Drive Tool in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011

by Trevor Clayton

I have had a few requests on how to make the most of the "drive" tool contained on the visibility check menu, the best way to start is to build your corridor as normal, create a surface to the top layer of the corridor, you can then use the border of the surface corridor to cut a hole in the existing ground surface, once you have extracted the border, turn off or delete the Corridor surface.

The next thing to do is to turn all the labels off within the drawing, this is done by simply selecting the Settings Tab on the Toolspace right click on the drawing title and select "label style defaults".

Change the label visibility to false.

You can then place any multiview blocks i.e. cars etc to make it look a bit better.

Navigate to the Analysis Ribbon, select the drive tool from the dropdown, and change the visual style to realistic, also set the your eye height and offset, travel speed, a quick tip if you want to see the pipes put a negative number in the eye height so it will take you below ground level.

I have only used the horizontal and vertical design for my path but you could easily use a 3d polyline instead.

Unfortunately there is no quick way to get an AVI out from this, however, I use Camtasia to record the screen, or you could just set up a normal AutoCAD camera to get a reasonable output from the drive through.