AutoCAD Civil 3D: More than just a name change

With the release of AutoCAD Civil 3D we are going to see quite a few changes and additions to the tools we use everyday. One of the main changes to the software will be the industry specific Ribbon. The Ribbon was introduced in 2009 and only contained standard AutoCAD functionality in that release. However, in this release we will see that all of our Civil 3D commands have been placed on the ribbon for us. In 2009, we could put the Civil functions on the Ribbon, although it came with quite a bit of CUI work. This release comes straight out of the box with everything placed directly in the ribbon as shown below.

Also in the midst of a totally redesigned user interface, we have been introduced to a nice little tool known as the intersection builder.

This is a quick view of what you will see when you start up the intersection builder. It will require a point where two alignments meet and then will ask for which of the alignments represents the main road, or through road.

It will also give us options for specific offsets, and curb return parameters, allowing us to design with turn lanes, specific curb layout and most other anomalies that may have been a bit tricky in the past. This option will automatically create alignments and profiles based on your options.

In the picture above you can see that we can control each quadrant of the intersection individually and also choose incoming and outgoing alignments, making it much easier to keep track of the construction of your intersection.

The end product of this new tool comes in the form of an automatically-created corridor based on the data used to create it (assemblies, profiles and alignments). Once we make a surface from this you will start to see what a great end-product this can actually produce, as seen below.

One of the best aspects of this is that the number for all alignments involved was automatically derived, by choice. I can choose to either do my curb returns profiles the old fashioned way or I can choose to have it calculated based off existing vertical tangents of existing corridor regions.

This is just a look at a great tool, the ease of maintaining crowns and creating the pesky alignments and profiles that go with creating an intersection have been streamlined to make us that much more productive in a task that used to contain a little leg work, at least for simple intersections.