Creating Section Views for Corridors: Sample Lines in Civil 3D

In this video, we're going to go ahead and start talking about creating section views for the corridors that we've created. In order to create section views, the first thing that we have to do is create these objects inside of Silhouette 3D called sample lines.

So before we go ahead and create sample lines, we're going to go ahead and do a little bit of housekeeping in our corridors dropdown here in our tool space. I'm going to go ahead and expand out corridors. I'm going to go to the names of my different corridors here.

And as you'll note, I have ones named corridor two and corridor three. The rest of these are named very well. I know which ones they are, but I want to go ahead and change the names of these so that they match what they are better than the name that was given.

So I'm going to go ahead and right-click on quarter two and hit select so that I can see which one it is. So I can see that this is my highway and my main alignment intersection. So I'm going to go ahead and right-click select properties.

I'm going to go to information tab. I'm going to change the name to int highway main, and I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. And then I'm going to go into here and the corridor three.

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I'm going to assume that it's this intersection, but what you can do is you can right-click select. So yes, it is that intersection. So I'm going to go ahead and select corridor three, right-click select properties.

I'm going to go to the information tab. I'm going to type in int main branch, and I'm going to hit apply and hit okay. And this is important because when we create our sample lines, we are going to tell civil three what pieces of information we want to sample when creating our section views.

And so if you don't have things named properly, it's going to be hard to know what you're actually sampling. So from here, we're going to go ahead and create these sample lines now. We're going to navigate up to the sample lines button here in the main tab of the ribbon bar underneath the profile and section views.

We're going to select sample lines. And what civil 3D is going to do is ask us to select the alignment that we want to create these sample lines along. I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER to bring up a list of all of the alignments in the drawing.

I'm going to be creating sample lines for our dev branch alignment. So I'm going to go ahead and select dev branch and select. Okay.

Now civil 3D gives us this create sample line group window. Inside of here, we have how to name the sample line group. We have the description of the sample line group, the alignment that's associated with this sample line group.

We have the sample line style, which you can drop down and select any version of a line style for your sample lines. That's in the current drawing, or you can navigate over to this dropdown and you can create a new one or edit any of the ones that are currently in the

drawing. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as road sample line, uh, same here, sample line, label style.

You can drop down and select any of the label styles. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as section name. If you wanted to create a new one, we could go ahead and go here and create new.

Otherwise, if you wanted to apply these later, we can use the properties of the sample line group and change the sample line style or the sample, the sample and style or the sample line label style. And we can go ahead and create new versions of these in our settings tab. So next we have the sample line layer, which is C road stamp.

You can select this button to pick a new layer. I'm good with it being on this layer. And then we have down here, the data sources to sample.

So down here, we have the two intersections that we renamed. We're going to go ahead and leave the int main branch selected because it's part of our branch alignment. We're going to go ahead and leave Civ 202 checked, and we're going to go ahead and leave dev branch checked.

And what Civil 3D has done here is it has basically checked the objects that are associated with this alignment. Apparently, my drawing has a network in here that's associated with my branch alignment. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that, and then I'm going to go ahead and select okay.

Now that I've selected okay, Civil 3D is allowing me to work inside of this sample line tools bar. So inside of the sample line tools bar, we have the how it's going to name each individual sample line. And you can click here to change how you're going to name it based on the naming template.

You have the button for which alignment you are picking from. Then we have our sample line group. So you can go ahead and create a sample line group, edit the current group, delete the current group, and then you can select a group from a drawing if you have a different sample line group that you want to work with.

You can edit your swath width. And so what your swath widths are is how wide your sample lines are going on either side of the alignment. And then you have the option for sampling more sources.

So adding more sources to what you're sampling from. If I go to my edit group defaults, what you're going to see is that we're back into this window for what we're selecting and how we're displaying these sample lines. If when you had that window open, you didn't select something that you wanted to select, this is your options now.

So I'm going to go ahead and click okay here. And what we're going to actually do is we're going to go to creating these sample lines. If we drop down here, you're going to note that there are multiple ways to create sample lines.

The first one we're going to use is by range of stations. So by range of stations basically means we're going to pick the beginning point of where we're going to sample from. And then we're going to pick the end point of where we're going to sample from.

And then we're going to specify how often we want to sample in and certain options like that. The other options you have are at station. So you will pick a single station to place a sample line at.

You can have from corridor stations. So your corridors are built using specific pieces. And so you can use those certain sampling points to create sample lines from your corridor.

Then you have options for pick points on screen. So you can pick different points and create a sample line based on the two points that you click on inside of the drawing. Then we have the option for selecting existing polylines.

So you can actually draw a polyline of where you want to sample from, then select that polyline and create a sample line from there. So first I'm going to go ahead and select by a range of stations. Now what civil 3D is going to do is bring up a window for creating sample lines by station range.

So what we're going to go ahead and do here is we're going to specify the station ranges. So from alignment start to alignment end, if you're set to true, civil 3D will pick out the beginning point of your alignment and the end point of your alignment. I don't want to pick the beginning point in the end point because my beginning point is in the middle of my main brand or my main alignment.

So I'm going to go ahead and select this as false. And then same thing with end. My end is inside of this other quarter down here that I'm not actually sampling from.

So I'm going to go ahead and select false. So from here I have the start station and end station. I'm going to go ahead and click inside the start station.

Click on this button here to be able to pick on screen. Then I'm going to go ahead and navigate somewhere up in here. I'm going to sample from this point here.

Then I'm going to go ahead and go to end station. I'm going to pick on this button here. Then I'm going to select my end station.

I'm going to go ahead and come down here and pick somewhere here. Now I am picking from start station of 0 plus 37 15 and ending at 929. So from here, now we have the options for how we want to choose our swath widths.

So what we talked about is we have options for how far out we want to sample. And so whether or not we choose to snap to an alignment. So this would basically cut off your swath width at a certain alignment.

We don't want to do that in this instance here. We're going to go ahead and leave this as false. So left and right is based on the direction of your alignment.

So our alignment was built from the intersection to this end here. So left is based on if you were driving along that alignment, left will be to this side, right will be to this side. We're going to go ahead and go a left swath width.

I'm going to go ahead and leave it as 50. And then same thing with my right swath width, I'm going to go ahead and leave this also as 50. Now moving on to our sampling increments, you can use sampling increments true or false.

If we say false, you don't do any of the increments if you set to true, you use these increments that are set here. So increment relative to absolute station or station range start. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my absolute station.

So it's something, so our start is 37.15. If we did related to our start, then it would go 50 feet or whatever our sampling station increment is. So 50 feet, 50 feet, 50 feet. Those would all be based on this 37.15. I want to go ahead and use an absolute station so that these are locked in at a specific station rather than a decimal point of a station.

So I'm going to go ahead and go with increments along tangents. I'm going to go every 25 feet. And then along curves, I'm going to go ahead and also say every 25 feet.

And then I don't have any spirals. So it really doesn't matter. I'm going to go ahead and leave this as 50.

So moving on from here, additional sampling controls. You can sample at your range start, at your range end. So it's either true or false.

And then the same thing with horizontal geometry points. So beginning of curves, end of curves, beginning of spiral, end of spiral, points of inflection, those kinds of things. So you can either set it to true or false.

I'm going to go ahead and leave it as false. And then same thing with super elevation critical stations. We didn't create super elevations for this.

We're not going to have any super elevation critical stations. So I'm going to go ahead and leave it as false. And then I'm going to click okay.

So once I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and hit escape. And what you're going to notice is that Civil 3D has created our sample lines starting from a point 50 feet from our beginning point, but it didn't create anything prior to that because we said our start was at 37.15. And then it comes all the way down here to our nine plus 25. And it didn't create any past our ending point that we selected as our end station.

Now that we've created these sample lines, we're going to go ahead and save our drawing, but we're not going to do a quick save. We're going to go ahead and go file, save as. I'm going to save it to my working folder.

I'm going to go ahead and change this from Civ 202 core to Civ 202 sect for sections. And I'm going to go ahead and click save. And then I'll meet you in the next video.