Alignments and Things........

Well, it's Friday again and it seems that this is when I find time to update my blog. I want to start a series of posts on some of the new functionality inside of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010. But first, a couple of weeks ago I recorded a webcast for our "What's New in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010" presentation. You can find it here. Just scroll down to the archives section. The recording is offered in 2 file formats, Windows Media Player and Adobe Flash.

Now let's move on to today's topic. Almost everyone that I have ever worked with went about creating their alignments in the same manner; lines and curves. Well, if you have been using prior releases of Civil 3D, you have had to take the extra step of converting those lines and curves to a polyline or use the layout tools to "trace over" the original line work that you had created. The 2010 release of Civil 3D has added functionality that will allow us to select the objects from which to create our alignments. Now we can use the Layout Tools, polylines or lines and arcs. The developers even changed the name of the command. Now it is called "Create Alignment from Objects." The command is found on the Home Tab of the Ribbon and by clicking

on the down arrow beside Alignment on the Create Design Panel.

Let's take a look at some other new features of Civil 3D alignments. Have you ever been working on a transportation project that had multiple lanes and transition regions all over the place? It has been a while since I was in that situation, but I do remember those days. We created our center line alignment and then used offset to create the edge of pavement and then created another offset for the transition region and applied fillets and tangents to tie them together. Alas, the boss comes in after a meeting with the powers that be and says that the center line is shifting and we have to have the changes by 9:00 am tomorrow morning. Time to hit the panic button, right?

The 2010 release of Civil 3D has several tools to help in these situations. Let's take a look at the Prospector Tab in Toolspace. As seen below, Alignments now have more categories or classifications. So, what does this do for us? Notice the second classification is Offset Alignments.

Now we can create offset alignments from our center line alignment and the offsets will stay dynamically linked to the center line. Can you think of any useful applications for this?

Another new feature for alignments is Widening. Using the widening functionality the designer or engineer can easily create a widened section in his 2D layout. widening works by creating regions along the offset alignment where the user can specify a different offset for one region to create a turn lane, for instance. On top of creating the widened section, the user can specify the geometry to use in transition between the two regions.

There is other new functionality associated with alignments. We will take a look at those next time.