Understanding Profile View Windows in Civil 3D: A Comprehensive Guide

In this video, we're going to talk about profile view windows. So the thing to understand about profile view windows is that they are a way for Civil 3D to present vertical data in a plan view setting.

So normally what we're looking at here is plan view, but this information here is actually a profile view of what we're looking at here in our model. So the window itself has nothing associated with it. As far as design goes, it's just a placeholder.

Everything that's inside of the window is actually design elements. So this profile inside of this window is associated with the surface. This window itself is just a way for things to be displayed.

So it's almost like a very complex label inside of Civil 3D. So with that being said, if you were to select your profile view window, the contextual ribbon bar would come up, and inside of the contextual ribbon bar, you have your profile view properties. If I select profile view properties, inside of the profile view properties window, we have the information tab, which tells us the name, description, and object style for the profile view window.

Then we have the options for stations. And so what you'll notice is these tabs line up with what we had in our profile view creation window when we originally created our profile view. So from here, we have the stations, automatic or user specified.

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We have elevations, automatic or user specified, and then the split profile view window options. Under profiles, we have the options for which profiles associated with the alignment existing highway are going to be displayed inside of our profile view window. We only have the surface profile now, so we can only display that surface profile.

Then we have the bands window or the tab. And from here, this is a little bit more robust than when we created our profile view window because we have all of these band types. We have profile data, vertical geometry, horizontal geometry, superelevation, section data, pipe data, pressure data.

So all of these different band types also come with a band style. And so you can choose a band style. From there, you can then add it.

And then depending on if you have bottom of profile view or top of profile view selected, that information will be populated in this window and you can manipulate that data. We'll get into that in a different video, but this is where we get our data bands from and where we can add and delete data bands into our profile view window. And then the last tab we have is our hatch tab.

So just like when we created the profile view window, we have our cut areas, our field areas, and our multiple boundary areas. That's why it wasn't too concerning that we didn't have enough profiles to do these types of hatchings because we can do it at a later date when we have more profiles available to us. So moving on from here, one of the important features of a profile view is the object style for a profile view.

So inside of the object style for the profile view, it's going to control all of the options and the displays of how this profile view window looks. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to zoom in on this upper profile view window, and then I'm going to go ahead and go to profile view properties again. So from here, I'm going to navigate to my object style.

I'm going to go to my edit current selection button. I'm going to go ahead and look at my profile view style, and we're going to go through these tabs so we can talk about each individual portion. So inside the information tab, very simple, is the name, the description, and who created this specific profile view style.

Moving on from there, this is where we control our horizontal and vertical exaggeration. So our current horizontal scale is set to whatever our drawing settings are, which are down here in the bar. We have our current drawing settings to 1 in 30.

So it auto-populates 30 as our current horizontal scale, and I can't type in a number to change this option here. It has to be changed in from this drop-down menu. Then from here, we have our vertical scale, and our vertical scale is calculated based on our custom scale and our current horizontal scale, and then that will give us a vertical exaggeration.

If we want to have no vertical exaggeration, we would put in 1 into our custom scale, and you'll notice that our vertical scale sets itself to 1 inch equals 1 foot, and that sets our horizontal scale to 30, our vertical scale to 30, and our custom scale is 1. I'm going to go ahead and leave this as 3 because I don't want to change the view style for major grids in HGP, but if we were creating a new one and we wanted to have something that didn't have any kind of vertical exaggeration, then we would go ahead and change this vertical scale to something like 1 equals 1,1 inch equals 1 foot. From here, we have the options for how we want to view this profile, left to right or right to left, and that's just a radio button that you can select, and you get a little image of what that's going to look like here. So moving on from there, we have our grid options, and we have our grid clipping options up here, and then our padding and axis offset options here.

So like I said before, when we selected our stations for our window, you don't need to add in additional stationing to the left and the right of the profile because this grid padding does that for us. We pad to the left by one grid, and we pad to the right by one grid, and we pad up by two and down by two, and these numbers can all be modified. We can put in four, we can put in one.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave it as two, and then up here in each of these windows here, it's going to show us what these different checkboxes do for us. If we select clip vertical grids, what you'll notice inside this window is that it's going to clip the vertical grid lines at a certain entity. We can either clip to the highest profiles or omit grids in the padding areas.

We can omit grids in the padding areas or clip to the highest profiles, and so what you can see here is it's either going to clip to a specific profile, or it will clip to the profile that has the highest elevation. So I am not going to clip my vertical grids, but I'm going to go over here to clip horizontal grids, and same thing here. You can clip to the highest profile, you can clip to a specific profile, or you can omit gridding in the padding areas.

So I'm going to unclip horizontal grid, and then I am going to go to this axis offset. So this is, if you wanted to offset your axis, because Civil 3D is centering this profile in this view window, if you want to offset it, you can offset it by a set value in any of these boxes here. Moving on from there, we're going to go to title annotation.

So the title annotation is for this box up here that says EX Highway Profile. So from here, what you can see is you have the options for the text style, the text height, the title contents, so Parent Alignment Profile, so EX Highway Profile. Then we have the title position where it sits above this window here.

We have location top, bottom, right, or left. We can move it to bottom, and it would come down here, or left, and it would show up over here. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as top.