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Typically, when creating a roadway corridor, you would use out of the box subassemblies or those you have prepared overtime to meet your corridor needs. Given time, energy and knowledge, you can use the powerful “Subassembly Composer” to generate these complicated subassemblies, however, this is not what will be discussed in this blog.

We will discuss the quick, down and dirty method that hopefully gets you the results you need when you want them. You will not get Subassembly Composer’s complex parameters or detailed components using the methods shown, but you will be able to create a subassembly from a simple polyline.

Creating the Subassemblies

This process is designed to be simple. Simply use the polyline command to create a joined closed loop that is the side view of your subassembly. At this point, consider where you want your insertion point in your roadway assembly to connect along the subassembly and provide a vertex at this location on the subassembly. This will be used later in the process.

Figure 1

Refer to Figure 1: Now with the Workset in “Civil 3D” mode, select the “Home” tab off the ribbon selection menu and then select the pull-down menu tab “Create Design” located at the bottom of the ribbon. This displays a series of commands. The command we are looking for is “Create Subassembly from Polyline.” This should be the second command down on the left.

After selecting this command, you need to click on the polyline that will become your subassembly. This causes the display box “Create Subassembly – From Polyline” shown in figure 2, to open on your screen.

Once you finish entering information into the display box and click ok, this converts the polyline the base subassembly as shown in figure 4. Currently, it is composed using its uncoded link name for its unit component parts.

Figure 2

Refer to Figure 2: The following is provided in the display box “Create Subassembly-From Polyline”:

  • Top: Assign the subassembly its name.
  • There is an optional space provided for a description of the subassembly.
  • Below this follows the “Code set styles” with a selection of code style options to choose from. You can also “Create New,” “Copy Current” or “Edit Current.”
  • Next, you can select the “Subassembly layer” or go with the standard layer.
  • Conversion Options
    1. Set the Mid-ordinate distance.
    2. Link creation: Options None, Single, Multiple
  • The option to Erase existing entities

When you finish selecting the options in the display box, click ok. This is the first part to creating a subassembly, but we’re not done yet. When you select your subassembly, you will see that a new subassembly specific ribbon will appear above (See Figure 3). This ribbon gives you access to add, modify and change your assembly, but for now we are going to skip over most of this and work on finishing the example.

In figure 2, selecting Multiple under “Link creation” allows us to select each segment and point in the subassembly separately. Now, we need to define these points and segments through the command “Add Code.”  This provides user-defined character strings such as “Barrier, Top of Wall, Back of Wall, etc.” for use in defining these points and segments. You will need to limit these to existing codes already defined in the corridor or import a custom code set style containing these codes into your corridor if they are going to function.

Figure 3

Refer to Figure 3: Now, select your insertion point. Simply select the modify origin command from the custom ribbon and select the point you created earlier to use as your modified origin. Then “Add Shape” to the subassembly. Select the subassembly and click “Add Shape” from the custom ribbon. Once complete, add this new subassembly to your corridor. Select “Add to Assembly” from the custom ribbon and you will be prompted to select the location on your assembly you wish to add your new subassembly. Simply select it.

Figure 4

Now that the new subassembly is a part of your corridor assembly, open “Prospector.” Here you are prompted to rebuild your corridor. Then you’re done!

Conclusion

Subassemblies can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make them.  With a little practice of the above workflows, you can quickly create the simple custom subassemblies you want without using out-of-the-box premade subassemblies or having diving into the more complex Subassembly Composer, which has a steep learning curve. 

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This blog is written by Civil Technical Specialist Glenn Houck. If you have any questions or need help with your AutoCAD or Civil needs, please email us at whyATG@atgusa.com.

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