Learn the intricacies of creating and splitting profiles using the quick profile creation tool in Civil 3D. This article provides a step-by-step approach to create a profile, set the elevation parameters, split the profile view, and adjust the view window size.
Key Insights
- The quick profile creation tool in Civil 3D is an efficient resource to create and manage profiles. The process involves selecting a profile, typing 'p' for points, and selecting a reference point.
- Splitting the profile view is a useful practice when dealing with profiles that have a lot of vertical relief. The elevation tab in the profile view properties window facilitates the split profile view process by allowing the user to specify the height and the datum points.
- Adjusting the view window size is accomplished through the profile view properties. After splitting the profile, if a view window of specific size is required, the height of the view window can be changed in the profile view properties.
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In this video we're going to go ahead and use our quick profile creation tool to create a profile that we're then going to go ahead and use the split profile view on. So to do that we're going to go ahead and select a profile, do the quick profile command, we're going to go ahead and type p for points, and then we're going to select a point somewhere up I'm going to turn off my snaps.
I'm going to click and then I'm going to pick somewhere down here and click and then I'm going to hit ENTER. Civil 3D is going to ask me what surfaces I want to have and how I want to display my profile. I'm going to go ahead and click okay and I'm going to pick an origin somewhere over here.
Now that I have this profile I'm going to go ahead and close this panorama window because we know that this profile will be deleted upon save or exit. So I'm going ahead and check, navigate over to this profile view window, zoom in, and we're going to pay attention to how tall this profile is, how low it is. We don't go above the 200 elevation and we don't go below the 160 elevation.
We're going to use those numbers to set the profile view window size. We're going to go ahead and select this profile view window. We're going to go up to the profile view properties and then we're going to navigate over to the elevations tab inside the profile view properties window.
I'm going to go ahead and go to a user specified height. I'm going to change my user specified height to my minimum of 160 and my maximum of 200. So what you'll notice when we do that is that it automatically calculates that our height of our view window will be 40.
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I'm going to first hit apply and hit okay so that we can see what that view window looks like. Now if for some reason we needed to have a view window that was only 20 feet high instead of the 40 that we have that's where we're going to get into splitting our profile view. So to split a profile we're going to go back up to our profile view properties.
We're going to go back to the elevation tab inside of this window and we're going to navigate to this button here for split profile view. I'm going to go ahead and select that and I haven't had very good luck with the automatic split creation. You may find it working well for you.
I don't have it working very well for me most of the time so I often use manual. So I'm going to go to manual. I'm going to go over here and so we currently have a single split.
We need to add an additional split so I'm going to go ahead and hit the plus sign to add. Civil 3D is asking me where I want to add that split in at. What station? So the station I want to add it to is going to be in the middle of this wherever this profile crosses the middle of my view window.
So that's going to be somewhere in here. I'm going to zoom in and then I'm going to turn my snaps back on and so where my profile intersects this grid line here I'm going to click. Now I
Don't care about where I'm going to click for this elevation because I'm going to input my elevations in the window when it pops back up.
So I'm going to go ahead and click somewhere down here and so what Civil 3D had done is it had selected the elevation that I had clicked on. What I'm going to go ahead and do is change this elevation as my adjusted datum to 160 because I want that to be the lowest elevation that I use in this section. Now this section up here we know that because we clicked and it was 170 something this grid line right here is 180.
So I want to change this adjusted datum to 180. So I'm going to go ahead and click apply and click okay and when I zoom out from here what you're going to notice is that our window now still is 40 tall but everything is contained within these 20. Now the way that you can go about changing that is that if you select the profile view window go to profile view properties and if you needed to squeeze this down to 20 feet tall you would change this height right here to 20.
You're going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay and now our profile view window is 20 feet tall and it goes to the point where we selected to where it crosses down through. It navigates back up to a new datum so it goes from 180 in this side to 160 on that side. This comes through at 180 above and then comes down until its end point down here.
So that's a split profile view. This is useful when you have profiles with a lot of vertical relief to them. This profile isn't necessarily the greatest example but it is better than some of these profiles over here.
So I wanted to show you about how to split profile views in case you have to do this in a different design. In our designs for this class we don't need to split our profile views but it's always good to know how to do this when you're going to be doing workflows inside Civil 3D. So I'm going to go ahead and save.
This is going to go away and then I'll meet you in the next video.
