Corridor Deconstruction

Peter Webb – Technocad

CI6401-P The corridor model in AutoCAD® Civil 3D® has many interconnected parts that work
together to produce roadway models. In this class, we will dig into the different parts of the model to see
how they all fit and work together. We will discuss alignment, profiles, offsets, targets, surfaces,
assemblies, subassemblies, regions, the ATC file, the subassembly code, code sets, labels, cross
sections, corridor surfaces, and feature lines. Attendees should have a good working knowledge of the
corridor model in Civil 3D. We're going down to bedrock in this class.

Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, you will be able to:
 List the different parts of the corridor model
 Explain how the program processes the model using the geometry in Civil 3D and the subassembly
code
 Create a great corridor model and design cross sections
 Describe new trends in cross-sectional design that go beyond traditional subassembly programming

About the Speaker

Peter Webb is a Professional Registered Civil Engineer, as well as a Chartered Civil Engineer and holds
a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering. He is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (London) and
also a member of the South African Institution of Civil Engineers. He has worked in the consulting
engineering field, as well as management contracting and a local authority. He has been an Autodesk
Partner for over 20 years, as well as a Member of the Autodesk Developer Network. He specialises in the
application of software for civil engineering and related fields. He has been involved with AutoCAD Civil
3D since its inception, and with related software projects and implementation. Currently his focus is on
Building Information Modeling (BIM), with regard to Civil Engineering.
 Corridor Deconstruction

Introduction
The corridor model in AutoCAD® Civil 3D® has many interconnected parts that work together to
produce roadway models. In this class, we will dig into the different parts of the model to see
how they all fit and work together. We will discuss alignment, profiles, offsets, targets, surfaces,
assemblies, subassemblies, regions, the ATC file, the subassembly code, code sets, labels,
cross sections, corridor surfaces, and feature lines.

The Corridor Model

The first step of our deconstruction of the corridor is a quick review of what makes up the model
inside your drawing.

Set the Plane

The program begins working from the start of the alignment and for each corridor chainage
obtains the xy coordinate of that chainage. It then queries the referenced profile (the one set in
the corridor parameters) to get the z or elevation. This xyz becomes the 0,0,0 point for that
corridor section, and a vertical plane is set perpendicular to the alignment at the corridor
chainage:

Figure 1 - Drawing Plane for the Corridor Chainage

Set the Points

After the plane is set, the sub-assembly adds points to the plane. These points contain point
codes (TOC, EOP) that Civil 3D combines with the Code Set Style to draw and label and
connect with feature lines.

As the assembly is processed, each sub-assembly is run in turn working from the inside to the
right and when it has finished on the right, from the inside to the left. In addition for each sub-
assembly the 0,0 point of the plane is reset to be the attachment point of the subassembly.

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NOTE: If you use any subassemblies that rely on a marked point this order is very important
because the marked point needs to be set before it is referenced.

The shipping subassemblies were designed to require no a priori knowledge. In other words
they don’t know about what came before them (or what comes after them) they are individual
programs that are designed to work independently. However you can pass values down the
chain.

Figure 2 - Points in the Plane

Links – Playing Join the Dots

After the points are set in the plane, Civil 3D plays “Join The Dots” with the points, linking up
pairs of points to create links. These links also have codes that the Code Set uses to draw and
label the links. The codes are also used to create corridor surfaces.

Figure 3 - Links added between the points

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Shapes – Color within the Lines

After completing the “Join the Dots, Civil 3D adds shapes to closed regions of links. These
shapes contain codes that the Code Set uses to draw and label them. The codes are also used
to identify the shapes for Quantity Take-Off (QTO), volumes and to create corridor solids.

Figure 4 - Shape added inside the links

Wrapping it Up
After the corridor has made each of the sections from start to end on the alignment, the points
and links are collected up and reprocessed into Feature Lines and Corridor Surfaces.

Figure 5 - Feature lines added to the corridor

Hidden Parts of the Corridor Model

There are a few hidden parts of the corridor modeling system that you may never need to look
into, but knowing about them is important.

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ATC File
The “Autodesk Tool Catalog” or ATC file is an XML file that the corridor uses to provide the user
interface to the subassemblies.

Codes File
The stock subassemblies come with some hard coded point, shape and link codes in them.
There are three ways to change what is displayed in your model:

1. You could edit the source code that is shipped and recompile all the subassemblies with
your point, link and shape codes
2. You could make a new set of subassemblies with Subassembly Composer that have the
coding you want
3. You could edit the Codes file

In terms of time, the first one might be a week or so of work, the second a month and the third
could be done in hours.

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2012\enu\ C3DStockSubassemblyScripts.codes is where the

file is located on my machine. Below are the first 10 lines of my file
//Attention; do not use commas in description
//
//Index No.,Localized code,Original Code,Description
//
1,Crown,Crown,Crown point between travel lanes on finish grade
2,Crown_Pave1,Crown_Pave1,Crown point on the Pave1 layer
3,Crown_Pave2,Crown_Pave2,Crown point on the Pave2 layer
4,Crown_Base,Crown_Base,Crown point between travel lanes on the base layer
5,Crown_Sub,Crown_Sub,Crown point between travel lanes on the subBase layer
6,ETW,ETW,Edge of traveled way; inside or outside edges of travel lanes on finish grade

The file has four fields, index number, Localized code, Original code and Description. If you
want to modify this file, after making a backup, modify only the 2nd and 4th elements.

Note: if you have Civil 3D running with the file open you may need to restart because the file is
cached by the corridor engine the first time a corridor is created.

By changing the “Localized code” you are “translating” from the shipping version to your
companies/states/country’s code. Below is a translation of the 6th code for that would be used at
the edge of a roadway. Now every time a subassembly writes the ETW code, the drawing will
contain the code EOP.
6,EOP,ETW,Edge of pavement; inside or outside edges of travel lanes on finish grade

Code Set
The code sets (a style-like element inside of Civil 3D) is used to stylize and label the point, link
and shapes for the corridor in model and cross sections. A corridor can use different code sets

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for the model and for the cross sections. The Code Sets use the codes (set with the Codes file)
so if you modify the codes file you will need to also modify the code sets.

Figure 6 - Code Set

There are three sections of the code set, Links, Points and Shapes (the tree was alphabetized)
and each of them have different things they control. The links have information about surfaces,
the point’s information about feature lines and the shapes are kind of along for the ride. If you
have made modification to your codes file or have custom subassemblies you will need to
import the codes into the code set.

Create a great corridor model and design cross sections

The basic subassemblies can produce many good corridor models, but to take it to the next
level, try employing conditional subassemblies. In the box there are a couple of conditional
subassemblies, one for surfaces and the other for offsets.

Conditional Surface
The conditional surface subassembly can do a couple of different things: it can test if you are in
cut or fill, but it can also test for the amount of cut or fill. By using these two cuts you can make
an assembly that would use a pretty standard daylight within a range of cut and fill, but when the
cut or fill is too great, a wall subassembly could be used instead.

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Figure 7 - Conditional Cut / Fill

Conditional Offsets
There are a number of different uses of the conditional offset subassembly. The basic one is to
test if an offset target (alignment, polyline, feature line or survey figure) is present and change
the assembly based on that. For example you could use a conditional offset to check to see if
you are within a distance of a ROW line. If you are too close, then add a wall otherwise use a
typical cut/fill subassembly.

Issues with your corridor model

In most cases the problems with the corridor are from how they were defined or constrained.
Here we take a look at some of the most common problems.

Bow Ties
The corridor is a cross sectional based solution. While this is a simple enough statement
understanding the ramifications are important. One area that a cross sectional based solution

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has “issues” is where you have a tight corner. In many cases this can produce bow-ties because
the corridor only considers the alignment, profile and surface in the plane of the corridor. If you
look at the bow-tie you will see that each of the individual planes is correct, but the whole
produces less than ideal results. One way to solve this is to not daylight in those areas using the
corridor. All of the standard daylight subassemblies have an option to omit the final link. If this is
used over the range of stations that are producing the bow tie, the daylight won’t be added.
Then extract the hinge point at the shoulder or back of the ditch as a feature line and use
grading to daylight to the surface. This will produce a much better solution and will remain
dynamic to changes in the corridor.

Figure 8 - Bow Ties

Figure 9 - With a Graded Solution

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Waterfalls
If you look at your corridor model sometimes you will see the roadway dropping down to zero at
start and/or end of the corridor. What is happening here is that the design profile is just a little
too short and because the corridor adds sections at changes in the vertical design, you get a
very short section of roadway that plummets to zero.

Figure 10 - Waterfall

The solution is typically pretty simple: snap the start / end of the design profile to the start / end
of the alignment. In your profile view there is typically a line that you can snap to.

Shooting daylights
Another thing that sometimes happens is that daylights will shoot across the site or not draw at
all. One of the causes of this (especially in intersection design) is that you have used a design
profile that doesn’t have any vertical information. The intersection Wizard will use the design
profile in the list as the default. If you happen to have an incomplete design profile in your
drawing, this can lead to problems.

Skipped Daylights
Skipped daylight lines have a couple of typically issues with the most common being forgetting
to set the surface target. When this happens your corridor should fill up your Event Viewer with
messages that say just that, but if you have that turned off you won’t get the messages.

Another problem is that the requested intercept slope may not hit the surface because the site
was too narrow for the slope. If this happens you typically have more issues than just a corridor
model that isn’t working, you have a design issue you need to solve (survey more land to make
the model bigger, buy a wider right-of-way, change the design slope, move the road up or down
or build a wall).

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New Trends
There are two new trends in cross sectional design that we want to talk about: the Subassembly
Composer and Corridor Solids that can change the way you work with corridor models.

Subassembly Composer
The Subassembly Composer is a standalone tool that allows you to create and modify
subassemblies without the need to use a programming language like VB.NET or C#. The
Subassembly Composer has a workflow or flow chart that you drag and drop tools on to and a
preview window to see the results. These tools allow you to create point, links and shapes do
complex geometry calculations and provides an extensive API to both query the subassembly
you are working on as well as the alignment, profile and surfaces that make up the corridor.

Figure 11 - Subassembly Composer

What is powerful about Subassembly Composer is that it lets you model complex cross sections
with multiple decisions or conditionals.

Corridor Solids
This is a new way of looking at the corridor model. Instead of looking at a series of related cross
sections, the Corridor Solids tool (posted on Autodesk Labs) will create 3D Solids from the
shapes in the corridor. These solids can be used to find true 3D volumes and can be exported
to other programs for additional analysis. A few of the interesting things that Autodesk are doing
with the corridor solids are taking them to Autodesk Revit to be used in building models (train
platforms), to Revit or Inventor to be analyzed for bridges. Autodesk have also been exporting

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the solids broken into smaller regions for use in Autodesk NavisWorks for sequencing analysis
and scheduling.

Figure 12 - Corridor Solids

Conclusion
The corridor model is a very powerful tool for designing linear elements. It combines some of
the traditional ways of approaching cross sectional based design and have coupled it with a
power programming engine the can process the sections.

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