Targeting Polylines and Feature Lines in Corridor Modeling

In case you have not caught any of our launch events, or have not had time to check out the new features, there is a new way to help with the modeling of corridors. Autodesk Civil 3D 2009 has allowed us to target polylines and feature lines in our corridors. This makes our job quicker and easier to manage inside of complex drawings. No longer will you have to wade through countless alignments and profiles to target both horizontally and vertically. The process is very simple and intuitive, and we are going to take a look at it in this article.

In the screenshot above we have a corridor already built that will need a turn lane added. In the past, we would have drawn an alignment to target. We are going to basically go about this the same way we always have, only with a polyline.

What I have done in the screenshot above is added the polyline to target in our lane widening. This will require no assembly adjustment at all which will make this even more convenient for us to use.

We will then get into the parameters tab of the corridor properties dialog. This is where we will access our target mapping controls for the assembly used to create the corridor.

When we choose a sub assembly to apply our horizontal targets, we now get the new dialog that gives us the option of what type of object we want to target. As you can see we have alignments and feature lines, survey figures and polylines as our two options. We are going to choose the latter and we will then be prompted to choose the objects.

Now we can choose to pick directly from the drawing or by layer. The polylines I have created reside on layer 0, so we will now choose all polylines on that layer to be applied.

Now we can simply apply this change and see how our corridor changes based on the target we have just applied.

This new method is a quick way to make lane changes on the fly, it also allows us another option of how we want to manage the objects we use as targets, instead of forcing us to keep track of a list of alignments.