let’s see how we can handle stripping in a corridor, shall we?

We want this to happen

The green is what volumes would normally be calculated to.
The black is the stripping material to be removed.
Both together is the total fill after stripping.
The red is the OG section.

First you need to add the StrippingPavement subassembly to the end of your daylight subassemblies. I’m only showing one side, but you’ll need to do this for both sides.

I’m using the DaylightMultiIntercept subassembly for my daylight and it doesn’t seem to work correctly when I attach the stripping to the fill lines (green), but it works great when I attach it to the red cut lines. Go figure.

This image is from the help page:

This SA inserts links parallel to a surface at a depth you specify from the daylight intersection back to the corridor baseline. Since it needs to know which surface to insert links parallel to, you’ll need to assign surface targets for this subassembly in your corridor.

After rebuilding the corridor we have this:

Now it’s volume time.

Volumes can be calculated by surfaces or corridor materials. This IS NOT a corridor material. That said, we will need to define corridor surfaces.
One for the corridor Datum.
One for the stripped OG surface.
When you are creating the stripped OG surface you will see two links that come in when you add the StrippingPavement subassembly. I have added just the stripping. If I were using the foreslope option, I would add both.


In order to calculate volumes from these surfaces in cross section, you need to define materials. I’m going to assume you know how to do this. There is one detail that is important here, however. Normally the EG below is set to your OG surface. for stripping calculations I have set it to my stripping corridor surface. The DATUM, as usual, is set to my corridor datum surface.

We’re almost done.

The last thing we need to calculate is the actual volume of material stripped. Add another criteria to your materials list; this time using the OG surface and the stripping surface. The completed materials list is shown below.

Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without some tables.

Here is what a section looks like when in both cut and fill.

Well, thanks for tuning in. Til next time,

Matt