From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

Sites, alignments, and alignment types - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

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Sites, alignments, and alignment types

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- [Narrator] Before we get into creating alignment let's take a brief look and see what kind of alignment types there are and what alignment associations exist between alignments and Site or containers in Civil 3D. Let's go ahead and open up our exercise file for this video. And I'm in chapter six of our exercise files and I'm going to choose 06_01_SiteAlignments and Types. Now to create an alignment we go from the Home Ribbon, Create Design panel in the middle top. Choose the Alignment and choose Alignment Creation Tools. Now notice all the many other ways to create alignments. Create alignments from existing objects, we're going to get it from a corridor. Create Alignment from Pipe Network, Parts and so on. We have a lot of other ways to create alignments. We're not going to be able to go through all of these in this course but majority of the time when we talk about alignments we really want to focus on the Alignment Creation Tools. And so we're going to go ahead and select that and we're going to walk through a little bit of this window about creating alignment. You have the name of the alignment and then you have the types. Now a lot of times we focus too much on what type of alignment am I creating. Unless you're creating a Rail Alignment Type where you have to deal with a Cant values, really doesn't make a difference. Civil 3D is simply needing to know what parameters need to be available to you. For Curb returns and other settings such as offsets, it stores that and automatically assigns the type for us when we choose to create these types of alignments using different tools. And if we're doing a Wall Alignment or some other Pipe Network Alignment, something similar to that where it's not really a center line, doesn't really matter that we do have parameters to enter super elevation values and design speeds. So what I really try to teach those learning Civil 3D, let the software define the type for us. If we're creating alignment using the Alignment by Layout tool let it be center line. Enter your description and your starting station and then notice an alignment can be or belong to a Site. Generally we have what are called Site List Alignments. They don't belong to a Site. A Site it not as you see here. But we could assign alignment to a Site. An alignment is horizontal geometry and so it will work very similar to Parcel Segments in defining enclosed spaces. So you want the alignment to help define your Parcels you'll place them in a Site. Generally speaking we wouldn't. We have our alignment style and we'll talk about Alignment Label Set later. And notice the layer is assigned, that again is coming from our settings, our drawing settings. And we have our Object Layer Settings in default layers there. There is another tab called design criteria. Now we're not going to be using design criteria a lot in this course. Design Criteria's really focused on those who are doing more road weight design and this course is really focused more on the simple, subdivision type roads, drives, that we might find. Even then we could use design criteria. Using the design speed we can check and say I want to use design criteria and then define the type of criteria that we're going to be using. There's two different types, a Criteria File, and a Design Check Set. Criteria File really gets into the AASHTO requirements for the US or if you have your state kit you'll have other settings that may be available to you. Maybe the British standards that you can select and it will read those values and you can work with those values and it will allow you still to design but give you a big exclamation point and tell you that you have broken this Design Criteria. We're not going to have that but maybe a simpler one with a subdivision is Design Check Set. So as you read the regulatory requirements it states that you can't have compound curves or that you have to have at least 100 feet of tangent between two curves, those are Design Checks. And you can build your own Design Check Set, it's part of the styles you could call them, or settings that are available per drawing. And you create these Design Check Sets and it will do the same thing. It will give you a big exclamation point if you've broken it. It'll allow you to break it, you are the engineer, you take responsibility for that but it will allow you to break it. We're not doing either one so I'm going to uncheck Use Any Criteria Based Design. And that's pretty much our description of that. So we didn't make any change here at all. In our next video we'll actually create an alignment and see how easy that is to do.

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