In speaking with clients, friends, and discussion group members about corridors, I have discovered that generic links are often not being used to their full potential.

Read on to get more out of them.

On the surface, generic links seem pretty basic; used only when necessary.  They can actually do a significant amount of work for you when used to their fullest.

If all you need are single line segments in your assembly these generic links are probably for you.  Their names pretty much tell you what they do.  Think about what you want and the information you have and then look at the options.

LinkWidthAndSlope – draws a link when given a Width and a Slope
LinkSlopeToElevation – draws a link to a certain Elevation at a given Slope
LinkSlopesBetweenPoints – given two points, draws links toward each other at a given slope until they intersect.

There are many more.  If you’re unsure about what the tool does, just click on help.

If you need several segments drawn in your corridor and you need separate surfaces for them you can do this as well.  Below is an existing river and dyke (blue).  We’re widening the dyke, but in 0.5m lifts and we need separate volumes for each lift. (Lift 1 is Red, Lift 2 is Yellow).

I used the LinkLinkSlopeAndVerticalDeflection and LinkSlopeToSurface subassemblies for each lift.  That’s the easy part.  What many people don’t realize is that you can rename these links.  What usually reads “Top,Datum” below can be changed to anything you want;  in this case “Lift1”.

When creating your corridor surface you use the links of choice to make your surfaces.

You’ll notice that you can rename the point codes as well.  This allows you to create corridor feature lines with unique names.  They can be coloured differently, or with different linetypes.  You can even use them as Automatic corridor surface boundaries, just make sure you have exactly 2 codes with that name in your assembly.  No more, no less.

That does it for this time.  Enjoy!