Create and modify a profile

00:06

In this video, we're going to start creating and modifying profiles using the profile creation toolbar.

00:12

We're first going to layout a profile using the design vertical profiles by drawing tangents and tangents with curves.

00:19

And then after we've done that, we'll go ahead and add in some additional points of vertical intersection or PVIs.

00:27

And then we'll also add in some tangents and some curves.

00:31

So what we are going to go ahead and do first is we're going to modify our profile view to make it more manageable for designing a profile inside of.

00:39

I'm going to select my profile view, going to go to profile view properties,

00:43

and then what I'm going to do is navigate to the Elevations tab and choose the automatic height and then hit "Apply" and hit "OK".

00:49

Now that my profile view is more open and available for designing inside of,

00:55

I'm going to go ahead and navigate to the Home tab of the ribbon bar, to the Profile dropdown and I'm going to select Profile Creation Tools.

01:03

From there, Civil 3D prompts me to select the profile view to create my profile inside of, I am going to be working with my Dev-Align,

01:11

so I want to go ahead and click on the Dev-Align profile view window, and then I'm going to be presented with my Create Profile - Draw New window.

01:20

From here I'm going to name my new profile Dev- Prof.

01:27

And then I'm going to leave my general settings as design profile and complete label sets and my layer as C-ROAD-PROF.

01:35

What I'm going to do is I am not going to assign a new design criteria,

01:39

but if you were going to create a profile and you wanted to use design criteria, this is where you would apply it.

01:45

So I'm going to navigate back to the General tab, click "OK" and then the Profile Layout Tools window shows up.

01:52

You can see by the title here that I'm clearly working in my Dev-Prof profile,

01:57

and so on the far left hand side, the first options that we have are draw tangents and draw tangents with curves.

02:04

These two options are identical to draw tangent to tangent and draw tangent to tangent with curves,

02:11

as we had when we were dealing with creation of alignments.

02:14

Just as we had dealing with creations of alignments, we have our curve settings that are associated with draw tangents with curves,

02:21

so we're going go to curve settings and inside of curve settings, we have three curves choices: parabolic, circular, and asymmetric.

02:29

So parabolic is going to be the left hand column, circular is the center column, and asymmetric is the right hand column.

02:36

I'm going to leave mine as parabolic and I'm going to choose my lengths and I'm going to set those as 50.

02:42

So once I've set these to 50, I'm going to hit "OK" to apply those new curve settings and I am going to jump into drawing my profile.

02:50

I'm going to start with drawing tangents because I don't want to insert a vertical curve near a roadway that I'm going to be tying to.

02:58

So what I'm going do first is I'm going to draw just tangents,

03:01

and I'm going to start snapping at the point of my intersection at the center line of the existing road.

03:09

And then I'm going to put in a tangent that approximates roughly what is happening in the existing road.

03:17

So I'm going to put a point in here.

03:19

And then I'm going to go ahead and move on to creating the next vertical intersection that I have here.

03:25

So I'm going to select a point somewhere in here and then I'm going to hit "Enter" to get out of the tangent command.

03:32

I'm going to drop back down and I'm going to go to draw tangents with curves, and Civil 3D is going to ask me to specify a start point.

03:39

I'm going to turn my snaps on, I'm going to snap to the end of this tangent and then when I start snapping to the end of this tangent,

03:46

Civil 3D is going to now start placing curves as I go from tangent to tangent because we're in the tangent with curves creation method.

03:54

So I'm going to go ahead and turn off my snaps because I don't want to accidentally snap to a grid inside of my profile view window.

03:60

And I'm going to pick a new spot here.

04:02

And then from here, I could continue to move onwards and create my last point here,

04:08

but what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to hit "Enter" to get out of that creation method.

04:13

And we're going to discuss some additional creation methods that we have available to us.

04:18

So the first three options all have to deal with points of vertical intersection.

04:23

We have the option to create a new point of vertical intersection.

04:27

We have the option to delete a point of vertical intersection.

04:30

And we have the option to move a point of vertical intersection.

04:33

So the move point of vertical intersection, what you end up having to do is you select the point that you want to move,

04:38

and then you select the location you now want to move it to.

04:41

It's not as simple as a group edit.

04:43

I don't prefer this option. We will talk about grip editing later.

04:46

Then what we have available to us is adding in lines and adding in curves.

04:51

The lines and curves are just like we had when we were dealing with our alignments.

04:56

You have fixed floating and free.

04:58

And just as before, fixed is between two points, floating is between an object and a point.

05:04

And what you have to understand is that for tangents, you cannot have a floating tangent line off of another tangent.

05:11

A floating tangent has to come from a curve.

05:15

Then we have the free tangent and a free tangent has to go between two curves.

05:20

Then we can also solve for tangent intersections so you can pick two lines and solve where that intersection is going to be.

05:26

Same thing with the curves, we have our fixed, our floating, and our free.

05:30

Then we have an option for converting AutoCAD objects to profiles, so that's this button here.

05:36

If you had a AutoCAD line or spline, you can convert it into a profile.

05:40

Then we have some of our edit commands, which we'll get into later.

05:44

So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to select a fixed tangent two points and I am going to place it at the end point.

05:53

So I'm going to turn my snaps on again.

05:55

I'm going to fix to the end point of this tangent and then I'm going to snap to the end point of my surface profile.

06:02

And then I'm going to hit "Enter" to accept that change.

06:05

And then from there, I'm going to go ahead and show how it looks like to insert a PVI and delete a PVI.

06:12

So I'm going to insert this PVI by selecting the insert PVI button and then I'm going to specify a point for the new PVI.

06:19

And when I do that, Civil 3D inserts that PVI and then it prompts me to continue if I want to.

06:25

I'm not going to continue so I'm going to hit "Enter".

06:27

And if I didn't like the PVI that I put in, then I can go ahead and delete it out by selecting Delete PVI,

06:33

and so I can delete this PVI by clicking at or near the location of this PVI that I want to delete.

06:40

So once I've done that, I'll hit "Enter" to accept that and then we have our beginning legwork of our profile.

06:48

We will deal with editing in future videos.