Creating a Design Profile for Existing Highway: Simple Method Tutorial

So in this video we're going to do a first very simple profile creation method. We're going to create a design profile for our existing highway.

Now normally what we would go ahead and do is we would take these points that we have associated with the center line and we could basically just say we're going to just only use this terrain profile based on those points. But as you can see, you know, these points kind of undulate and more than likely the road doesn't actually undulate like that. We're going to do our best approximation of that line, of that alignment by doing a simple single line profile through this profile view window.

So to do that, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go to the profile dropdown. We are going to go ahead and select profile creation tools. And from here, we're now going to be prompted to select the profile view to create a profile.

We're going to go ahead and select the profile view we want to work in, which is for our existing highway profile. We're going to select it and the create profile draw new window shows up. So from here, we have a note of what alignment we're associating this profile with, what that name of the new profile that we're going to be creating is called.

So profile type next counter. I don't necessarily like that because the type and the number doesn't do anything for me. So maybe we come in here and we say alignment name, profile type, and then next counter.

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We're only going to have one, so it'll only ever show one, but at least now we have information for what the alignment is that's associated with the profile, the profile type, and then if there was more than one. So I'm going to go ahead and add dashes in between these so that the text is separated. And then I'm going to go ahead and click okay.

So from here, I'm not going to write in a description. Again, just like in our alignments, we have two tabs. We have a general tab and a design criteria tab.

So inside of the design criteria tab, you can apply design criteria to your profile and civil 3D will look at that design criteria and tell you whether or not your profile meets or does not meet the design criteria that you've selected. I don't have any design criteria loaded up into civil 3D right now, so we are not going to be adding in design criteria. That's kind of a more advanced topic.

We're going to go ahead and just go back to the general tab. So inside of the general tab, we have the options for our profile style. So is it a design profile? Is it a layout? Is an intersection? For our design here, we are going to go ahead and go with design profile because we're creating a design profile to approximate what the existing profile looked like.

I don't want to select existing ground profile because we already have that existing ground profile here. So what we're going to go ahead and do next is we're going to make sure that our profile layer is correct, which see road proof is good. Then our profile label style for complete label set.

Since I know that this is going to be a very simple profile where we are just going from one end to the other in a straight line, I'm going to go ahead and actually do no labels and then I'm here. What civil 3D is doing is it has opened up the profile layout tools. Now, sometimes you can have an error like this that I'm having right now.

For whatever reason, civil 3D can get a little bit buggy in that the profile layout tool bar is completely grayed out when you open up your profile creation tools. When you have a problem like this, sometimes it's the simple fix for me has been to just save my drawing, close the window, and then reopen it. So I'm going to go ahead and click open.

I'm going to go ahead and click on a line and we should have in the past saved to proof because now we're working with profiles. So at the end of this video, we're going to do a save as, and we're going to save it as proof. So from here, we're going to open civ 202 align.

I'm going to go ahead and click open. Now I'm going to navigate over into my tool space. I'm going to go to my alignments.

I'm going to go to center line alignments. I'm going to go to existing highway. I'm going to go to profiles.

And what you'll notice here is that I have this X highway layout one. That was the profile that I was trying to create when I went into this. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is right-click.

I'm going to select delete, and it's going to say, are you sure you wish to delete X highway layout one? I'm going to say, yes. So then from here, I didn't have to delete that. I could have just created a new one, but I'm trying to clean up as I go.

So I'm going to go ahead and go to profile. I'm going to go ahead and select profile creation tools. I'm going to pick my window again, and then I am going to go ahead and erase these out.

I'm going to go into this window. I'm going to choose alignment name dash profile type dash next counter and select. Okay.

From here, I should make sure my starting number is one of my increment value is one. Hopefully it will give me a one here instead of a two, but we'll deal with that if we have to from there, we're going to go ahead and have design profile, C road pro no labels. I'm going to click.

Okay. And it should not be great out now. So as you can see now, these aren't great out.