Topic: Rebuilding all corridors at once in C3D

[StefanDidak]

Last night a colleague told me that it's not possible to rebuild all corridors (or only all the out of date corridors) in Civil 3D and that it's been a bit of an annoyance because each corridor has to be rebuilt one at a time. So I figured I'd spend 10 minutes to hack up a quick plugin for C3D (2010) that does exactly that. It's really almost too silly to mention but the core of doing that is really only a few lines of code. I'm by no means a user or expert with C3D but for what it's worth, anyone who has a use for two commands that will do as described above can get the plugin here: http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/11/12/rebuilding-all-or-all-out-of-date-corridors-in-autodesk-civil-3d-2010/

[mjfarrell]

Interesting Stefan.....although the method I try to impart to students, is such that they would rarely have more than one corridor in their files at any given time; irrespective of the size of job or complexity of the corridor.  How many corridors did they or do they normally have in their files?

Also curious does your command suppress the Warning dialog concerning loss of Intersection data during the Rebuild Process?

[StefanDidak]

How many corridors did they or do they normally have in their files?
Also curious does your command suppress the Warning dialog concerning loss of Intersection data during the Rebuild Process?

Over the past few years I've seen a lot of files with varying numbers of corridors, anything from one to 10 or more. And last night I heard about a demo that's being prepared that uses something like 16 of them and that sometimes there appears to be a problem where a file with corridors that are not OOD will save fine but when reloaded again will have a number of them being OOD. And I regularly get some files for debugging purposes that have some interesting multi-corridor constructs to create roundabouts, etc.

I'm not suppressing any dialogs so if those pop up it's entirely as intended I guess. As I said, it's almost too silly that there's no direct "rebuild all" in C3D since it's just a one line call to corridor.Rebuild(). And two lines to rebuild only the OOD ones (before calling Rebuild() it checks the IsOutOfDate flag first).

[mjfarrell]

OK, so you will still be warned should one have tinkered with the Interestion (it is implied that your command is also updating Intersections as well).

Hmm, even for a Roundabout construct one would still rarely need more than a Helper Corridor, and then the real thing.
In my class we do a small project with about 6 roads, a drainage way, and adjacent lot grading all from the corridor model, and this is done as ONE contiguous corridor model.  It's easier than attempting to manage all them separately.

[sinc]

Keep in mind that, to create a robust solution, it is not enough to simply rebuild all corridors.  The user could always create one corridor so that it targets surfaces, feature lines, or alignments created from another corridor, so a robust solution would need update them in the correct order.  Or, if you don't care about performance, you can update all Corridors, then check to see if any of them are still out of date, update the out-of-date Corridors, and repeat until no corridors are out-of-date.

I understand where Michael is coming from, though...  I'd be curious in seeing some of these designs, and why they use multiple Corridors.  So far, I've only ever used a maximum of two Corridors in a single drawing, myself.

[scout]

I have a drawing with a few separate corridors in it- i mostly build rivers anymore, though.

i have the main design corridor
and about 5 dummy corridors that have flat assemblies at certain points that I use to make profile lines that I can tack onto and target.

Since they brought in the shrinkwrap boundary tool and intersection objects, I find I am more likely to build small corridors for the intersections alone just because it is easier to blow them away if I have a big change.

[mjfarrell]

Scout, you might like to try another method for the 'Design to Surfaces' other than corridors.
You might find that feature lines are more nimble and as robust as doing it your way.
Further given my experiences with 'river and stream' design and redesign projects most often the profile information is coming to you from other than C3D, in which case I use the Create Profile from file function, and import the target profiles from the design software 'solution', and use those designed profiles as my corridor targets.

The only drawback to using feature lines is the C3D will NOT allow one to use them as Alignments and Profiles for your Assembly OFFSETS to follow. (A major weakness) Nor does C3D use your actual offset alignment stationing (a total defect) within the corridor model.

In short if you have more that two corridors going in the same file; you are working WAY too hard.

[StefanDidak]

I understand where Michael is coming from, though...  I'd be curious in seeing some of these designs, and why they use multiple Corridors.  So far, I've only ever used a maximum of two Corridors in a single drawing, myself.

I'm not sure I could show any raw data since it's all customer data that I get to debug/develop against but I can tell you that the data comes from small independent firms to large government organizations. In most cases those are some really large data sets with designs that cover lots of different roads, ramps, etc. It might be that the data is not only specific to the design but rather also aimed at visualization but I've never really given it *any* thought whether there should be a limit to the number of corridors (other than file size and general performance degradation of C3D). I'm actually quite happy getting really complex designs with countless regions and asms/subasms because it is generally more helpful to me to ensure the data doesn't mess up my code and make it break down. 

[mjfarrell]

Stephan, I'll send you a sample set somehow....

One of the cool parts of using a single corridor, is that to a large degree it is easier to manage.  The other thing is that as to performance the user has some controll over that.  In practice one begins the corridor, having created alignments, and or profiles as required (the helper corridor), the basic assembly set.  You assign the first baseline, and region, and then using the object viewer confirm that the model is following your instructions (named targets). Add the next region, and again verify as is to plan, as the third region is added in one can then turn off the first region, continuing in this fashion, and only having on required regions limited to the current design area of interest.  One can get a great deal of performance during this part of the operation.  Then only at the very end should one turn it all on, for sections, volumes, etc...

As to the customers data...if you didn't tell me I wouldn't know....and I'm sure it's identity is quite easily 'masked'.

[sinc]

I've seen some designs that I thought might warrant multiple corridors.

I just had one that involved a divided highway, where the individual lanes drifted from adjacent to each other to having a very wide separation between lanes.  The existing highway was turning into one half of the final divided highway, and everything happened in multiple phases.  In many places, the design of one phase daylighted to the final surface created in the previous phase.  The plans were actually somewhat problematic - the Engineer did things that kind of made me (as the lowly surveyor) shake my head, but anyway...  Civil 3D proved flexible enough to handle the design.  But while working on it, I was thinking about how I might have gone about doing the engineering for this project in Civil 3D, I decided the easiest way would probably involve using one Corridor for each phase...

As it was, we were only doing the surveying, so I just built one Corridor with the final design, and we were able to use that for everything we needed.

And actually, now that I think about it, I've also used multiple Corridors when doing some "what if" sort of situations.  I've done things like have multiple Corridors, each set to different design parameters and on its own Object Layer, so designs can be individually hidden or VPFrozen.

[sinc]

What would be the best way to handle something like a major highway interchange with like a dozen flyover ramps, like I've seen in a picture on one of Autodesk's promotional items?

[mjfarrell]

those multiple flyovers would probably work best as disconnected corridors...

[scout]

What would be the best way to handle something like a major highway interchange with like a dozen flyover ramps, like I've seen in a picture on one of Autodesk's promotional items?

I can pull down the file from our most recent marketing stuff and count the corridors for you. I don't have it handy, but attached is a shot of the Civil 3D model in Max design.

Knowing the kind of customer data that Stefan sees on a daily basis, I would say this is likely comparable.

[scout]

Scout, you might like to try another method for the 'Design to Surfaces' other than corridors.

I don't really use it for design to surface. I use it when I need like a bottom of bank profile to use as a baseline and I need it to be as long as some very curvy alignments up the bank.

I could use some advice on something though- I know you hate external links, but I wrote up the quandry here:

http://bimontherocks.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/leveraging-a-temporary-corridor-for-stream-projects.html

[StefanDidak]

Knowing the kind of customer data that Stefan sees on a daily basis, I would say this is likely comparable.

That is, indeed, a very good comparable example.