Creating a Profile View Window in Civil 3D: Step-by-Step Guide

In this video, we're going to go ahead and create that profile view window that we talked about in the previous video. So to do that, we're going to go ahead and navigate up the ribbon bar to this profile view drop down.

So inside of here, we're going to go ahead and create a profile view. You have options for creating multiple profile views, projecting objects to a profile view, and adding crossings to a profile view. Right now we don't have any objects or crossings that we want to put onto a profile view.

We could create multiple profile views, but I first want to walk through creating a single profile view. So I'm going to go ahead and click create profile view. We're going to move into our sections of our profile view creation window.

So first we're going to walk through general. We are going to select the alignment that we want to associate with our profile view. We're going to go with our EX highway.

The profile view name, I'm going to go ahead and leave this because I want it to have the parent alignment and then the next counter. Now maybe I don't want to have the next counter because we only are going to be creating one profile for each alignment. So I'm going to go ahead and actually delete out the next counter.

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From here, we're going to go ahead and select our profile view style. We have options that are available to us inside of Civil 3D. We also have the ability to create new ones.

So first things first, I'm going to go ahead and select one. I think I'm fine with the major grids and HGP. So I'm going to go ahead and go with that selection.

And then I'm going to go ahead and leave this as profile view layer is C road profile view. And then we have the option here for show offset profiles by vertically stacking profile views. We don't have any offset profiles so we don't need to worry about that.

If you did have offset profiles, then when you created them in the surface creation method, then we could go ahead and check this box and it will allow us to stack those vertically. And as you notice, when I check that box, we get a new option over here for stack profile. So I'm going to uncheck it since we don't need to have any stack profiles and I'm going to click next.

So inside Civil 3D, when you create a surface profile and then you go to create a profile view window, you have the option for automatically having Civil 3D choose the stations based on that surface profile that they made for you or you can do a user specified range. I often like to do this automatic because when we create our profile view window, we have inside of our view window options or our visibility options here for the profile view style, an option for adding buffers to either side. We don't need to make sure we're adding in an additional stationing to the left or to the right of our profile.

The buffers handle that. So the only reason you would want to change your station range is if you wanted to truncate your profile, you wanted to have a smaller profile view window. Say you only wanted to show the profile from station one to station four or something like that.

But for our case here, we're going to be creating a design profile. So I want to have my full alignment inside of my profile view window. So I'm going to go ahead and leave it selected as automatic and click next.

Then we have the options for profile view height. If we wanted to create a profile that had a set user specified view height based on the elevation of our alignment or our profile, then we could go ahead and user specify and then the split profile view options come up. And that's because if you set your specified view heights and your profile goes outside of it, Civil 3D will automatically split your profile and give you basically ranges of your profile.

So you'll have something going from your minimum up to when your profile exceeds what you set as your maximum. And then it'll move on to the next and move back down to the original height. So it'll split up your profile view for you.

We're going to go ahead because we're not trying to set this as a set static height for our profile to fit into a sheet or something like that. We're going to go ahead and leave it as automatic. So I'm going to go ahead and click next.

Then we have the profile display options. Which profiles do we want to have displayed inside of our profile view window? Right now we only have one profile available to us for the alignment that we've selected. We have the existing highway selected.

So only the surfaces associated with the existing highway will show up here. This is the Civ 201 surface profile. We're going to go ahead and click next.

Then if you had a pipe or pressure network that you wanted to display in, I had created that network in my drawing. So I have a network one available. There's nothing associated with network one.

So I'm not going to select this. I don't want that displaying on my profile. But if you did have a network that went along the alignment of where your profile was from, then you could go ahead and add this in.

This is helpful in that you know how we talked about creating an alignment from a pipe network. And then when we selected create alignment from pipe network, it asked us if we wanted to auto-generate a profile and a profile view. If we auto-generated a profile and a profile view, this is when we would want to select to add that network into that profile.

Because that's the sole purpose of us creating that profile. We're going to go ahead and click next. And so inside of here, these are the options for data bands.

We'll get into data bands later. But what data bands are, is they are pieces of information at the bottom and the top. So you can see here as examples, the bottom and the top of our profile that returns data to you based on the profiles that are inside that profile view window.