Archive for Feature Lines

AU Class: Part 3

In the continuing saga that is my 2011 AU class, the next part covers connecting the dots.

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Double-Click your way to new heights in your grading

One of the greatest things about AutoCAD products is that they are very customizable. Being that Civil 3D is a vertical product of AutoCAD, it too, is very customizable. I’m going to share with you one way you can customize your Civil 3D to improve your grading efficiency without having to know one bit of programming code.

Similar to the contextual ribbon appearing when a certain object is selected.  We’re going to assign a command to a Civil 3D object when it is double-clicked. I’m going to show you one of my favorite ones, and that is evoking the Quick Elevation Edit or (AeccQuickEditFeatureElevs) command for Feature Lines.

This will surely save you some grading time. Do you want to see how to set this up?

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FeatureLine Priority

As a follow-up to the post Feature Line Styles Control What?:

2010.02.01-Sites ‘Featureline Priority’ is most likely a feature – no pun intended – in Civil 3D that you have overlooked or didn’t even know about.  As you do know, if Featurelines are in the same ‘Site’ they interact with each other and the last one edited wins.

For example:

If you have two Featurelines that cross each other and are in the same ‘Site’, Civil 3D will force them to be at the same elevation where they cross.  This is a good thing since they need to be to build an accurate surface (review image below).

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Featureline direct from Alignment & Profile

There are a number of times where you just want to get a Featurline (3D polylines) right from a profile and don’t want to deal with a corridor model or assemblies.  It is sort of funny, in Land Desktop there was a convoluted method involving points and surface breaklines to accomplish such a common task.  Well, not any more in Civil 3D!  Civil 3D will create a Featureline directly from an alignment and profile.  It has always been there, your probably may have breezed over it, like I did, for months.

After the jump learn how…

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Bowties be Gone

Apparently Matt’s on a hot streak, two in a row for our Canadian contributor! JW

I’m willing to bet if you’ve had a little more than zero experience with corridors you know what Bowties are.  maybe not in name, but in practise.  Bowties are what happens when your corridor has a bend in it that is too tight for the width of the section.  Here’s an image.  The circle shows overlapping links.

image

This is a perfectly understandable phenomena; each corridor section is its own standalone entity without thought to preceding or successive sections.  Same thing happened in Land Desktop, it’s just that there was no Corridor in LDT so it wasn’t blatantly obvious.  Additionally, this overlap condition is not problematic unless you’re creating a surface.  This is Civil 3D after all and it’s all about making surfaces; far more than Land Desktop, at least in my experience. Make the jump to find an alternate solution.

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