Corridor boundary

[kwdsku]

I am trying to create a boundary for my corridor surface. The help file states that I can RC on the corridor surface (on the Boundary tab) and click "Add Automatic-Daylight". When I RC, all I get is "Add Interactively", where I have to pick the daylight lines individually. Big problem is I have a 3/4 mile stretch of road, with numerous intersections and about 18 baselines with assemblies. The result of picking individually is a boundary that crosses itself many times over, and no clue on how to correct it. Am I missing a menu setting that would give me the "Add Automatic" selection?

[danny.counts]

it forces the add interactively when you have more than one baseline in the corridor. The add interactively then allows you to assign the boundary in a specific order which is necessary to get it set correctly. Even so, sometimes it doesn't work properly. Under the boundaries tab, you will see a definitions column that will allow you to reorder the boundary.

As an alternative, it can be much easier to export the corridor to a surface without a boundary at all and then display the surface as TIN lines and remove the TIN lines outside the daylight. Works well.

[kwdsku]

Thanks for your help. I appreciate the response.

I have figured out the concept of the 'Add Interactively', but like you said, it doesn't always work properly (in my case it has never worked). It seems that I should be able to select my boundary based on the station of the alignments. The problem I get is that it will let me select the stations, but as I move down to corridor to add more boundaries, the stations I selected reset themselves to the beginning and ending station. Then I can't figure out which one need to be changed, in what order, or where I left off.

Exporting the surface to a TIN did work, but I lose the dynamic update aspect with that. If I knew my corridor was absolutely final, I'd be happy with that as a work around, but I know things will be changing once the engineer get ahold of it.

I drew a polyline representing the daylight. I'm looking for a way to use this as a boundary (like being able to cookie-cutter the corridor).

[danny.counts]

Considering that exporting the surface and trimming the lines is the only solution sometimes, I am content with it.

What about not creating a corridor surface at all until it is final? If you are not in need of earthwork, you can save this process for later.

For creating the polyline boundary, try using Corridors-->Export-->Corridor Feature Line as Polyline. This will give you the polylines along the daylight. You will then have to join them up which can be challenging with 3D Polys. You might be able to find a 3rd party app, but I use the Join 3D Polyline tool in Land Desktop under the Terrain menu. Then export your corridor to a surface and add the 3d poly as the boundary to your surface. It is a good alternative as well.

[tscheevel]

For this to work you need C3D 2006 with SP1. When you have to add the same feature line several times (eg: the daylight line on a mainline with several side road intersections), don't set the station limits of any of the segments until you have all of them selected. As you have seen, when you add a second segment, you lose the limits you set on the previous ones.
Once you have all segments added, and station ranges specified, you will have to check the box under "Reverse Direction" on some of the segments. It's hard to explain in a post like this but here goes.
Imagine that you are walking along the daylight line as you are adding the feature lines interactively. If you are walking in the direction of the stationing, don't check the "Reverse Direction" box. If you are walking opposite the stationing, check it. You will keep getting criss-crossing boundaries until you get this right.
Once you have a well formed boundary, you will have to change the boundary type to outside boundary because the default type is "Render Only".
It's frustrating at first, but once you get it right a couple of times it gets easy.
I'll attach a quick and dirty tutorial that I did the other day. It's a zip file with a drawing and instructions in a MSWord document. I Have no experience making zip files so I hope it works.