Corridor-EZY is an add-on to C3D that is very impressive. I haven’t gotten my hands on the full version to fully test it but I like what I see so far.

The product is from our friends down under at CadAPPS. You can download the Lite version (aka, limited demo) from their Civil 3D tools website here.

The software really excels at road design as it tracks intersecting alignments, automates vertical design and intersections. This is what initially caught my eye. They had a demo a year or two ago that showed C-EZY grading 40 intersections in seconds. The software does have this capability and it is very impressive.

The software creates an alignment and profile for each rounding and automatically designs the rounding with a vertical curve based on grade in/out inserting the appropriate high/low point. A huge time saver.

There are other features as well. I’ll explore them in a full review in the future.

I look forward to seeing more Civil 3D Tools from CadAPPS.

The FILEDIA variable has a tendency of being set to zero when Civil 3D crashes. This results in your file open options being displayed on your command line. A major annoyance. This topic has been posted on the discussion groups several times. One solution is to place the following line in an acaddoc.lsp file in you civil 3d support directory.

(setvar “filedia” 1)

If you don’t have an acaddoc.lsp file you can create your own in notepad and save it in your support directory. Or right-click and save as the file here.

The acaddoc.lsp file is run by autocad when you open a new file. The line you added will set FILEDIA to 1 preventing the dialogs from being disabled.

If you haven’t stumbled upon David Garrigues’s Double and Right-Click CUI available on the Autodesk Civil Engineering Community page you are missing out. David has customized the CUI allow the user to interact with Civil3D Objects via double-clicks and right-click menus. This falls into our Must Have Category. Once you try it you won’t be able to use C3D without it.

Here’s David’s summary of the customization:

“Did you ever wish that if you double clicked on a Civil 3D Object you would get the appropriate Properties Dialog box for that Object? Of course and what if you right clicked on a Civil 3D Object did you wish you had more appropriate options in your right click menu? Of course you did so here it is just as it was presented at AU this year in my class called Civil 3D Grading: It’s Not a Slippery Slope.”

Check out his post on the Civil Engineering Community page here. (You’ll have to login to view this page, you can use your login for the Autodesk Discussion Group)

You can also further customize the right-click/double-click functionality. We’ll build on this in our next post.

Add civil3dblog.com to your favorite RSS feeds now so you don’t miss out on any posts.