Widen Your Horizons

Offset alignments and widenings were available with the 2010 version of Civil 3D.  They were enhanced for the 2011 version.  See how to manage your settings to get those widenings to look their best. Check it out after the jump!

Here is what a widening through a curve looked like in 2010.  Not ideal.

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Here is what you get out of the box in 2011.  Much better, but not ideal either.

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The transition is coarsely tessellated.  I don’t mind the tessellation, but I want it finer.  No problem.  It’s handled in the alignment settings.  Edit the Command settings for the Add Widening command under Alignments.

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You can make the tessellations Lines or Curves.

You need to decide how many tessellations to use.  Some may think that a distance should be used (every 1.0m).  No, if you have a 10m transition or a 200m transition, there will be the same number of tessellations.

By the way, don’t think about attempting to change this setting after you’ve already created the transition widening.  This setting must be assigned prior to creating the widening.  Open your DWT file, apply this setting, and forget about it for new projects.

Finished product.

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Hope this helps you out,

Matt Kolberg

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