The Corridor Twilight Zone

One of my colleagues, Malcolm Fernandez, ran into an interesting (in a disasterous sort of way) problem with Civil 3D 2010.

If you are working in the Corridor Section Editor, and you save your drawing while in the editor, there are a couple of things that might happen, depending on what you do next.  If you immediately close the drawing while the editor is active or close the drawing after closing the editor but without saving the drawing again, your drawing will exist in a twilight zone the next time you open it.  You will see only the corridor section you were working on: all of the other Civil 3D objects will have disappeared.  If you save your drawing again after closing the editor, everything should be OK.

Being a big fan of twilight zones, I thought I would look into this and see if I could find any more doors into this other dimension.  If you look closely at your otherworldly drawing, you will see that the view direction in the drawing is now not the plan view.  Setting it to plan view may restore a couple of contours in your once visible surface, plus a few other lines and bits of objects.  You're not likely to see any assemblies, profiles, or alignments.  I even tried to drag an assembly off of the tool palette.  That didn't show up either, even though it was listed in the Prospector.  So, where are all your objects?  Actually, they're still in the drawing, albeit hidden in the twilight zone.  If, for example, you select an assembly from the Prospector, you will see the grips for that assembly.  Nothing else in the assembly shows up and you can't select any of the grips.  If you select what remains of your surface and then look at it in the Object Viewer, you will see some of it, although it seems to be sliced by and partially hidden behind an invisible plane.  Very strange!

Can you recover any of these objects from this other universe?  Well, anything that can be exported by LandXML will export correctly, so you can save things like surfaces, alignments and profiles, pipe netwoks and parcels.  I'm afraid the assemblies will remain in limbo.  There just doesn't seem to be a way to recover them.

Stay tuned for the next episode.  We may yet find a way to bring these objects back to our own dimension and relinquish the Section Editor's power over them.

So, be careful, or you may find your drawing in the Twilight Zone!

Comments

[Christopher]

Here's how to get out of the Twilight Zone : http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2009/11/corridor-section-editor-problem.html