Control your corridors with Naviate Infrastructure

Configure your environment, manage assemblies and sub-subassemblies, and apply corridor settings consistently across your projects with Naviate Infrastructure for Civil 3D.

Civil 3D offers great functionality, but one area it’s cutting short is to manage your organisations content for corridor modelling. You can create your own catalogues for Pipe Networks and Pressure Pipe Networks, and manage styles, but the same cannot be said for assemblies and sub-assemblies.

With Naviate Infrastructure for Civil 3D, you can easily configure your environment to help users manage their assemblies and sub-assemblies and apply corridor settings consistently across your projects.

Naviate settings and content are stored in Naviate support files which is created on each users own computer in a public folder. To control standards for a particular project, you can create project support folders that will reside in your Data Shortcut project folder. This allows you to control project standards and global standards separately.

Sub-assemblies

To use sub-assemblies, you need to import them into Civil 3D. This results in them being added to a Tool Palette. With standard sub-assemblies, Country Kit sub-assemblies and perhaps any that you may have created yourself, you can end up with many tool-palette tabs. If you’re the CAD or BIM Manager then you can of course create tool palettes for your users that bring together the sub-assemblies you want them to use, but this all needs managing and distributing, adding to the management overhead.

With Naviate, you get a simple solution for making collections of sub-assemblies available to your users. The sub-assemblies still need to be imported, but you can group the sub-assemblies that you want users to utilise in a Civil 3D drawing. You can place the drawing in the support folder, your project folder, or any other library folder location.
Using the Naviate Insert Subassembly command, you can select the library .dwg file, and then choose from a list of available sub-assemblies. The sub-assembly can then be inserted, replace an existing sub-assembly, or update a sub-assembly to reset the sub-assembly parameters. It’s simple to use and a great way to make it easy to keep to the approved sub-assemblies for a project.

Assemblies

Naviate can also manage published assemblies. If you have a project with requirements of certain standards of construction, you can ensure that you and your team keep to the guidelines by creating the assemblies that are required in advance, and then publish them.

The Naviate Export/Publish Assembly command to publish an assembly makes a new version and revision control to the assembly. You can publish the assembly drawing to either the standard support folder, or to a project support folder.

Use the Publish in Drawing when you are editing an assembly drawing you’ve already created, and Publish in Folder is used to write an assembly out of your current drawing to a new library drawing.

For every time you publish, the version number is incremented. You can also increment the revision number when required. The version is typically incremented when a change is made to the parameters of an assembly, whereas a revision is incremented when changes are made to the construction of the assembly (adding or removing sub-assemblies).

When you import an assembly using Naviate, property data saved on the assembly records the version number, revision number and the path to the assembly.

This information allows you to check whether you have the latest version of an approved assembly, using the Verify Inserted Assemblies command.

When you choose to update, the Import Assemblies dialog will be opened. Here you can review the revision information and select assemblies to update. The corridor can be automatically edited to include the revised assemblies, which is useful when you may have renamed the assembly in the drawing. You can also opt to check all assemblies automatically when a drawing file is opened.

This feature is invaluable for ensuring that all your models are created to the correct standards for a client or a unique project.

Corridor Settings

One of the features I like the most, and that I think is a huge time-saver, is Import Corridor Settings.

When you are modelling your corridors, you generally choose a corridor Code Set Style that shows you the feature lines and the links. This way you can see how the corridor is constructed. Making constantly new changes to the corridor, it helps to keep the insertion frequency large since it reduces the time to rebuild the corridors and will help you to work faster. Once you’ve finished all of your edits you need to make the corridor presentable for use on your construction drawings. This means increasing the frequency, applying, and probably editing a code-set style to show the detail you need, and applying slope patterns for your embankments. All of this takes time, and if you’ve got multiple corridors to edit, it can be very tedious – especially if you’ve got to add slope patterns to all the regions. Let’s not forget that you may also need to create corridor top and formation surfaces.

In the example above, the corridor is shown using styles for editing. Using the Import Corridor Settings command, you can update your corridor to match the settings saved on a corridor in a library drawing. You can have multiple examples of corridor settings, saved in one or more drawing files, and these can be stored in the support folder or the project support folder.
The image below shows an example corridor saved in the project support folder, that has insertion frequency, code-set styles, corridor surfaces and slope patterns defined. Using this template, we can update any corridor in our drawing.

You can choose what you would like to include and save the settings for future usage in the Setup dialogue.
From the example in this blog post, with the new settings the design corridor now looks like this.

The best part for me is I don’t have to pick lots of feature lines to get the slope symbols on the corridor. What a result.

Want to know more?

• Download a free trial of Naviate for Civil 3D here