Did You Know - Profile Views

This morning I was chatting with a user and I picked up on a gap that may be in a number of users knowledge – I thought this might be a handy thing to understand

The problem we were discussing was they had a wall bottom line and a wall top line. The wall was vertical. They had created an alignment out of the bottom line which was a 3D line, so in the alignment it creates a HAL and a VAL for the line. They were trying to produce drawings for the wall construction. They wanted to now add the top of wall line into the Profile View of the wall alignment. How do you do that?

Simply open the alignment editor for the alignment. Then create a vertical alignment - yes you can have as many vertical alignments as you want in an alignment (there is an active VAL (used in corridors) but all of the VALs will show up in the profile View of the alignment. Then you can add append a line from the Plan View (button in header area of the vertical alignment editor) (provided that its 0 station matches the zero station of the alignment) and provided that its stationing matches the alignment - the profile of the wall top will be drawn in the profile view. You can also add profiles drawn in the profile view as vertical alignments using the same process.

Then the user said can I add the OG as well - of course you can - you use the Surface Profile command in the corridor menu to create a profile for the OG along the alignment (or any other surface that you want to draw (strip, subgrade etc.) and then when you open the Profile View the OG line will be there also.

You can also draw lines in the profile view as well as text. Note that in the Profile View the X and Y axes while they are Station and Elevation commands like Label Points or Smart Text think that Station is Easting and Elevation is Northing for labeling purposes - so label Northing for Elevations and Easting for Stations when in this view (Crazy I know) …

Also - if you have other lines that you want to project into the Profile View (lines that are offset from the alignment but you want to show them in the profile e.g. Utility Lines etc. then you can use command CreateProfileProxy from the command pane to compute a linestring for the selected objects in the profile view. Note that the linestring in the profile view is linked to the linestring in the plan view so any changes to the line will be updated in the profile view, however this also means that you cannot delete the proxy in the profile View without deleting the object in the plan view also. To remove the profile proxy simply run the command again and select the same line again and add it a second time to remove it from the profile view.

Then the last question was "If I draw things in the Profile view can I plot them - sure you can. Simply draw a plotbox or a rectangle in the profile View and then create a Dynaview using the Rectangle and place it ion a drawing sheet (typically a Custom Sheet). You can set a View Filter Filter ion the Dynaview to control its content and add a Grid (Station and Elevation Grid) and set Vertical Exaggeration etc. Just select the Dynaview once placed and you can change its properties to set Scale, Grid, View Filter, Vertical Exaggeration etc.

Happy Friday!

Alan

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