Wednesday, 18 December 2013
How to Hatch a Corridor
This is another one of those things that is easy to do in Civil 3D when you
are shown how. From experience I know a lot of people aren't aware that it
can be done or think that it is difficult to do. The result is that a lot of
people are exporting Civil 3D models to AutoCAD and hatching manually
(madness!).
The code set style is what is used to control the appearance of your
corridor in Civil 3D. It is a pretty big style and can look intimidating at first
(it controls display in plan, section and 3D views, as well as labelling). This
has been the most common thing that I have been asked from users in
relation to corridor appearance - how to hatch a corridor in plan, Here's my
corridor before, not exactly jumping off the page:
Select your corridor and go to Corridor properties on the ribbon. On the
codes tab you will see the current code set style in use (3D Render Basic
Plan in this case), we want to create a new one as below:
Before you create the new code set style, take a minute to look at the
some of the ones currently available. You will notice that the style itself is
broken down into Links, Points and Shapes - see image above, These L, P &
S come from the subassembly you are using. Without digging into that too
much, basically the L,P & S are parts of your subassembly. Points are joined
by links and shapes are bound by links in your subassemblies. See below:When we want to style our corridor in a particular way it is these elements
of the subassembly in the corridor that we are styling effectively. When you
create a new code set style you will see that the L, P &S are empty:
The quickest way to populate these to suit what is in your
subassembly/corridor is to click Import Codes at the bottom of the dialog
box and browse to your subassembly in your drawing and select it. You can
then assign styles to the L,P & S, see below:
To hatch to corridor in plan we are only interested in links, and only in the
Material Area Fill Style section. I am using the UKIE drawing template andpicking some of the styles from that and assigning them to particular links in
my corridor. Note that the Top link is generally common to most
subassemblies so applying a style to this will ikely colour your corridor all
the one colour so best not to use it, If you are having trouble figuring out
which link you should be applying a style to then hover (‘hoover’ if you are
Dutch! ;)) over that link in your corridor and you will find the name of it in
the tooltip that appears.
If you are not showing links in your corridor you can find the code by
selecting your subassembly, right click and select properties and find the
Top Link Code name as below: