15 More Civil 3D Tips & Tricks - Alignments & Profiles

welcome my name is jeff bartles i'm an infrastructure technical specialist here at autodesk and today we're going to look at some tips and tricks associated with civil 3d alignments and profiles i've got a ton of things i want to show you today and i'm going to use kind of a shotgun approach to get through as much as we can during our time together on screen you can see a rough outline representing the categories of the tips and tricks we're going to be looking at everything from creation all the way down to organization let me say right off the bat here that when we're talking about alignments and profiles civil 3d views these objects similarly so if i show you a tip associated with an alignment try it with a profile it may work there as well and vice versa alignments and profiles use similar toolbars dialog boxes workflows labeling etc as always this is going to be a powerpoint free zone everything that we do today is going to be live in the application okay taking care of housekeeping let me drop out of this i am working in civil 3d 2022 that said everything i show you today is going to work regardless of the version of civil 3d you're using we're going to start out by looking at how we can set civil 3d to check for tangency in our alignment geometry on my screen i have a polyline and i would like to create an alignment from this this is a typical workflow we want to create an alignment from objects now i generated this geometry myself so i know that these curves are tangent to these straight segments however sometimes you get geometry from others and you may not have time to go through and validate everything let me pull that over just a little bit at this point i know that line segment's not tangent to that arc anymore let's convert this geometry into an alignment from the alignment menu i will choose create alignment from objects i'm going to select this object and i'll press enter i'll press enter to accept the direction i'm going to keep the default name and stylization and then i'll click ok and right away you can see that i have a warning here if i hover over that we can see that i have a tangency violation now how can we see the warnings or how can we ensure that we see the warnings two places we have to go one is with the alignment properties if i select the alignment and go to alignment properties here on the design criteria tab down the lower right corner there is a toggle that allows civil 3d to check for tangency between elements now don't worry this is turned on by default if not you can toggle it on here likewise if for some reason that's not on by default on your end you can find it over here on the settings tab if i go to settings and i right click on the alignment category edit feature settings if we come down to the criteria based design all the way to the bottom check for tangency between elements right here is where you can assign this as a default for your template file okay so that needs to be turned on one more thing has to do with the alignment style if i select the alignment and right click and then from the menu choose edit alignment style i can see here on the display tab that the alignment style that i'm using is displaying the warning symbols so you want to make sure these are turned on you can see if i turn that off and click apply it's checking but it isn't going to show me on screen so i want to make sure that that is turned on in the style that i am using so now that i've identified the tangency issue how can we fix this i'm going to select the alignment and then i'm going to come up to the geometry editor and then i'll click this green ball to bring up the tabular editor in the tabular editor we can see the tangency violation here with the warnings all we have to do is hover over them and i can see the curve has a radius of 200 feet it is considered fixed if i select this the curve highlights on screen that's the entity we're going to edit notice if i click the tangency constraint again we have the option of changing this and i'm sure you're aware the entities that we create can be fixed floating or free basically these designations have to do with tangency fixed means it doesn't care about tangency on the left and right it's a fixed object floating maintains tangency on one side or the other and free will maintain tangency on both sides so i'm going to set this to be a free curve when i do it's now tangent at both ends let me go ahead and close this it does maintain the bearing of this tangent segment coming in and going out basically it just re-filleted that arc with a new radius of 200 feet okay so that's how we can check geometry and and how we can fix it if we have to next we'll dive a little bit deeper into creating alignments from objects on my screen i've got some circles here i'm going to create a copy of these let's copy those down so same circles in both cases i'm going to create a polyline and we will draw the polyline from the center of these circles and then i would like to fill it this so i'm going to create a fillet i'll launch the fillet command we'll choose radius i'm going to go with a 200 foot radius and we'll click these two entities to round that corner and now let's create an alignment from this object i'm going to go to the alignment command i'll say create alignment from objects i will select this object i'll press enter enter and enter again to accept the defaults perfect now let's create a similar alignment using the layout tools i'm going to go back to the alignment menu and this time i'll choose alignment creation tools i'm going to keep the default name and stylization let's click ok using this method i'm creating the alignment using designated tools and i can create various tangent segments you know both fixed floating and free i can create curves spirals things like that for this example i'm just going to open the menu on the end if i come down to curve and spiral settings i just want to show you that by default it's going to create curves at 200 feet which is perfect let's set this to tangent tangent with curves i could just go from one circle to the other to the other and i'll press enter when finished let's close this so i have the exact same geometry in both cases now when i started using civil 3d i was of the mindset it really didn't matter how you created your alignment as long as you ended up with the same thing and in some respects that's accurate where we do find the difference between the objects is when it comes to grip editing let me show you what i mean i will select both of these alignments and if i zoom in on the one that was created by layout tools you can see that the pi or the point of intersection here has a blue grip if i pan up to this one up above the one created from objects has a gray grip this is considered an implied or an implicit pi it wasn't calculated didn't need to be because i provided the geometry for this where that comes into play is when we grip edits the alignments if i click this grip down at the end and i pull this tangent segment down my expectation is that it would change the bearing of this line and hold that pi if i click you can see that's exactly what it's doing however if i try the same thing with an alignment that was created from objects as i pull this down notice it's not pivoting on the pi it's pivoting at the end point of the geometry that i selected that tangent segment if i click you can see what happens to the pi which is not what i want let me undo that now all is not lost if i select this alignment and zoom in you can see that the pi here is gray if i hover over this i can choose solve pi which will then solve it which makes it blue and now if i select this alignment click the script at the end i can now adjust this and it will hold that newly calculated pi location okay after seeing that you may think all right you know good to know from now on if i create something from objects i may have to go through and solve the pi's it actually goes a little bit deeper than that and let me show you another example let's say i want to create some geometry that represents a cul-de-sac or an alignment so that represents a cul-de-sac i've got some geometry representing center line of road and the edges of pavement i'm going to come up and i'll create an alignment from layout tools first i'll choose alignment creation tools we'll keep the defaults here i'll click ok and i'm going to create some fixed geometry i'll just create a fixed line segment from here to here and i'm still in the command i'll create one from here to here and i'll press enter notice that the even though it's all one alignment the labels can't jump to the other side because i don't know how to reconcile that gap now i'd like to create the head of the cul-de-sac i'm going to create a fixed curve for this because i don't have other alignment geometry to connect to just yet so we're going to do this in the fixed category i'll go to more fixed curves and if we look in the menu here i'm going to use this option fixed curve center point and radius good rule of thumb with these options just look in the parenthesis and ask yourself what do i know for creating this geometry in this case i know the center point and radius i'd like to put the center point of the cul-de-sac head right here and the alignment geometry is going to go counterclockwise because i'm going in this direction so we'll choose counterclockwise and it's going to have a radius of 50 feet perfect now let's create the fillets that tie these together to do these i'm going to create free curves because i would like them to maintain tangency on both sides i'll go with free curve fillet between two entities with a radius because that's the information i know i will select this alignment and this one this is going to be the solution will be less than 180 whenever your solution's greater than 180 it creates a great big loop which is almost never what you want so i'm going to press enter to accept less than 180 i'm going to be creating a reverse curve as i come through here and then the radius will be 25 feet i'll press enter that looks good we'll create one on the other side i will select this part of the alignment and this one less than 180 reverse curve and 25. i'll press enter when finished i can get rid of these sketch lines now so here is the geometry for your alignment representing a cul-de-sac that was created from the layout tools now let's create one from objects if you'll indulge me here for one second i am going to trace this and there's other ways to do this this is just really quick i'm going to come through and trace this we'll go back to the line segment there there we go all right let's say move and i will say l for last i want to move the last object that i created i'll press enter and i'll move this up so there's a polyline representation of that geometry i'm going to create an alignment now from object i'm going to reverse the direction there so it's going the same way and then i'll accept the defaults perfect exact same alignment in both cases they're created two different ways let's select the alignment created from the layout tools and i'm going to turn off my object snaps here for a second if i click this grip on this tangent segment you can see that this translates as i would expect it's adjusting the offset for the roadway there it's tying up the phillip nicely notice i have a grip at the center of the cul-de-sac head i do because that's the way i drew the geometry i had the center point if i click the center of this i can i can pull it out nicely i can even flex this in either direction it just it just edits as you would expect it to edit you know if you were you know modifying this geometry with grips let me press escape if however i select the same geometry that was created from objects if i click the same grip here in the middle drag this around you can see that's not necessarily what i want i've got no grip at the center if i click the script at the end i could you know kind of pull this out and make the cul-de-sac head bigger but it looks like it's a fixed object it's not maintaining tangency let me click undo now you may think okay well you know i could get in here and i could you know solve the pis well there isn't a pi here because we've got a reverse curve and you know i could select that and i could go to the geometry editor and bring up the tabular editor i could say let's take this first curve and i could set this to be a free curve so it maintains tangency on both sides so i could kind of reverse engineer this as though i created it using the layout tools but then it creates a compound curve instead of reverse curve so could i go through and reverse engineer this and make it work the exact same way yeah i could but in the long run if i'd like the the more flexible editing it may be better to create that geometry using the layout tools no right or wrong way to create an alignment you can do it however you like i'm just showing you this to show you that there is a difference between the ability to edit after those alignments are created depending on the method let me also mention that i wish this example here was my own idea it is not i was watching a demonstration by a gentleman by the name of matt kohlberg about a year ago who demonstrated this and i thought this is just a brilliant way to show the difference between the ways alignments can be edited based on their creation so i'm using the same example here okay let's pan this up next let's talk about creating alignments using best fit on my screen i've got some geometry i've got a pair of poly lines in this case let's assume that these polylines represent the left and right bank of a stream or a river or something like that maybe i'd like to identify the center line of this i'd like to create an alignment that represents the center of that stream if i go to the alignment pull down i can choose best fit alignment and this brings up a great big dialog box in the upper left corner here i can select the entities that i'm working with i can do best fit to generate an alignment through selected entities i'm going to choose autocad entities in this case you can see the other options that we have there's a weeding method here using weeding we can cause civil 3d to ignore excessive or redundant vertices or grips and and we can supplement vertices and grips if we want to i'm going to keep the defaults i will then select my path or path one i'll select path one here and press enter now if that was all i did if i just came down and completed this command it would try and create a best fit alignment through this singular entity that's not what i want to do notice that there is an optional path to if i select that and click the other side and press enter now it's going to try and create an alignment between them i can now set to my minimum radius for curve detection i'm going to keep the default setting for that since i'm creating this first stream i'm not going to worry about having it try and you know understand or create spirals don't worry about the stylization or the labeling right now i don't need to show the report or labels in the end i'll come down and click ok before i do let me mention that this is kind of an iterative process if you don't get exactly what you want the first time through maybe you can adjust this number a little bit maybe you can adjust the weeding options to get a better result when i click ok i can see in this case i've got a very nice centerline alignment and this is created from legitimate geometry i could go into the geometry editor and i could make changes to this a real quick way to calculate something like that let me push this up i wish i could say that that method is going to function perfectly with every geometry type or configuration that you may come up with unfortunately the more complicated geometry gets the harder it is to solve something like that as an example i've got some additional geometry on screen here i'm going to say create best fits and i will select entities going to do the exact same settings that i did last time i'll select my two paths and then no spirals no report no labels and when i click ok you can see in this case that's not what i want the geometry is getting a little too complicated for that to figure it out let me undo this let's look at a low-tech way to solve a high-tech problem this is the way we solve this type of thing in the old days i have polylines in this case if i select this polyline just imagine if this polyline was set to an elevation of 700 i press escape and then just imagine if this polyline was set to an elevation of 702 if i was to create a surface between these two objects civil3d could calculate the 701 contour which should fall between them let's do that i'm going to launch the surfaces command i'll say create surface i will call this surface stream and i will change the style let's go with proposed one and five for this and then i'm gonna go to the modify ribbon tab i would like to modify a surface i would like to add data i'm gonna add contours i will then tap my spacebar because i've got multiple surfaces in this file i'll choose the surface i want to modify stream and then notice we have the supplementing and the weeding factors just like we did for best fit i'm going to keep the defaults here just make it simple and then i will select this object and this one and press enter that creates my surface i will then select the surface and from the contextual ribbon i will choose extract from surface i want to extract objects i want to extract a minor contour not all of them just one from the drawing i'll click the green block and i will select this one and press enter i will then click ok that surface is still selected i'll press delete because i no longer need it and you can see i now have a polyline that represents the midline between these objects admittedly it's not perfect i could now turn around and use the best fit alignment through this entity to get me closer depending on how far off this is i can also go through and make any unnecessary adjustments so this is another way to find the midpoint between objects when you have complicated geometry let's ban this up this time we're going to look at some shortcuts for navigating our interface maybe i would like to calculate a surface profile for this alignment if i select the alignment anytime you select an object in civil 3d at the end of the contextual ribbon you'll find a panel called launchpad launchpad is what civil3d uses to anticipate what you might want to do next in fact i used this option in the last tip i used the extract surface objects from surface that was in the launch pad here when i select an alignment it anticipates that i may wish to create a service profile so i'm going to create surface profile i would like to sample through the existing ground surface now you know i've got multiple services you may wonder how does he know that's existing around i could pick it using that green block if i wanted to let me click add i'll choose draw on profile view create profile view and then i will place this over here so just using the launch pad i was able to sample that surface profile in a couple clicks maybe i'd like to create a finished grade profile if i select the profile view from the launch pad i can go right to profile creation tools just two clicks and i'm there i can accept the default name and stylization let me click ok note the toolbar here is virtually identical to what we use for an alignment i'm going to use similar commands here i'm just going to use the draw tangents with curves and let's go from the endpoint here and then we'll we'll just pick some points and we'll draw this quickly on screen there we go so there's my finished grade profile i was able to access that in like two clicks just using that launch pad let's close this dialog box i'm going to delete this profile and let's look at another method i can create best fit profiles as well just like i came with alignments now unfortunately that particular tool is not in the launchpad so i'm going to go back to the home tab i would like to create a best fit profile through this surface profile we'll assume that this is the surface for the center line of the road that was calculated from survey points and i'd like to kind of clean this up clean up the geometry to do a proposed finished grade roadway center line elevation if i go to the profile menu i can say create best fit profile if i select my profile view very similar dialog box what we have with alignments all i have to do is select my entities or my input type in this case i'm best fitting through a surface profile note the other options that we have i can then adjust my weeding options in this case i am going to make some modifications if you've ever sampled a surface profile you know that there's a ton of vertices in this entity i'd like to weed some of those out so i'm going to use the weeding option and the way weeding works if you turn this on it allows you to enter an angle this is a deflection angle and if we come over here the way this functions if i have two entities that create a deflected angle of this amount or less it will eliminate or ignore the vertex between them and essentially treat that as a straight line so that's how we can weed out grips in this case i'm just going to use a small angle just 0.1 and then i can also supplement as well now supplementing supplementing's not going to help me here but supplementing helps if i'm creating a tin surface and i've got segments that are quite long without a lot of vertices what this does is i can say this distance 30 feet if i have a segment that is 30 feet or longer go ahead and triangulate or find a vertex in between those points okay not necessary in this case good for tens but not for this i'm going to go ahead and leave the weeding on let me click ok and then the surface profile i'm sampling is the only one that i have in this profile view i've got a maximum radius for curve detection just keeping it simple i'm accepting all the defaults here i want parabolic curves the only thing i am going to do is change the style here i'm going to go with the proposed style no reports no labels when i click ok you can see that civil 3d created a best fit profile through my surface profile to kind of clean this up for me and this is legitimate profile geometry this is as though i created it using the layout tools if i select that profile and go up to geometry editor and then click the green ball to bring up the tabular editor in fact i don't even have to go that far if i want to remove some of these pis for instance i can use this delete pi option and say you know what that's kind of redundant maybe i could take that one out too i could come around here and say you know what maybe maybe that one's not necessary heck maybe that one's not necessary so if i had a long stretch of roadway here i could use this best fit option to go through and clean things up for me rather than trying to trace it manually and i can make adjustments as necessary also note that if i was to use the layout tools i have the ability to create best fit on a segment by segment basis both tangent and curve fixed floating and free let's look at another option on my screen i have an alignment let's say this alignment is tied to a subdivision design we're going to look at how we can do some design checks with our geometry if i select the alignment i can come up to the alignment properties and here on the design criteria tab we've got this toggle where i can say i'd like to use criteria based design if you've ever used this before you've probably turned this on because you've wanted to use the design criteria files this is where i could select an xml file that represents the ash toe tables that i'd like to use for super elevation notice down here that there is another toggle that says use design check set this is where we can define or check our own standards that are over and above what ashton may define for example you may have municipal standards for subdivisions that say that for a new subdivision the tangent segments need to be at least 150 feet long and maybe the radius at the center line of the road on a curve needs to be at least 200 feet i can go through and set standards so that if i violate those standards civil 3d will warn me visually on screen let's look at how we can do that i'm going to hit cancel here for a second if i come over to the settings tab this is where all of our settings are stored i'm going to expand the alignment category and i'll come down to design checks and in here you can see the various components with respect to an alignment that i can check and in this template i don't have any checks set up i'm going to create some new ones here i'm going to right click on line and i'd like to create a new line check for the name i'll say that this needs to be greater than or equal 150 feet tangent required i like to be very descriptive in my design check names and we'll see why here in a little bit since i'm descriptive in the name i really don't need a description here since i'm checking line segments if i open this menu you can see these are all of the aspects with respect to a line that i can check i would like to validate the length the length needs to be greater than or equal to 150 feet let's click ok let's do one for the curve as well let's say that we have a minimum radius length of 200 feet i will create a check for that we'll say greater than or equal 200 foot radius required i'm not going to put a description on that since i'm checking a curve here's my list of items associated with arcs i'm going to choose radius greater than or equal to 200 feet now if i expand this other item here you can see you can make the math here in these expressions as simple or as complicated as you would like let me click ok now that i've created a couple checks what we'll do is we'll create a check set this way i can assign multiple checks to a single alignment and in this particular template i've got a check set here i'm going to create a new one for this example i'll right click on the header and choose new and i'm going to call this check set subdivisions so this would be the checks that i would assign to the alignments if they're associated with the subdivision and now that i've created the set i can go through and you can see the same categories here that we have here so i can go shopping under the line category for the requirement that i want i want the one i created called greater than or equal to 150 feet and then i want the curve greater than or equal to 200 feet i'd like to add that to my check set let me click ok perfect now let's assign that to this alignment if i select the alignment i will come up to alignment properties and i would like to use criteria based design however i'm not going to be grabbing xml files or tables for the astro standards instead i would just like to use my municipal check set i'll expand this i'll choose subdivisions and i'll click ok and no warnings so that's good i can see that my geometry doesn't violate those standards if however i grab this radius here and i pull this out you can see that if i drag it too far i now get this warning we can also see a greater than or equal 150 foot tangent required that's why i'm descriptive because it's very intuitive here in the tooltips if i drag this curve down i get another warning saying that greater than or equal to 200 foot radius required now how can we fix this we've seen that if i select my alignment and go to the geometry editor i can go to the tabular editor here and in the tabular editor i can see my check set warnings down at the end currently the radius for this arc is 73 feet i know that that needs to be at least 200 feet so i will select that curve and then i will change its radius to 200 which takes away that warning now i i can't enter a new line length or a new tangent length through here because this length is dictated by the radius of those two arcs i'm going to change the incoming radius here to this has to be 200 feet or greater i'm going to make it 250 feet and i'll press enter and that creates a longer tangent segment which now eliminates that other warning so as i'm editing my geometry civil 3ds keeping track of it with respect to those design checks and it's ensuring that i'm not violating any standards now let's talk about how we can create some stylization i like to create what i call working styles working styles makes it easier for me when i'm editing my design as an example if i select this alignment i'm going to come over to the properties and i'm going to change its style i've got one that i created called layout and if i assign that and zoom in with this layout style i have chosen to colorize the components of this alignment to make them easy to identify i can easily see the lines the spirals and the curves note that i'm also displaying arrows that show me the direction of these entities this can be real helpful when i'm joining entities together or selecting objects because if my for some reason my stationing stops at a particular area and i wonder why i can look to make sure usually it's because i've got an entity that i've connected to that's facing in the other direction so this is a great working style that i can apply to alignments when i'm doing my design work because it just visually makes it easy for me to see things if i select this alignment we can take a look at the style i'll right click on this and i will go to edit alignment style and you can see that when i created the style here on the display tab i just said that for lines curves and spirals i would like to use three different colors the nice thing about working styles is the layer you use the color you use line type none of it matters because it's not supposed to plot you set working styles up so that they've got nice contrast on screen makes it easier for you to work you can also see that i have applied a line weight to these once again they're never going to plot so it doesn't matter since i applied a line weight to these if i come down and click the line weight button to display the line weights here in model space that makes it really easy to see on screen i create these working styles not just for alignments but for profiles surfaces anything because it makes it easy to work on the design and then i can flip it to a plottable style when i'm done since we're talking about stylization let's talk about the match prop tool match prop is an autocad command but i can use this to pass stylization from one civil 3d object to another if i choose match prop i will select my alignment and you can see the paint brush i can go up and select another alignment to apply that style to this one now i did it with alignments but try it with other civil 3d objects great tool for passing stylization from one object to another okay let's look at another shortcut here i'm going to jump to a different drawing we're going to look at some shortcuts that we can apply to our template to reduce picks and clicks i jump to this drawing because this drawing was created from the generic stock civil 3d template that comes out of the box so this has just all the default settings and i want to show you a couple things here that can save time on my screen i have a polyline i'd like to turn this into an alignment so we've seen this i'm going to go to alignment create a line from objects i will select this and i'll press enter i'll press enter in the dialog box notice there's this toggle that says add curves between tangents that's on by default and it used to drive me nuts every time i made an alignment from objects i always went through and unchecked that because i don't want you changing the geometry or doing anything i drew it the way i wanted it i don't need you making any adjustments to this did you know you can pre-populate the settings in these dialog boxes let's do this i'm going to close that and if i come over to the settings tab let me do this first i'm going to press f2 here i just want to show you that if we review my command line history that command that i just ran is called create alignment entities keep that command in mind if i go to the settings tab under alignment down the very bottom there's a commands option here if i expand this you can see every command associated with alignments in civil 3d there's that command i just launched if i double-click on this i can pre-load the settings for this command not just this command but every command in civil 3d notice that some of the options in this dialog box have a icon with a wrench these are the settings in the dialog box create from entities i'm going to expand that add curves between tangents currently that's set to true i'm going to set this to false and i'll click ok this be the type of thing that you'd set in your template from now on whenever i create an alignment from objects i will never have to deselect that box again let me also mention that in that same dialog box you can pre-load your styles and your labels as well very valuable tool there you can do that for every command let's go ahead and complete that create alignment from objects i will select this and i'm going to call this alignments let's call it main street and i'll click ok let's look at another option i would like to pull a surface profile for this so we've seen if i select the alignment i can come up to the launch pad choose surface profile i'd like to use the mainstream alignment to sample the existing ground surface when i click add it used to tear my hair out i always wanted to name this you can see no matter how many times i click there it does not give me the ability to name that surface profile until i actually complete the command and then i have to go do that later instead let me remove this and i'll cancel i'm going to have the template name this for me coming back over to settings i'm going to expand the profile category and i'll come down to commands notice there's an option here create profile from surface let's double click in the dialog box just like with the other ones there's an option here for default name format let me expand this profile name template let's click i'll click the ellipsis button here's the default template that's being used for the name of your profiles i'm going to press delete to take that out i would prefer that these profiles are named based on the alignment name let's insert that and then i would like a dash and then i would like to add the sampled surface name after that let's click insert this is more logical this is going to be automatic and it'll be the same for everybody let me click ok and okay from now on if i select my alignment and i go to surface profile and do my sampling you can see it's got a nice logical name now main street dash existing ground let's draw on profile view create profile view now this is going to look different because we're using the default template not the same as what we saw earlier if i hover over this profile now we can see its name one more thing if i select the profile view and go to profile creation tools i don't necessarily like the naming by default that we get for our finished grade profiles let's pre-name these as well if i come over to create profile layout and double-click default name format profile name template let me click on this i'll click the ellipsis button i'm going to delete what's there i would prefer that my finished grade profiles are usually finished grades what i create first i would like them to start with the alignment name dash fg okay now that may not be correct in every situation but that's going to be correct in 90 of my situations and i can always change it if i have to in the command itself but for right now this is going to cover almost every time i create a profile let's click ok so i could do that in my template let me select this and now if i go to profile creation tools i can see this is going to be named nicely i'll click ok and then we'll just do a couple of quick segments here and if i hover over this i can see this is nicely named main street dash fg can't emphasize this enough make your template work for you the more work you do on the template the less work you have to do on every drawing file that you work on okay time's running short one last thing i want to show you here is with respect to organization i'm going back to the first drawing here if we go to the prospector tab this is where we can see all the data that's in our file if i expand the alignments category centerline alignments you can see that i've generated a lot of alignments today did you know that we can organize alignments into groups just to further simplify things to make it easier to find what we need even though this is already organized to centerline alignments i may have centerline alignments associated with roads or utilities or swales or you know grading or something like that if i right click on a header i can choose create folder i'm going to create a folder called utilities and i'll click ok let's say that all of these alignments starting with the word alignment here are utility alignments i can select one hold my shift key and select another and then i can click hold and drag those into the utility folder now i have nice little collapsible categories here maybe i could create another folder for roadway we'll call this roadway and i'll click ok and then i will grab both of these and i will drag these in so i can very easily organize the data that's in my file if we look down here if i right click on surfaces for instance you can see that you can create folders organizing your shortcuts as well now i wish that we could apply folders to every category if you're wondering which categories support folders it's all of the categories that are displayed down here beneath data shortcuts so we can do with services pressure networks pipe networks corridors by creating folders you can simplify and make it easier to navigate the data in your models all right we're dangerously close to the end here i'm going to jump back over to my powerpoints so today we looked at a ton of tips and tricks associated with alignments and profiles by all means if you try a particular tip or workflow with an alignment try it with a profile and vice versa because those objects are looked at very similarly at this point i'm ready to address any questions

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 7,052

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, alignment, profile, tip, trick, shortcut, criteria, check, best fit, solve pi

Id: SmOlQLXDYoo

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021