Creating Section Views from Sample Lines in Civil 3D: A Step-by-Step Guide

So in this video, we're going to go ahead and take those sample lines that we created and start creating section views. So to do that, what we're going to go ahead and do is navigate up to the home tab of the ribbon bar.

We're going to go to our profile and section views section of that part of the ribbon bar, and then we're going to go to this section views dropdown. So inside of the section views dropdown, you're going to notice it looks very similar to our profile views dropdown. We had create profile view, create multiple profile view, and then project objects and add crossings to our profile view.

Same thing for section views. We can create multiple views, create section views, project objects to multiple section views, project objects to section view. So similar, not quite the same.

The reason why we have it flip flopped here for create multiple profile views and create profile view is that it's more common to create a single profile view than it is to create multiple profile views. In section views, it's more common to create multiple views rather than creating a single section view. And that's simply because more often than not, you're going to create a sample line group and you want to create sections views for all of those groups.

Only in a rare instance would you be creating a single section sample line and then creating a single section view. So what we're going to go ahead and do is create multiple views. So once I've selected the create multiple views option from the section views dropdown, we get this create multiple section views window.

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And just like we did in our profile views window, we're going to march through many different options. We're going to go ahead and start in the general. We have which alignment these section views are associated with.

And so since we are creating these sample lines from dev branch, it auto selected dev branch as our alignment. We only have one sample line group. So that's also why dev branch shows up here in the selected alignment, because we only have one sample line collection.

So moving on from here, we have the station range. You can either have automatic or user specified, which will specify the station ranges where you're going to pull your sample lines from. I'm OK with automatic because we set our station ranges based on a or our sample line station ranges based on a set type of station range that we wanted.

I don't need to exclude anything from here, so I'm OK with it starting at the beginning and ending at the end. It won't pull any section views that I'm not expecting to get. Then we have the options for what our section view names are going to be.

So section view station, it would give us a station and then a number based on what the next counter is. So I'm OK with that. So I'm going to move on to descriptions.

I'm not placing any descriptions. Then we have the layer for our section view. So C road section view is OK with me.

And then we have a section view style. So just like a profile view style, this is a view style for the section that we're going to be creating. So I'm going to go ahead and go in here and look at edit current selection.

So inside of here, just like in our profile views, we have all the different options of what our view style is going to look like. We'll look at this information in another video, but we're going to go ahead and just know that we could create a new one or we could edit our current selection or we can drop down and select any of these options that are currently in the drawing. I'm going to go ahead and go with road section.

So moving on from here, I'm going to go ahead and click next. Now we have the option for section placement. When you choose section placement, you can base your placement on production.

And if you have a sheet set up, then you can use that sheet set to create actual sheets for these section views. We have not talked about creating sheets yet, so I'm going to go ahead and do a draft setup. We're going to place these based on draft.

We're going to place the sections in a grid and model space and sheets cannot be created using this option. Now, that is a true statement in that it will not automatically create sheets, but these section views can then be used inside of a sheet by just creating a standard paper space drawing and using viewports and that kind of stuff. So don't let this concern you that it can't be used to create sheets.

Yes, you can put these into sheets. It just won't do it automatically for you. So moving on from here, this is the group plot style.

So this is how it's going to drop the section views into your drawing. So I'm going to go ahead here and go here and go to edit current section. So from here, the options are the name, who created it, description, then we have array.

So this is how Civil 3D is going to place these into your drawing. We can do it by rows or by columns, and then you pick the start corner. So same thing here.

These don't change if you change it to by columns or by rows. And this preview gives you an idea of how it's going to be built. So starting here, going across, and then going up.

So that's how this would be built. So starting corner, lower left, and it highlights when I hover over this, and you have options for lower and upper left, lower and upper right. So I'm going to leave it as lower left.

Then we have align section views about, and we have left, center line, right. I'm going to leave it as center line. Then you have cell sizes.

So you can have it uniform for all or uniform per row or column. So this is how you're sizing your cells. I'm going to go ahead and leave it per row or column.

Then we have the options for our spacing between adjacent section views. So columns have certain amount of spacing, rows have a certain amount of spacing. Then you can add drafting buffer size to space between views.

So this is just adding extra buffer in between each individual section view. So moving on from here, we have plot area. So this is the information for your grids.

So how you're going to grid these things out, what the sizing on those grids are, and then what the gap between successive pages. So this is if you were creating individual sheet sets, we're not doing that because we're doing draft mode. So this plot area doesn't matter as much for us.

So then we go on to display mode. We only have plan view, and you can add the options for how you're gridding. So major and minor horizontal grid, major and minor vertical grids, print area, and sheet border.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave it as is, and then we go to the summary tab, which is the summary of the important information from the previous tabs. I'm going to go ahead and click okay, and then I'm going to click next. So once we click next, we have our offset range.

So you can set how you are offsetting in your section view. So this varies based on your sample line, or you can do user specified, say how wide of a section view you want to create. I'm going to go ahead and go automatic because we do have two sample lines that are much larger than the other ones, and so it will vary the size of our section view based on the swath widths of our sample lines.

So moving on, I'm going to click next. So here again is our elevation range. You can specify a user specified height, or you can go with automatic, and that will base it based on the surface that you have and the sampling that you have, the data samples that you have here.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave mine as automatic, and I'm going to click next. Then we have the section display options. So whether or not you're going to draw the data that you have sampled, if you want to clip grids, what label sets you want to add, and we'll talk about label sets later.

Then we have the options for the style, how you want to display the data that you're sampling, and then if you want to have any overrides. So I'm going to leave it as is and click next, and then again, like we had in our profile view windows, we have data bands for our section views, and so the same thing goes here. The data bands are going to pull certain information from our section views and place it in a bar underneath or on top of our section view.

I'm going to go ahead and leave it as bottom of section view, and then I have walked through all these, so I'm going to go ahead and click create section views. So Civil 3D is going to prompt me to set my view origin, and if I remember correctly, our bottom left corner is the origin for our section views. We would expect that the section views would be built upwards and outwards from the bottom left corner.

So I'm going to pick somewhere over here, and then I'm going to wait for Civil 3D to create my section views. And so when I zoom in here, you're going to see most of them are

Uniform size based on our 5050 swath width, but we do have two that are larger, and those are based on the custom created sample lines that we have, the ones that were by point and by polyline. Now that we've created these, I'm going to go ahead and click file, save, and then I'll meet you in the next video.