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Survey Site Design and Style in Civil 3D

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Feature Line Baselines in Corridors are a big deal in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017. I also like the basic cleanups in corridors with angular horizontal control. It’s been a long wait for them. Technically, I wish Autodesk had implemented them differently and gone the extra mile. Here’s a brain bender. What’s the difference between a Feature Line and an Alignment? A better linear data model. Why don’t we get Group Labels for Feature Lines too? Maybe next time.

We Receive Richer Corridors

People who follow this blog know I am big advocate of employing Civil 3D corridor design tools and complex corridors to do almost anything. Be a better Tool user. Set personal preference, habits, and old skills and workflows aside. It pays to follow the development money. You are better off in the end. Way back in Release 4 we introduced a whole bunch of Site design Alignment and related styles into the Framework.

“Innovation sometimes requires the patience to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.”

These are a bit hidden away in the Jump Kit Style library somewhat like our wonderful annotative Alignment Style tools. Yes. There is lots of potential productivity buried away in the many thousands of Civil 3D Styles in Jump Kit. As one happy customer put it, “I don’t need no stinkin’ linetypes.” What?

In Civil 3D corridors, we do a bit more control setup work to end up with more adaptive and flexible results. There are linear corridors and nonlinear corridors. The last sounds like a contradiction in terms, but trust me it is not. Watch the videos. Get Templates Only. Test and try our better style tools yourself.
Civil 3D Corridors are all about…

Productive Nonlinear Results

Sorry. It is true that to realize nonlinear results we have to know more about Civil 3D nuance than we probably ever wanted to know. Sadly, we also have to be able to see and visualize what we are up to in the midst of a detailed workflow. When things don’t work, we get distracted. You know the drill.

Style Deprivation Hurts

I’ve argued for a long time that working Style tools are often the root of many of the design and publication problems that Civil 3D users encounter. Style Deprivation Hurts. We could call the problem:

Da Code Contradiction

While this has nothing to do with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the puzzle metaphor is apt.

The Civil 3D user problem is experiential. That can be, and often is, an existential threat to our productivity. Don’t you just love the vernacular of election years?

How to we figure out how to employ that subassembly (say a repav one) when you don’t have a Code Set Style that produces visual results in the multiple representations – Plan, Profile, Section, and Model that we actually do need to evaluate our design success or even our initial progress.

I find that everywhere you go in the country and certainly out here in Civil 3D Land there is some form of annoying No-See-Ums. Sorry. Maybe you have to work and sweat a little to appreciate the annoying little insects. What if we can fix that?

Code Set Style Basics

Remember: the Civil 3D Code Set Style is like an AutoCAD Layer State. It just points to a host of other Styles which may be combined and applied in a combination of ways in multiple display (representation) contexts. We get it that Layers look one way for proposed and another way for existing. Code Set are not really any different.
A Code Set depends on a combination of three types of named Codes built into subassemblies. The employed Codes can and do vary by subassembly. Poor Civil 3D General Style definitions create confusion. They can make the problem worse and even more maddening.

A Superhero Decoder Ring

Have you seen our Subassemblies Code Tool? Register and download a copy of this spreadsheet tool for free. This is the only organized, summarized, and in-depth documentation of the stock Codes we know of outside of the individual subassembly help pages. It will help everyone build and maintain better Code Sets. If you plan to employ the Civil 3D Subassembly Composer, please take heed.

We Must Survey Design in Civil 3D

Within the Framework for AutoCAD Civil 3D we employ the acronym BESTWay and specific patterns of Survey Codes. These are already built into to optimize survey field collection methodology for almost any linear or nonlinear structure you can find.
Why does that sound familiar?
Survey pros who use InstantOn Survey know that BESTW = Bottom|Edge|Surface|Top|Wall. To add a simple key for a kind Figure (STRC) is liberating.
If we can think differently, we can realize more productivity.

We Be Human - We Trust and Depend on Patterns

Better instant name (Key) and visual identification (Color) produces more work with less effort.
This is why we call our products InstantOn.
If we do our job right, you hardly notice. You instantly get more work done.

Can we innovate in Civil 3D and do the same for design?
Of course. Maybe next time or the post after that we answer the question what is…

Key Based Design in Civil 3D?

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