SQOTD: Corridor Boundaries are Driving Me Nuts!

Q. Is there a better way to stop the finished surface boundary at the edge of the corridor than using the daylight line?

When the proposed profile changes so does the daylight line and I need to re-extract the daylight featureline and turn it into a polyline. This is really annoying!

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A. When it comes to the surfaces created by corridors there is good news on the horizon. Civil 3D 2010 has a tool that makes what I’m about to tell you a moot issue (Civil 3D 2010 has an option “Corridor Extents as Outer Boundary” for corridor surfaces). However, in 2009 creating a surface boundary takes a little more finessing.

When you are in your corridor properties, go to the Boundaries tab. Right click on the name of the surface. If you have Add Automatically, use it. However, you won’t see that option in a corridor with an intersection, if you are using generic links or one with more than one baseline. However, you will see Add Interactively. It can be time-consuming to set up initially, but it is worth the effort because it will change as your corridor changes.

Once you click Add Interactively, you will be shot back into the drawing. Snap to your daylight featureline. A dialog box will pop up asking you to verify which daylight line you were aiming for (Daylight, Daylight_Cut, Daylight_Fill) - highlight Daylight, and click OK. Now you will trace the daylight line.

As you move your cursor, you’ll get this thick red line following the path of the Daylight line. As you pan and keep tracing the line may stop at the region boundaries. If it does, click again on the Daylight line and verify if you need to.

Essentially what we are doing with this procedure is spoon-feeding Civil 3D the location of the daylight line. You’ll need to click to jump across the street, any time you change baselines or anytime you encounter an assembly that created a different line from Daylight. Trace around the entire corridor and when you’ve looped around back to where you started, type C for close (similar to a polyline).

It may seem like a pain in the neck at first, but once you’ve created a corridor surface boundary this way, it will prevent those overruns even if the corridor geometry changes.

Hope this helps!