I was thinking about this on my way home from work yesterday. I figured out a way that it would actually show them in the cross-section since TBC shows other surfaces in the cross-section when drafting.
If we were able to explode the IFC or whatever Trimble uses to make the pipe geometry into lines, the lines are there if you select the utility. Make two surfaces out of it: a top surface and a bottom surface. Pretty much everything equal to or above the center of the pipe is one surface, and everything equal to or below the center of the pipe is another surface. It would then draw that surface in your cross-section.
I guess my feature request would be for something to explode that geometry, make the top surface and bottom surface for every pipe run, run the combine surface command on them, and delete hundreds of individual surfaces to leave you with two surfaces for all the pipe runs’ top surface and bottom or even four surfaces: top OD, top ID, bottom OD, bottom ID.
This could be done for manholes as well with the circles at the top and the bottom. Resize the bottom circles so TBC does not have a cow about the overlapping lines.
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I am of the mind that, since the utility module is an add-on to base TBC (of which i pay a premium for) this should be a functional reference and should display without a lot of work-around. There are a few work-flows that will give some semblance of utility position but we have the ability to create the network as a whole. It should display as/when needed in its whole.
Like your train of thought though!
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@nate_doyle I agree it should be fully functional, but unfortunately it is not. hence why I asked here for a workaround/macro.
oh, I get it - its a shame Trimble doesn’t see it that way.
If you extrude the pipe in sketch-up and bring in as an ifc and explode, your requisite lines should be there. Note that you can increase/decrease the number of lines used to create the shape. You may have to run a couple versions to get exactly what you want from the exploded ifc
The reason I asked for this to be done automagically is because on a complicated pipe network/networks you would have to do this per run and there can be a bunch of them.
It is something I have seen asked for more often than Trimble should allow. I think it would be a useful command that would solve some issues for us TBC users until Trimble fixes this in 2030.
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It takes some setup but the multi offset line tool is great for this. I have a few templates setup for common sizes.
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It would solve the issue of the linework. Doing the surfaces trying to make sure you hand picked the correct ones for top and bottom. combining them deleting the potentially 100’s of the left over ones all by hand is going to be quite the process. I think the work to do this would not be worth the end result of having pipes show up in your drafted cross sections. would be great if you had one or two of them but if you needed to do a bunch it would almost be better to draft them all over again in Civil3d and pull your drafting from there.
but again another useful already developed RPS tool that could be used in a macro to achieve the end result thanks Plheureux.
Just be strategic on your layering
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So, I’m revisiting this as I’d like to have a existing pipe shown compared to my design in a x-section.
I created a 2D pipe in sketchup, divided it and brought it in to TBC.
TBC is currently not going around arcs with the lines its going straight through it. see below
It’s also doing some weird offsets vertically in some area along the outside edges
see below
Is this a bug in Multi line offset, or are some of my settings off?
Edit:
Here’s a link to my project as well as my Template for Multi Offset
Edit 2: I ended up making a new point style and optimizing the line string and everything is working smooth!
Typically, something like this happens when an instruction is fat fingered. The same rules apply to this as any other surface in TBC, meaning you can’t have a surface wrap around on itself. When you get some time, shoot me the template and I’ll take a look at it. Once I figure out the issue, I’ll record you a video and shoot it back to you.
I figured it out. See edit #2 above 
Here’s my template file for anyone that needs a 36" Pipe from the top. You can just offset the source line for other deltas, invert, center etc… I’ll make other pipe sizes and update this post as I make them
36IN PIPE (28.9 KB)
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Once you have a multi offset line temolate setup it can be defined to create 4 surfaces - top outer, top inner, bottom outer, bottom inner. Each set of lines can be created on a different layer and each set.of.lines can create a separate surface. Once defined, you can create a hundred or a thousand pipes in one step. If you dont want all of the pipes in the same.surface (which will require a boundary to limit each pipe) you can create separate surfaces for each pipe but that would be 4x times the number of pipes which is likely to.be a lit of surfaces. Creating the boundaries i would create another pair of lines, left and right of the pipe line and come back afterwards with smart join to close them out to make boundaries and apply the boundaries to the surfaces.
This works.well to create the pipes in sections and profiles - not what you all.want I know but it does.work at least.
Alan
Here’s a post showing how to create a pipe template for RCP in MOL for the purposes of getting pipes into your cross sections.
https://community.myrockpile.com/t/creating-pipe-shapes-using-multi-offset-line-for-viewing-pipe-in-cross-sections/2500
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