From the Ground Up
A European perspective on design and out of the box thinking with Civil 3D.
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- posted 06/14/07 by Jack Strongitharm Sat in Cork Airport - Adding features to your cross sections
- So I have a couple of hours to kill in Cork airport after finishing my short tour around Ireland this week.
The Guiness was good by the way in the Gravity Bar in Dublin!
Funny how most pictures of me are with a pint! I dont always drink you know!
(from the left, Brian, Seamus, John and me Jack)
Anyway back to the Civil stuff
So here is a little area in Civil 3D that has been there from the last version (2007) and probably has been missed by most people, including myself to be honest!
Within cross sections you can show where other alignments live on your cross sections. But if you think about it and look at what else is enabled is that you can also drop a block in the cross section/s.
Here is how you do it
1. If you want say a fenceline shown, convert a polyline into an Alignment for your fences
2. Go to a cross section and its properties and go to the Gradient Profile Lines tab.
Here you can see that you can add alignments
This will now draw a vertical line on the section to where those alignments are within your section
3. To be able to drop in a block on the ground you need to create a profile for your fencelines
4. Then go back to your section and properties. Remove the alignments and then readd them and you will find that profiles have been added and also that you can choose a marker
If you have not looked at markers before, they are used through the program for labelling.
The basics are that you can choose a cross, circle etc for a simple symbol but also you can choose to use an AutoCAD block that you can draw yourself
In this case I have drawn a simple fence post and 3 rails
5. Then when you say OK, you will find that your section now has the blocks shown and on the surface
( a bit zoomed in to save your eye sight)
Now, if you want to update these to all your sections, in 2008 you can now change anything about them very quickly.
Go to your sample line groups in the propector and right click into properties
You could easily apply this technique to draw on other features such as lighting posts, walls etc.
Just because it says an alignment does mean that is only what it can do. Think outside the box and how you apply the tools, or just keep watching this blog.
By the way, if you move the alignments for the fences, rebuild the corridor and the fence blocks will move on the sections.
You may notice that my cross sections have good text labels in the bands at the positions I need them at.
My colleague, Joerg Pipo in Germany found a great way to make cross sections better.
So I will try to explain this technique in the coming posts.
Good weekend to you all, time to check in to go home!!
Jack Strongitharm