Alignments, Offset Alignments, and Profiles From Polylines

Do you design parking lots in Civil 3D? Are you looking for possibly a better way. Well I’m not quite sure if this is the bestest way, but here is a workflow that I heard from Joe Bouza. It’s a way to utilize surfaces, alignments, profiles, and autofeature lines to model curbs and gutters for a parking lot from a grading surface.

The first step is to create a baseline featureline(s) and then create grading from them representing how you want the parking lot to be graded.

Next create a surface from those gradings or feature lines.

Create surfaces for the lip, flowline, top of curb, and if necessary back of curb. Then paste your previously created surface into it. Then adjust the surfaces the correct elevations to get the distances required to model the appropriate location on the curb and gutter.

Next you can create alignments, offset alignments, and profiles for each of your curb islands. The profiles should be created on the appropriate alignment, or offset alignments. This may be a laborious step which may be reduced greatly by using a command in the SincPac called CreateAlignmentsFromPolylines. The comand will create the source alignment plus up to 3 offset alignments and profiles.

Make sure the polylines are going in the correct direction to create the appropriate offsets. Sometimes it will go the opposite way that we want. Don’t forget about the reverse command on the Modify tab to quickly reverse the polylines.

Next create autofeaturelines from the alignments and profiles. Utilize the profiles from surface for the appropriate surface.

Then add those autofeaturelines to a surface to model the parking lot.

The benefit of this method is that any changes to the original surface will be propogated through to the autofeaturelines. This makes it easier, once set up, then adjusting a bunch of regular feature lines.