Discover how to create a quick profile, project objects to a profile, and project crossings to a profile in Civil 3D. Learn why quick profiles may not function as you'd expect and see how to project a 3D polyline to a profile view window while understanding the difference between projecting objects and projecting crossings.
Key Insights
- Creating a quick profile in Civil 3D can be useful as a temporary object to get an idea of what the surface profile looks like, however, quick profiles disappear after saving the project, making them inappropriate for design profiles or sheet sets.
- Objects like 3D polylines, blocks, 3D solids, points, feature lines, and survey figures can be projected onto a profile view window. There's a difference between projecting objects and projecting crossings: objects are projected along the alignment while crossings physically intersect the alignment.
- Quick profiles can be useful for gaining a quick understanding of a profile view, but should not be used for design purposes due to their temporary nature. Any objects projected to the quick profile will be deleted or left floating in space upon saving, requiring manual deletion.
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In this video we're going to go over three quick topics. We're going to go over creating a quick profile, projecting objects to a profile, and projecting crossings to a profile.
So what we're going to do first is we're going to go ahead and create this object called a quick profile. Now you may have noticed when we created our profiles there was this option for quick profile and while it sounds like it may be very useful to create a quick profile rather than having to go through creating a service profile, creating a profile view window, and then going through all those settings and just basically having Civil 3D create a quote unquote quick profile. So it doesn't quite function like that and we're going to go ahead and show you that example of why it doesn't function like that.
We're going to go ahead and click quick profile and what you'll notice is Civil 3D will tell you can either select an object or do by points. If you do if you select p and do by points you will be picking points around a screen just like if you were drawing a polyline. I'm going to go ahead and do select object and I'm going to zoom in to the end of our main alignment and I'm going to select this polyline that's here.
When I select this polyline Civil 3D is going to open this window that says create quick profiles, select the surfaces, and select your profile view style. So I'm going to go ahead and click okay and what Civil 3D is going to ask me to do is select my profile view origin. When I do that Civil 3D is going to create my profile but what you'll notice inside of this panorama window is that Civil 3D is telling me that the quick profile is created and that this is a temporary object and will be deleted on save command or on exit from drawing.
This is why a quick profile is not necessarily as great of a tool as it may seem at first blush and that's because this will disappear when you save. So you cannot use this to create design profiles or to turn into a sheet set or something like that because it's temporary. So it's a good way to get an idea of what the surface profile is going to look like and what different objects are going to look like when you create a profile.
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But if you need to have this profile stick around quick profile is not the tool you want to use. So in saying that I'm going to go ahead and show you how some objects can disappear after this thing goes away. We're going to go ahead and project something onto this profile and then we'll save and it'll all disappear.
We're going to go ahead and project a 3D polyline to this profile view window but it's important to know what objects can be projected other than 3D polylines. Blocks, 3D solids, points, feature lines, and survey figures can all be projected onto a profile view window. We're just going to go ahead and use one of those which is a 3D polyline.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to type in 3D poly to initiate the 3D polyline command and then I'm going to go ahead and pick a point here and then I'm going to pick a point over here and I'm going to hit ENTER. So from here I'm going to select this 3D polyline. I'm going to right click.
I'm going to go to properties and I'm going to specify my vertex z for both ends of that 3D polyline. So the first point I'm going to give is 196 and the second vertex I'm going to give is 197. So I'm going to close this properties window.
I'm going to escape and I'm going to go ahead and go up to profile view. Inside of the profile view drop down we have the options for creating profile views, creating multiple profile views, and then we have the two options that we're going to discuss right now which is project objects to profile view and add crossings to profile view. So projecting objects will project the object up into the profile view as long as it is going along the alignment which is that polyline that we selected.
Crossings is where that object physically crosses the alignment. So depending on what you want to project and how you want it to be displayed inside of your profile view that's the difference between projecting objects versus projecting crossings. I'm going to show you both.
We're going to go ahead and select objects first. Project objects to profile view. Then Civil 3D is going to ask us to select the objects that we want to project.
I'm going to select my 3D polyline and hit ENTER. Civil 3D is asking me to select a profile view. So I'm going to select this quick profile view window that we created.
And so Civil 3D is now asking me to select how I want the object to be displayed when I promote it to my profile view window. So inside of here you can set your styles and your elevation options. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as is and click okay.
And so what you can see here now is that we have this line that is being projected to our profile with a very specific elevation based on the points we gave here. Now I'm going to go ahead and go to profile view again. Select add crossing to profile view.
I'm going to again select this 3D polyline and hit ENTER. I'm going to select the profile view that I want to display it on and then I am going to have the option for changing how I want to set and display this object inside of my profile view. So I'm going to leave it as is and I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
And so from here what you can see is that Civil 3D gave me two points that are the station and elevation for the crossing of that line along my alignment. So from here we're going to go ahead and show how objects are deleted when you go ahead and save and this quick profile goes away. So from here I'm going to save and when I do that everything inside of that profile view window that I had went away.
Now if you have a Civil 3D object that is staying for example a feature line or something like that and you projected it to the profile view and it is the elevations and the design of that object are not going away or not being deleted then that object will be abandoned rather than deleted from the profile view. It'll just be floating in space and you'll have to delete it out of your drawing. So this is why we don't want to use quick profile to create profile view windows that we're going to end up using for design purposes but if you want to get a quick idea of what you're doing and what you're going to see inside of a profile view window then that's the tool you want to go ahead and use.
So I'm going to go ahead and delete this 3D polyline. I'm going to save my drawing and then I'll meet you in the next video.
