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.