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Michael Kinnear/2 min read

Dealing with Corridor Bow Ties in Civil 3D: Clearing and Restoring.

Civil 3D Workflow

1

Build the Surface

Import survey data, generate contours, edit breaklines.

2

Create Alignments

Horizontal geometry for the design centerline.

3

Design Profile

Vertical curves and grades along the alignment.

4

Generate Corridor

Combine alignment + profile + assembly = 3D corridor model.

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This Civil 3D tutorial walks through dealing with corridor bow ties in civil 3d: clearing and restoring., covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we're going to cover a real quick topic. We don't actually have any of these objects inside of our drawing, so we're not going to create them to clear them, but there is an important object that you're going to deal with if you deal with corridors quite often, and that is the idea of these objects called bow ties.

What bow ties are inside Civil 3D is they are often found in corners when you're doing a corridor. If you have a large amount of fill or cut and these assemblies end up crossing each other—so if these were to come out to a point out here and they extended out—this one may end up crossing one of these guys, and what you get is this thing that looks kind of like a bow tie. It fans in to a singular point, and then it fans back outwards and creates this kind of strange artifact in Civil 3D.

And so the way to clear out those bow ties and those artifacts that you have is you can go ahead and select a corridor, and then up here in Corridor Tools, you have this option here for Clear Corridor Bowties or Restore Corridor Bowties. If you have a crossing—and you can kind of see it in the icon for it—is that you have these radial lines that come from the corners and they cross, and then they fan out past that intersection point. So to clear bow ties, you go ahead and you select Clear Bowties, and then you can select the region where the bow ties take place, and Civil 3D will clear those out for you.

Now if for some reason you wanted to restore those overlapping corridor links, you can do that by clicking on Restore Corridor Bowties. We could cause them to happen by raising up this profile, but I don't want to mess with my design because I like how it is. We're going to go ahead and just leave it as is, and I'll meet you in the next video.