Lately, I’ve been seeing quite a few questions on the Civil 3D discussion group regarding volumes and quantities. Volumes can be pretty straightforward, but individual material quantities can be a bit more in-depth. Following the link will hopefully illustrate this process a bit better.

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No, this isn’t some kind of weird SPAM post or hack or anything. This is, in fact, a genuine Civil 3D article. Actually, it’s a little pun regarding the upcoming Autodesk University in Las Vegas. You know…The Strip. I had to throw in the obvious definition for Jason’s sake

I’ve been plagued recently with people asking how to calculate stripping using a corridor. They know the old standby method, you know the one; copy your OG surface and drop it by the depth of material to be stripped and then calculate cut and fill to this new surface. It works, but this way is cooler.

Let’s see how we can handle stripping in a corridor, shall we?

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I’ve had people request a way to put volume labels on a section view before, but I had no really good way to do it. I thought that I had heard some rumblings in Manchester about being able to do that in Civil 3D 2008, but quickly glanced at it and forgot about it when I couldn’t find an easy way to do it. This morning on my drive in, sections were really on my mind for some reason, and I remembered wanting to be able to add the volume labels. So, I asked my good pal Nick Zeeben if it was there - he told me that it was, and where to find it. He even let me in on the secret, which I’ll let you people know in a few minutes. So, if you think you’d like to see a section view that has the information shown in the image below, click more to see how it’s done.

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I’ve been putting this off for weeks for varying reasons, but the main reason is because I think I suffer from adult-onset ADD. I am so busy when I finally do get a day or two to spend in the office that I get VERY distracted VERY easily. So yesterday, as I’m on the phone with a reader of this site, I’m browsing some of the other blogs out there (see, I told you I get distracted), and came across Angel’s latest post regarding a program from our friends across the pond at CADApps. Believe it or not, there’s a reason we look to alternatives for intersection design - Civil 3D lacks any automation tools for the process. The whole process is tedious.

So, if you’ve read Angel’s post, you now have seen his reaction to CADApps’ program. Now, click more to see my alternative (guess you can’t figure out where this is going…)

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There are some questions I get almost every day and I never have good answers or even resources to find those answers.

Today our very own Mark Scacco emails me a list of articles he has written over the past year or so for industry magazines POB ( http://www.pobonline.com/)  and Site Prep (http://www.siteprepmag.com/) , and I found that each one of them hit the spot.  See links below to download your own copy of each article.
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Tonites post is a result of some work I was doing the other day. I was trying out the brand new corridor volume tables. I was a little confused by some of my results so I thought I would pass along what I learned. Basically what happens is this: the volume table is dynamic all the time. What do I mean by that? Well my montage of images should paint the picture. If you have a corridor model that is not set to automatically rebuild(Like me because I can’t stand waiting all the time for rebuilds). Anyways on with the show.

In this first image you can see the corridor volumes and the model.

The second image shows the alignment having been moved, the out of date corridor in prospector and the new volume numbers. When I saw this some alarm bells went off in my head, the corridor isnt rebuilt but the volume table is showing new numbers, wrong numbers! What I was able to deduce is when we move the alignment the sample lines move with it, and update based on their new postion within the corridor surface. The problem is the corridor needs to be rebuilt. Now those folks in manchester do have the event viewer pop up and warn us with the message that the corridor is out of date, but I got a little tired of the event viewer myself and set mine not to pop up so I missed out on the warning.

Last screen shot. In this one you can see the volumes have changed again, the corridor has been rebuilt. Everything is back to being correct. So what was the point of all this rambling? Make sure you rebuild your corridor while making volume edits.