Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to grade parking lots faster with a combination of corridors and feature lines.
- Learn how to use the new corridor creation tool to build and edit corridors faster.
- Learn a new grading workflow that's easy to understand and repeatable.
Speakers
- Brian LevendowskiBrian Levendowski, PE is a Firmwide CAD Coordinator at Kimley-Horn, supporting civil engineering teams through skills development, content and standards creation, and software development. With a practical background as a civil engineer and land surveyor, he understands real-world applications of today's technologies. As a well-seasoned public speaker and technical consultant, he is known for his expert knowledge in Civil 3D and AutoCAD. Driven by the search for better processes through technology, Brian thrives on helping engineering teams create their best designs with maximum efficiency.
- John ArmendarizJohn Armendariz is a firm wide CAD Coordinator for Kimley-Horn. He has been in the Land Development industry for 24 years, 20 of which have been with Kimley-Horn in the Richardson, Texas office. John has worked on a variety of Land Development projects as a designer, from wind farms, to multifamily, to mixed use. He offers an invaluable perspective on practice design workflows, and presents Civil 3D solutions in a clear, practical manner.
- Tim YarrisTim has been with Autodesk since 2006 and spent several years designing the user experience and producing in-product learning materials for Civil 3D and InfraWorks. In Tim’s current role as Civil 3D product manager, he works closely with customers and the development team to define the future of Civil 3D.
BRIAN LEWANDOWSKI: Hello and welcome, everyone, to Site Grading with Corridors. Are we there yet? My name is Brian Lewandowski from Kimley-Horn. I have with me today John Armendariz, my partner in crime at Kimley-Horn. And Tim Yarris, the Civil 3D Product Manager at Autodesk. A brief agenda, what we're going to cover today. I'm going to walk us through what we're calling the site grading challenge, a bit of an introduction of this class and what we're addressing.
I'm going to turn it over to my friend Tim at that point. And he's going to walk through some of the stuff his team has been doing on how to make corridor site grading better. And finally, we're going to turn over to John, and he's going to jump right into Civil 3D, and show you how to put all of this together. Show you a streamlined site grading corridors workflow.
All right, let's talk about the site grading challenge. What is this? Let's get into it. If we think about site grading in Civil 3D, the concept is fairly basic, yet there's a lot of detail. So what do I mean by that? Drainage patterns are fairly simple, right? You think about draining away from the building, draining towards a curb inland. Drainage patterns aren't that complex. However, the horizontal design is quite complex if we think about all the curb islands, perhaps retaining walls. There's a lot of geometry going on there.
Site design is also quite repetitive when we think about going from one project or site to the next. However, every site is unique and has its own qualities that make it a unique challenge. Site grading is something that is quite challenging to teach new people. Something I've spent a lot of time in my career on. And it's always one of the most challenging things, because it's not very straightforward.
When people aren't taught well, people fall into bad habits. We end up wasting time. Or even worse yet, we end up delivering poorly graded sites. I think it's fair to say, side grading in Civil 3D is probably one of the most difficult tasks a Civil 3D user can do. So there's a number of questions. How do we create a simple workflow? The title of our class is, Site Grading with Corridors. Are we there yet? We're after this simple workflow.
How do we create an efficient workflow? Can't be simple and take longer than what we're used to now. It's got to be efficient. We're always trying to get faster with what we do in Civil 3D. Most importantly, site grading is a very iterative process. It's got to be repeatable within a given project. And it's got to be repeatable from project and user to project and user. It's important we minimize mistakes.
I think about site grading a parking lot with exclusively feature lines. And perhaps we have a feature line at flow line at top of curb and at back of curb. Maintaining all three sets of those makes it very easy to make mistakes. We've got to be able to minimize that to optimize this workflow. The overall question, how do we make site grading and Civil 3D better? Let me talk a little bit about what we know, or what we've had in Civil 3D for years.
We've had feature lines. Those have been the core objects. The default tool set for grading sites. They're extremely flexible. We can manage point by point. We can grade across multiple points. We can add-- or specify certain slopes for each segment. However, they're fairly slow to work with. We can say they're easy to learn because they're basically glorified 3D polylines. Yet, we need them to do more. Let's contrast that with one of the other core grading related tools in Civil 3D, which are corridors.
These are easily the most dynamic object in Civil 3D. Changing some of the core components in it has the ramifications of doing hundreds of edits to feature lines at once, in effect. Whereas, with feature lines alone, there'd be a lot of manual editing there. Corridors are quite intuitive when you think about it. They use basic design elements that aren't even necessarily specific to Civil 3D. Alignments and profiles are general Civil engineering type terms. We have assemblies, of course, as well with corridors. Those are basically our typical sections.
Even so, corridors are quite cumbersome and non-linear situations. They've been used historically for roadway, railway, and other linear-type projects. Not as much and a site grading scenario. And in the end, they are hard to learn. There's a lot more going on there. But they're more powerful, certainly. So what are we missing to bridge feature lines and corridors into a workflow that answers all those questions we just went through? We need to be able to reduce the number of feature lines. Three feature lines for every curb line. That's a lot going on.
We need to be able to bridge feature line and corridor workflow so it feels like one toolset. We need a workflow that's straightforward. It's predictable. And we need to be able to quickly and easily create surfaces. If you think about grading with just feature lines, and all the iterations of adding break lines to that surface, or removing them, or re-adding them. There's a lot going on there. We need to be automated where possible. I think of corridors when think of automated. Yet, we need to be flexible when needed. Feature lines.
So how do we put this together? More importantly, how do we get there? Or how did we get there? That is our question, right? Are we there yet with corridors for site grading? So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tim. And he's going to walk through some of the great stuff his team has been doing over the last few years.
TIM YARRIS: Great. Thanks a lot, Brian. I appreciate it. So this Kimley-Horn team has been a great advocate for identifying challenges that folks in the land development industry face when modeling a site. Especially those challenges related to site grading workflows. I'm going to share how we've worked together over the last few years to make Civil 3D better for not just John and Brian, but for the entire industry.
So while most of what I'm going to show is all in recent versions of Civil 3D. In a few minutes, I'll be talking about some things that haven't made it into shipping products just yet. So please keep in mind that sometimes our plans change at Autodesk. So please don't make purchasing decisions based on the capabilities I tell you are still on our roadmap. The Autodesk product team has had a long-standing partnership with the folks at Kimley-Horn. They were early Civil 3D adopters and have been key participants in validation activities since the beginning of the product.
We really value their feedback because they approach problems not just from the standpoint of how a resolution will help them, they frame their feedback from the lens of how we can make Civil 3D better for the entire industry as a whole. Kimley-Horn has offices all over the United States, each location having different requirements. The Kimley-Horn and Autodesk partnership really kicked into high gear around 2017 when several of them joined us in Manchester, New Hampshire. Which was the birthplace of Civil 3D. And at the time, was the global headquarters for the Civil Infrastructure Product Team.
Since that meeting in 2017, the Kimley-Horn team has been really trusted advisors to the product development team as we've made Civil 3D incrementally better for site design. Particularly in how corridors can be used to make site designs more efficient and dynamic. We laid the groundwork for this in Civil 3D 2017 when we added the ability to use a feature line as the baseline for a corridor. This opened corridor site workflows tremendously.
But in that same release, we also added the concept of sightless feature lines and the ability to clean up interior corners of a corridor. So you're seeing this here on screen. Feature line being used to create this whole curb island. And those corners being cleaned up quite nicely. Next up, customers expressed how inefficient it was to update feature line elevations to reflect when a surface changed. So for Civil 3D 2018, we added the ability for a feature line to maintain a relative elevation to a surface. This saves you from editing the vertices one by one.
So this means when the surface updates, the feature line vertices follow if they're set to relative. You still have the option to maintain an absolute elevation for vertices as needed. This is all about expanding the dynamic behavior of Civil 3D so you can do more important things. The old corner bow tie issue became really pronounced when corridors started to be used in site workflows. So we also added tools to resolve those bow ties in 2018. This is another tool that takes a lot of the manual labor out of a tedious task, but it still keeps you in control of the finer details of your design.
Then at Autodesk 2018, I did a slight grading class with the Kimley-Horn folks, who showed off some of their great custom tools that they had created to edit feature lines. They created some really clever tools to help edit those feature lines that serve as corridor base lines. They really push the limits of the Civil 3D dynamic model, letting them set a corridor feature line-- a corridor base line elevation by referencing another object, such as this example showing a building pad. And then setting a grade across multiple feature lines.
That class really inspired our development teams. So much so that we built very similar tools in Civil 3D 2020 so that all our customers could reap the productivity benefits that were identified by Kimley-Horn. Then in 2023, we enhanced existing corridor modeling workflows to make them smarter and more powerful. First, we added a new corridor transitions workflow to help you easily transition a corridor from one linear condition to another. We created this to let you quickly model elements like ramps, widenings, and, really, any other linear transition using any subassembly parameter.
And the really cool part with this is that you can copy that transition to other locations on the same corridor, or even export it to use in another drawing altogether. John's going to show you, in a few minutes, some more advanced ways of creating transitions using conditional subassemblies. But the corridor transition tool works really well with any subassembly. In 2023, we also overhauled the formerly tedious process of setting and managing corridor targets. Users expressed how much time they spent clicking through dialog boxes in that process, so we made it altogether much more intelligent.
Then in Civil 3D 2024, we closed the loop on the original goal of using feature lines as corridor base lines. In this video, you're going to see how we automated the creation of a complex site corridor. Until this point, you had to add those feature lines as baselines one by one. Which meant lots of picking and clicking to add the baselines, and then assign subassemblies and assemblies over and over again for each one.
With this new workflow, you can pick a series of feature lines and alignment profile pairs using filters to make selecting from many feature lines easier. Then you assign assemblies. And then create the corridor in one single operation. Pairing it with that corridor template that we updated not too long ago also lets you even get a corridor surface as part of the deal. So this saves you a ton of time on creation, and gives you a great starting point for your site model.
While we've been working to make you faster since Civil 3D 2022, we've also been working on to make Civil 3D faster. Since 2022, each release of Civil 3D has been faster. From simple things like opening a complex drawing or panning and zooming to more complex operations, like rebuilding surfaces and corridor models, editing corridors and sections, and so much more. The more recent releases of Civil 3D are way faster than the legacy versions.
This is all about not forcing you to wait for Civil 3D to catch up to you, making you more productive. Many customers have told us that it takes a while to adopt a new tool or workflow simply because learning new tools takes time away from getting project work done using the traditional workflows that you know well. The performance enhancements alone are completely worth migrating to the latest version of Civil 3D because there's nothing to learn. The tasks you perform every day are just faster.
But we are working on some completely new tools that are related to site design. Tools that will also eventually apply to road, rail, and, really, any civil infrastructure project. So this is where that safe harbor statement comes into play earlier. The next couple of minutes are all about what's under development for the future. For example, we've been hard at work on pond design workflows. So this video here shows the workflow for laying out a pond object using purpose-built pond design tools.
It's a real Civil 3D object, so the creation workflow is familiar. We're giving it a name, a depth, starting inside slope, starting elevation, and freeboard. Laying out vertices to get the initial outline of the pond. And then once the initial layout is complete, you have the flexibility to add curvature, edit the pond to do things modify the elevation and curve radii, add storage stages, and adjust the inside slopes. You can even assign outlets and connect pipe networks to the pond.
We're very excited to be working on delivering long-standing requests for capabilities to model ponds and other drainage elements. The pond is just one aspect of our upcoming drainage analysis workflow, which ties the drainage system design on the Civil 3D desktop to cloud-based InfoDrainage analysis services. This video here shows launching a drainage system analysis, entering rainfall data, and running the analysis.
When the analysis is finished, the workflow helps you validate whether any of the system elements have any violations before you apply the resulting properties to the objects in Civil 3D. And then this example also showed the resulting HGL and EGL lines being automatically plotted onto the profile view. Overall, this workflow is going to help you use the power of InfoDrainage to analyze a drainage system without ever leaving Civil 3D.
The really good news is that, as of this week, a beta of the pond and drainage analysis workflow is available on the Autodesk Infrastructure Futures portal. If you join this program using this QR code, you'll be able to download the beta, test it out, and provide feedback directly to the development team. Kimley-Horn is one of many customers involved in this program, which doesn't involve just beta testing. This program also gives you the opportunity to participate in our weekly, What's the Product Team Working On webinar series. Participate in biweekly reviews with our development teams. And join us for live Inside the Factory events. So if you want your voice to be heard in the development of Civil 3D, join this program.
To find out what we're working on with drainage analysis, or really anything else in our Civil infrastructure product line, check out our Civil infrastructure public roadmap using the QR code on this slide. This will give you a high level idea of what we're actively working on. And it'll also give you some insights about what else is on our radar for the future. For everything up there, you can vote for it and add comments. Which all helps us prioritize the next things that we apply our development resources to.
But that's all coming in the near future. But now, John is going to show you how you can use some of the newer corridor workflows to really supercharge your site grading work. So, John, take it away.
JOHN ARMENDARIZ: Great stuff. Now let's talk about what we have currently for site grading. So we're always looking for better ways to improve our workflows, specifically around site work. We're always looking to figure out ways to replace objects like curbs, retaining walls, sidewalks. All those different objects that require multiple feature lines to represent. So I've got a quick little example here of some of the issues we run into when we're using these methods.
So the example I'm showing now has, on the top, feature lines representing the pavement, which is the face of curb, the top of curb, and the back of curb. And that's what you're seeing on the left side over here. We also have a feature line that has a corridor attached to it, which is the newer workflow. So as you can imagine, if I go in and modify just the feature line, you'll see that the curve doesn't move along with it. If I do that same edit with our corridor, you'll see the corridor curb goes up.
Not only that, horizontal changes, like if I grip edit this feature line, again, my curve is not following along horizontally. But if I do that same thing with the one on the corridor, you'll see that it also followed horizontally. So we can see where we're going to take advantage of this by using a corridor. One of the concepts we're going to be using, and you can tell from my assembly, is we're going to be using conditional subassemblies.
So this workflow is going to take advantage of conditional assemblies that find polylines to turn things on, or the opposite. Like for this not found. If I don't find a polyline on a certain layer, it's going to show my curve. For the rest of these, I have to have these layers on to see these individual objects. You could see I also have the polyline on the layer that they represent next to each one of these so that don't get lost. I also name them the same as the conditional subassembly, the layer name itself. So you can see here conditional curve. This polyline is on layer, conditional curve.
So for an example, if I wanted to turn off the curb, I can click on my polyline here-- and I like to take advantage of this Autodesk tool called Add Selected. So this is going to take the object I have selected, recreate that object on the same layer. So if I hit Add Selected, place a polyline right here, you'll see that when I enter out, that because I chose the not found one, it removed my curb from that area.
But if I go and do, let's say, this curb ramp-- again, taking advantage of my Autodesk tool here, Add Selected-- and I do the same thing over here on this side, you'll see that I'm getting-- this ramp now shows up on my corridor here. So it's really important to understand this workflow as we move along to this bigger example here. So here's the site I'm going to be working on.
And I'm also going to have a 3D view in this bottom right corner that represents wherever area we're standing at. So in this case, I've got this one here, and I'm looking at this curb return. So this 3D view is as if I was standing there looking in that direction. So what I've got in this drawing-- I already have an FG surface in here. This FG surface is showing up as 1-foot increment contours, but it also has these TIN points that let me know what's inside the surface already. I find this pretty helpful.
As you can see here, the face of curb is in here, but not the top or back of curb. It's not part of this yet. You also notice I've got these feature lines that are on this layer that's colored white. And you'll see that this feature line is called Feature 61. But if I grab a feature line that's on my curve, you'll see that these are labeled Curve with a number on them. So this is really important because you've got to decide what method you're going to use to add your baselines in quickly. We've got to be able to distinguish between all of them.
So let's get started. For my surfaces here, you'll see that I've got this curve example, which was that example I showed at the beginning. I've got an existing surface. I've got this FG that has all those feature lines already in it. And the corridor I have is that same example I showed at the beginning. So that's what's in our drawing now. So let's get going. I'm going to go to Home, which is where we're going to create our corridor.
I'm going to select Corridor. And you'll see that I've already got this collapsed. I know I'm not going to be working with alignments and profiles in this particular site, so I'm going to collapse that so I see just my selection process. I'm going to use my defaults for everything you see here. And I'm going to go ahead and select my feature line. So if I was to just hit our drop down, you'll see I've got a lot of feature lines in my drawing. But I'm only after the ones that have the word Curb on it.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the selection filter, which is pretty handy. And I know I name everything with Curb as a prefix. So once I type Curb and I leave the asterisk in there, I hit that dropdown again, and now, I only see my Curb feature lines. So I don't even have to go into my drawing to select. I can just simply hit this, Add All Listed, and now they're all as baselines.
I'm going to attach our assembly called All. Once I do that, if I am ever targeting for something, it's more than likely surface wise, it's going to be an EG surface. I'm going to go ahead and select that. One important piece to this that's going to save us a lot of time is adding a corridor template. If I browse, I already have a drawing that I used a similar , assembly and I want to bring in everything that a template will bring in for us. Which is the main one, the corridor surface.
So it brings in code, set styles, things like that. But I'll go over what that actually did for us here. So I'm going to hit OK. I'm not going to go into the Baseline and Region parameters. I'm just going to hit OK. Once that finishes rebuilding, I'm going to click on my corridor. And you'll see that everywhere I had a feature line that was named Curb, I've got a corridor and a baseline and a region all representing that curb.
And the reason for that is because that is using the notfound conditional. Meaning that if it didn't find a polyline to turn it off, then it's going to leave it showing up as a curb. I've got that all selected here, and I'm going to go to my Tool space and you'll see it. I created this corridor. I'm going to set this to automatic while I'm here. But I'm also going to go into the Properties to show you that on the Surfaces tab, it also added all-- I use the data type of feature lines, and it's already-- because of the corridor template, it added all the different ones that I typically use using this assembly. So very helpful here.
So I'm going to hit OK. It also created this corridor surface, named it just like it did in the template. And in the template, it was already set to a style that we called No Display, meaning that it just doesn't display anything in our drawing. So it defaulted to all that. But what I'm going to do next is I'm going to paste this into my FG. So this is the workflow I like to use. I like to paste in the corridor. Because I've already got my feature lines and my boundaries in the FG.
But you'll notice that it overrides the surface here. It's all just doing the top of curves here. And that's because the definition order is really important in this workflow. If I go to Definition, go to Paste, and I send this to the top, you'll notice that when I hit OK and get out and I rebuild this surface, you'll see that I'll get back down to my pavement level. But now all of this is in my drawing. So why is that important? If I zoom back to our original corner over here, you'll see I've got some labels representing the face of curve, and then the back top of curve.
I'm going to slightly slide over here to view it in 3D. So like we mentioned in the example, if I edit the elevation-- and I'm going to go a foot higher-- you'll see that in the 3D view, my pavement went up. I still maintain 6 inches here. And you can see that from the label itself. So that's where the power comes into play. I'm only ever having to mess with the feature line. Even if I change horizontally here, you'll see that curve corridor is going to go along with it. And I'm going to maintain my 6 inches here. So that's the power of this.
Now, before we get too far, we've got to add all of these subassembly targets to our corridor. So I'm showing a curve because there are no other targets in here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select my corridor. And I'm going to go to Edit Targets. You'll see at my command line, I have the ability to edit all my regions at once. I'm just going to do A for all, or select all from the command line. You'll see how this list can get pretty excessive here because it's all the regions, all the subassemblies that are available.
So what I like to do is I like to collapse it first. Go to the filtering of this. And because I named all of these with an underscore at the beginning, I can just put that underscore here, and then just click out. And you'll see I'm only getting my conditionals now. So a little easier to work with. So here's where the trick of this is. Because this conditional curve is a not found, anytime it finds any of these polylines, I want my curve to turn off. So that's the difference between this conditional and the rest.
So again, if it finds any of these polylines on those layers, then I want to turn the curve off. So I've got them all selected. And for a conditional curve, I need to go down here, and any of those layers that I represent my polylines, I need to make sure that I add those all to my conditional curve one. Because that is the not found. Now I'm going to go to daylight. These are all found. So now I'm going to say, if you find a polyline on that layer, turn that on.
And then I'm going to do the same for all these different ones. So now I'm on curb ramp. Retaining wall. Here's our sidewalk. And then I've got one just called ramp at the end. I'm going to rebuild my corridor, and nothing's really going to happen here other than the corridor's looking for those targets. There's none to be found right now because we haven't drawn any in. But that's the prep work that we've got to set up and establish in the beginning. So now I'm going to move down to a second view over here. So I'm zooming in to this little ramp area here.
And you can see, again, I'm standing right here on this label looking in that direction. That's how you're seeing the 3D view. So I wanted to do this one because it has a little bit of a unique area here. So one, it's got this curb that wraps around and leaves a landing for our ramp here. We also got our ramp. And then on the top side of this, I've got a curb with a sidewalk on it. But where did we see this example? On my subassembly, I have a conditional curb sidewalk here. So I'm trying to replace the curve that's there now with this subassembly.
So how do we go about doing that? Again, we're going to use our little trick. I've mapped out what polyline and what layer that I want to turn this on. So I'm right clicking. I'm hitting, Add Selected. And I'm going to pick along this. And notice that I don't have to be parallel. I just have to be within the limit that I set in those conditionals. So you'll notice that once I hit Enter, I'm going to get my corridor. Which has a hatch showing me that it's in there.
But again, remember my TIN points also let me know that edge of pavement is also in the surface now. And then you can also see it over here on the 3D view. I purposely picked this area to look because you'll notice that we have a curb ramp. I'm not after trying to represent this site with a perfect corridor in every little pavement section everywhere across the site. Would that be nice? Yes. But where we are today, we want to just try to get our TIN as best as possible.
So if that means that all I have to do is represent this area with the correct corridor and subassembly, and then this area with some feature lines and the correct corridor assembly, then it's going to let the triangles figure out the rest of my design. So if you look here, I have a ramp. And I've got these labels on here-- these surface slope labels that are letting me know that they fall within the local criteria here. So I'm not going to worry about trying to replicate this with the corridor. I'm going to let the triangles do its job here.
So I'm going to move over to another tricky little ramp area here, which is our third view. And you could see him looking back towards us. So first thing is, I know I want to represent this landing with only feature lines. So I've got to turn off the curb, basically, from here all the way to here. So again, if I simply just want to turn off the curve, I got to go back to this polyline on this layer. So again, select it, Add Selected. I'm going to pick the endpoint here. I'm going to pick the endpoint here. I'm going to hit Enter.
And now, my curve is going to go away along that area that it's finding this polyline. So now, I just want to represent this landing with feature lines. So I'm not going to really add anything back there. But I happen to have this ramp that's going perpendicular to the curve. So what do we do about that? Well, I've got an additional subassembly here that is called Conditional Ramp. And all it is a piece of pavement that is 8.33%-- it's actually a sidewalk that's 8.33%. So how do I add this?
Same as we do the rest of them. Selecting my polyline, hitting Add Selected. And then I'm going to put it for the length that I need here. So once I hit Enter, you'll see that that section is always going to be a ramp, 8.33%. So you can see my slope label there. If I, again, want to show this off, if I just want to clean this up a little-- 645.6-- you'll notice that my other elevation here-- I've got a spot elevation that is always going to be 6 inches different than the landing over here because of the corridor itself.
Going to move on to this top corner here. So I got this fourth view. And we're looking down that curb line right there. So what you're not seeing here-- and I'll turn it on in a second-- is we've got our existing surface. And that existing surface is down pretty far. And it's going to be a pond. So we don't want to interfere with our tie-in going too far into that area. So we're going to use this conditional retaining wall.
So just like the rest of them, I'm going to grab that, right click, hit Add Selected. And then I'm just going to move along everywhere I want this retaining wall to be. So I'm just going to start drawing my polyline anywhere I want to turn that on. And so I'm just going to turn this corner a little bit. And we'll stop right there. So again, when I hit Enter, keep an eye on our model. And you'll see that the retaining wall comes in. And what I'm designing is just the top of ground, and then where it matches existing. That's what I'm trying to get from my surface by using this subassembly.
And then just to see what we were doing here, I'm going to temporarily turn on my existing surface. And you could see how this wall is now tying down at where this existing surface is. A pretty useful subassembly there with the conditional curve retaining wall. Let's look at another ramp. So I'm going to go to this corner. Switch my view. Again, we're looking down towards this ramp. You can see we've got a pretty traditional winged ramp here.
So again, I need to turn off the corridor anywhere that it just transitions here. So it's going to transition in these two wings. But in order to save myself from having to draw two polylines, I'm just going to turn off the curb in that entire area. And that's how I'm going to get started here. So I'm going to pick the endpoint here, and the endpoint there. And then I'm just going to hit Enter. And you'll see that the curb is going to go away.
Once that curb goes away, I need to now add my ramp. Which is this one next to it. So I only need to add the ramp-- if I get this command started-- right here in this ramp area. So again, when I hit Enter, you'll see that the corridor will show up. And now, my pavement will always be 6 inches different than the back of this ramp. So again, we keep harping on this, but where's the power, right?
Even for this ramp here, if I was to just clean this up, make this an even 654.75. Then if we look at the top of my ramp, it's always going to be half a foot different. But not only that, let's say that the base changed, those polylines can just simply be slid down to the new location of the ramp. So I've got those two polylines selected. I'm just going to move from here to here. And obviously, the base didn't change because I didn't make that change. But you'll notice that the corridor will update.
And now, my ramp will be in this location, as you can see from the 3D model there. So again, the power is in the vertical and the horizontal changes. So let's look at a different tool. So in this scenario, we've got a little drive that is coming into the building that is a storage building here. And we want to-- because we have a sidewalk that's going up against the building, this sidewalk, I need to take my 6-inch curb and trim it down to have a zero-inch height curb by the time it gets to the sidewalk. So let's use some of those tools to create that.
So I've got the corridor selected, and I'm going to start with this one right here. And also going to switch to that view over here. So we're going to be looking at this return right here, which is the return we're seeing here on plan view. So I've got the core-- I'm going to select my corridor. Going to use the Edit Corridor Transition. First, it wants to know baseline. So I'm just going to hover over my baseline and just click. And then it's immediately going to ask about the subassembly. There's only one in here, so just got to hover. Select that.
The Help menu for the subassemblies are really great. If I was to pull that up, you would see that dimension D is the height of the curb. So I'm just going to select that D. And then it wants to know, OK, where are you doing this at? OK, so I'm going to start down here. And I need a zero-inch height curb right here. But for this particular dimension, if you put a 0, it sometimes bugs out. So I'm just going to do a really small number here.
Then I'm going to go to the end of this curb return, and I'm going to accept that 6 inch. And then I'm going to accept the two defaults here to finish out the command. And then keep an eye right here on our 3D model. When I hit Apply, you'll see that it now I've got the curb up here at 6 inches, and it transitions down to 0. So a great way to use a transition in this scenario. So let's redo that for this other one over here so that we can see that same scenario happening for this curb return.
So we'll go through this quickly. Since I've already got the dialog box up, I'm going to switch baselines. I'm going to invoke the command again. This subassembly, dimension D. And then I'm going to start at this end. Accept my 6-inch curb height. And then go all the way to here and change it to, basically, 0. So then as I accept defaults and Apply, you're going to see that same scenario happen here. 6-inch fading down to a zero-inch curb.
Let's move on to the next view. So you can see up at the top here, I've got a little curb island. But in 3D, it looks like a pond. So what can happen to you is-- and you'll notice that my assembly, all my subassemblies are on the right side. So you have to have the feature line going in the right direction. In this case, I've got my feature line here. And you can see that the curb accidentally ended up on the outside. Easy way to fix that.
We're just going to go to our Tools here for reversing a feature line. Going to invoke that. Once that builds, you'll see that my 3D view will now look like a curb and not a pond. So while we're in the same area, we're going to look at this view number eight. And what's happening here is, for the length of the building from here to here, this is an entry, and it's a drop off area. So we want the pavement of our drive here to match the pavement of our sidewalk.
So I don't want this 6-inch curb in here. But I also want to control where we transition the curb from 6 inches down to zero-inch height curb. So again, we've got the-- I still have my transitions open right here. So I can just invoke, because I'm already on the right baseline. And invoke the command again. Then come in, and select the D dimension again. And then start this process again. So I'm going to start here. Accept my 6-inch. Go all the way to here.
And again, can't type in 0, so I'm to do 0.001. But this time, I'm going to hit Enter. And I'm not going to get out of the command because I need this to be 0 all the way to this other side. And then I'm going to transition back to 6-inch height curve. So accept the defaults, accept the defaults. And then if you keep an eye over here, when I hit Apply, you'll see that I got 6 inches here. And then it's going to transition down to 0 all along the face right here along the building. It's another good use for transitions.
We're going to go to my ninth view. And you'll notice that I have contours going through the building here. Because the only thing I have representing the building now is this feature line. And this feature line represents outside the building. We're actually going to be exposing the foundation on this corner over here. So that's why you're seeing these contours going through the building, because I only have the one feature line.
So I have an assembly here that if I was to grab a small little piece that is visibly hard to see because it's only 0.1-- I have a link offset and elevation with the horizontal offset of 0.1. But I'm actually telling what the finished floor is. So I can control the finished floor right here from this subassembly. So in this case, my finished floor is 655.4. So my feature line is going to represent outside the building. And this small subassembly is going to represent what the finished floor is going to be. That is not part of my baselines here, so I've got to manually do that right now.
So I'm going to click on my corridor. I'm going to go to Add Baseline. And don't need to filter because it's only one that is labeled, or named, Building. And then I'm going to switch to the assembly called Building. So that brings in that baseline and that region. But now, you'll see that my 3D updated and has my finished floor now completely level here. And it's exposing this part. You'll notice that I also have another conditional here with some sidewalk on it.
And that's because if you click on this polyline, which I've already gotten the drawing-- I'm going to select similar-- everywhere you see this polyline, I want there to be a sidewalk. Because in some areas, the graph is going to be too steep and we want to make sure that we grade in a flat sidewalk there. So again, if I click on my corridor, I didn't have this as one of my targets originally, so I'm just going to add that. So I'm going to hit Edit Targets. And then because this region is so small, sometimes you have to zoom in. And once you get that blue highlight, select it.
Not quite as intimidating, because this is just one. And you can see if I collapse it, I know right away that I'm going to be messing with this Building one. And again, because of my naming, I'm able to quickly come down here and find that Building, which is that layer name there. I'm going to rebuild. And you'll notice that it's going to show the corridor for the sidewalk, and add it to the surface along this edges here. In plan view, you can see the hatching of the corridor, which is all that blue that you're seeing.
And then finally, for our tenth view here, something that we do project. If I go back to All, I have a Daylighting option. And what it does is it has a curb, a small little landscape area that's relatively flat. And then I'm going to daylight to the existing surface. So let's turn that one on. Going to select this polyline, right click, hit Add Selected. And I'm just going to pick along this area here.
So notice when I hit Enter and get out of this polyline command, if we look at our 3D view, you're going to see that the corridor now daylights to existing. So it's got the small, little landscape area that I've talked about. And then now it's also got this area that's going down in matching existing. So these are some of the objects that we typically use on a project. Back to you.
BRIAN LEWANDOWSKI: Wow. Impressive, John. Thanks so much. What a cool workflow, how you've incorporated all the different tools that Tim's team has made, and really put together a workflow that is-- I think, it's checking all those boxes. Anyway, let's wrap up here. I want to walk through a few conclusions and takeaways from the presentation.
Feature lines are still your core grading tool. If we think back to John's example there, the grading of all the parking lot, the pavements, the flow lines themselves, all of that is still feature lines. The overall drainage pattern of the site. Think of corridors as a supplement for grading curbs, for PED ramps, transitions, that sort of thing. Now, it might be a little overwhelming at first if you're not real familiar with corridors and conditional subassemblies, start simple. Use your feature lines for flow line baselines, and just model the curb, the first conditional that John had on there. And then add more conditionals as you get familiar with that, and you'll see that workflow come together.
Some big time savings things. Pre-build those assemblies. That assembly that John was showing, that's something that can be used for project to project to project. You might change a few things like width of sidewalk, so forth, but having those ready to go is a big time saver. And the corridor template, how it defines how the surface and other settings are already configured for you. It eliminates some of the mistakes that we're after. And of course, saves a lot of time.
John showed us a ton of tricks using those conditional subassemblies. The Add Selected option, the way that you're naming your layers that those polylines go on. Those match the name of the subassembly itself. All of those little things help bring this workflow together. When the targeting with conditionals gets clumsy or just too confusing, flip two transitions. They're really quite intuitive. And they fill in that gap where the conditionals don't quite make sense. So always keep those in mind.
And one last piece here. You need to be working in 2024.4 to get one of the biggest additions, which is the Multi Baseline Tool. That was the one where John was able to add dozens of feature line baselines to a corridor at once. With 0.4, you're able to add to a new corridor as well as add to an existing corridor. So the question remains, are we there yet with corridors and site grading? I think the three of us would say a resounding yes to it. We've been working on this for years, talking about this for years. We're super excited about where we're at. And we hope you are too.
With that, thanks for watching.