Understand the functionalities of the inquiry tool in Civil 3D, a tool that enables you to ask questions regarding specific objects in your drawing. Learn how to use the tool to determine the elevation of intersecting points along different branches and how to change grades to achieve desired elevations.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on using the inquiry tool in Civil 3D to gather information about specific objects in a drawing. The tool can be used to find the station of intersection along different profiles.
- You can inquire about the elevation of a profile at a specific station using the inquiry tool. The elevation can be utilized to adjust the grades of a design profile to achieve desired heights at intersection points.
- It is important to properly name profiles for easy identification. Changes made using the grid editing feature like adjusting slopes and elevations are immediately reflected in the drawing.
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In this video we're going to go ahead and do some grid editing of our profiles that we just created. So what we're going to go ahead and do first is we're going to go ahead and learn about a tool called the inquiry tool.
So what the inquiry tool is, it allows us to ask a question of Civil 3D about certain objects inside of our drawing. What we're going to end up doing is we're going to be taking the end point or actually the beginning point of our dev branch where it intersects with our dev main alignment and we're going to elevate it so that it is at the elevation of the dev main branch at the intersection. So to do that the first thing that we're going to do is we have to figure out what station our intersection is at along the dev main profile.
And to do that we're going to go ahead and select our dev branch. Then we're going to go up here into the contextual ribbon bar for the inquiry tool and we're going to select it. So inside of the inquiry tool you have the options for asking questions or inquiring about different objects inside Civil 3D, as you see here.
Points, surfaces, alignments, profile views, profiles, section views, sections, and corridor sections. So since we are trying to ask a question about an alignment and what the station is we're going to go ahead and go to alignments and then we are going to go with alignment station and offset at point. What we're really only interested in is the station because we know the offset is going to be zero because we're going to be selecting on the alignment.
So Civil 3D now asks us, once we've selected station at offset and point, what alignment we want to know about. So for this we want to know what the station is at the dev main alignment. We're going to go ahead and select dev main and go OK and then Civil 3D is going to prompt us to specify a point for the station and offset.
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So I'm going to zoom into the intersection. I'm going to hover over my alignment and then I'm going to use my snap that's forcing here with the square on that intersection. So I'm going to go ahead and click at the end.
It's going to do the endpoint of my dev branch. So I'm going to go ahead and click and what Civil 3D is telling me now is that the endpoint of my dev branch alignment is at the station of zero plus 97.0 with an offset of zero on my dev main alignment. So I know that at 0 plus 97 I am going to be intersecting my dev main alignment.
So what I'm going to go ahead and do next is I'm going to inquire about the elevation of that profile. So inside of here we may not have given the best name to our alignment or profile. We're going to go ahead and change the name of our profile.
As you can see once I've selected this profile my profile is called layout 2. That's not going to make it easy to inquire about that profile in a list unless you know what that profile name is being just a layout and a number. If you notice down here, if I go and select my dev branch profile, it is layout 3. So to not have to remember which one's 2 and which one's 3 we're going to go ahead and change the names of these. So I'm going to go ahead and select this design profile and then I'm going to go ahead and open profile properties.
So inside of profile properties I have the name I'm going to highlight it, say dev main prof, hit Apply, and hit OK. And then I'm going to do the same thing down here. I'm going to select this profile here.
I'm going to go ahead and go to profile properties, name it dev branch prof, hit Apply, and hit OK. Now that we've done that I'm going to go ahead and go back up to this profile. I'm going to select it, go to the contextual ribbon bar, select Inquiry, then drop down and select From Profile.
I'm going to do profile station and elevation at a point. Now I'm going to select my dev main profile and hit OK. And then inside of this window I'm going to navigate down sometimes these boxes get glitched out by the view but all you have to do is click in here.
So I can type in a station if I want. I want to know the elevation at station 0 plus 97. So I'm going to type in 97 and I'm going to hit ENTER and what Civil 3D is now returning is at station 0 plus 97 the elevation of my profile for my dev main is 190.272 on my dev main profile.
So I'm going to go ahead and make a note of 190.272 over in a different window off to the side here. So I'm typing 190.272 in a different window that I have open, and I am going to go to my dev branch alignment or my dev branch design profile. I'm going to select my design profile and I am going to go to my geometry editor.
Now this is where we're going to get into grid editing for our design profiles. So the grid editing button inside the profile layout tools window is this pencil with a green circle. So I'm going to go ahead and select that button and then I get the grid view for my profile.
So inside of here you have the options for changing the station of your pvi. You have the options of changing your elevation for the pvi the grades in and grades out from a pvi. You have these ones that are grayed out so grade change that's a calculation based on grade in and grade out.
What type of curve it is that's dependent on if it's sagging or if it's cresting and then you have your curve length your k values and your curve radius values. So all of the ones in black text you can change. So for our purposes here, I'm going to go to my PVI station of zero plus zero because that's the beginning of my alignment where it's going to intersect my dev main profile, and I want to change this 190.072 to 190.272, which is the number I wrote off to the side in another window.
So I'm going to go ahead and type in 190.272 and I'm going to hit ENTER and so inside of the drawing you'll notice that this will have updated. So you can see here it's kind of hard to see when I'm zoomed out as I was, but you can see here now it says elevation equals 190.272. So from here we could take the slopes that we have and change them some to make them a little bit more round. So say I wanted instead of a 1.63 I wanted a 1.6 I can type that in and hit ENTER and you'll notice this elevation didn't change because I'm grading away from that point grading out.
If I did grade in, then I would be changing the previous point; if I did grade out, that's going away from it. So I'm going to leave 1.6. I could change this to negative 3.6 and hit ENTER, and what you're going to see here is now we have a 1.6 and a 3.6. Now I want to keep my elevation for this last point so I'm not going to change this grade. Now if I didn't care about this elevation, I could go ahead and change this to 1.1 or 1 or even 1 percent, but I want to keep it at the elevation that we selected, so I'm going to leave this as 1.07. So to get out of this, we go ahead and close the box, and then we're done editing here. We can close this box and then inspect our profile to make sure that the changes we made were translated into our drawing.
If we zoom in, we can see we have a 190.272, we have a 1.6 slope, we have a 3.6 slope, and then we have our 1.07 that we left. This is the elevation that we didn't change from our original creation of this profile. Now if I zoom in here, what you're going to notice is that there is a gap between the design profile and the surface, but that's okay. Because if we go up to this profile here somewhere around the 97, which is a little bit before one plus zero, we're going to go over here and notice that our design profile is above our surface elevation, so we're okay with that. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and save the drawing, and then I'll meet you in the next video.
