Creating Best Fit Profiles using Civil 3D

in this session we'll look at some ways to create best fit profiles on my screen I've got some geometry let's zoom in and take a look right here I've got an alignment called first Street I've also got an existing ground surface if I hover we can see that's called eg now just to simplify things I am displaying the surface using a border style only down below I've got a profile view in this view you can see the surface profile that I sampled for the existing ground surface using that first Street alignment let's assume I'm working on a road reconstruction project and this alignment represents the centerline of the existing route and this profile represents the elevation of the existing Road at the centerline to do the reconstruction I'm not going to be changing this profile much at all I'll just need to clean it up a little bit where necessary for that reason my proposed Road centerline profile is going to be very similar to the existing one to define my new profile I'll use the best-fit option I can find that here in the create design panel let me open the profile menu and I'll choose create best fit profile I will then select my profile view in the create best fit profile dialog box I can choose my input type what objects am I going to be best fitting through you can see some of the choices that we have here I'm going to choose surface profile when I do I also have the ability to do some weeding let me click weeding options generally speaking civil3d is going to try and duplicate this profile as closely as possible while simplifying the geometry it can do that by weeding out unnecessary vertices it can also add vertices where necessary in this case I'm going to accept the default where neither of these is checked and I'll click OK the nice thing about this dialog box is if I don't like my resulting profile I can always come back make some changes and run it again here we can see the surface profile that I'll be best fitting to it's the only profile I have down here we can see the maximum radius for curve detection once again I'm going to keep the default I can always raise or lower this number later if I don't like my results we're going to go with the parabola curve type you can see the other option that we have right here I can give my new profile a name I'm going to keep the default name for right now I am going to change the style let's make this the proposed profile style I will then come down and click OK at this point civil3d has created my new profile geometry and this best fit report shows me how close that geometry matches the existing profile we can see the various points that were sampled the station and elevation of those points here we can see the corresponding station and elevation along the new entity and we can see how much that new entity deviates from the original profile let me close this dialog box will zoom in and we'll take a look at the geometry as you can see this follow is really close let's pan this back one of the things I like about this profile is that it was created much like I would have created myself if I select the profile you can see that we have access to all the grips I can bring up the geometry editor let's bring up the tabular editor from here I could make changes to the PDI stations I could change elevations grade in grayed out vertical curves everything is editable let me close this for that reason I could make some modifications if I want to for instance I'm going to delete a couple of PBIS here at the beginning maybe those are redundant when I'm finished I'll press escape a couple times to deselect so if you want you could use this best fit profile as the starting point for a new profile now that we've seen this method I'm going to close the tool bar and I'll select this profile and I'll press Delete let's look at another way we can create best fit geometry I can also do it on a segment by segment basis once again I'll come back to the create design panel I'll open the profile menu and I'll choose profile creation tools I will then select my profile view in the dialog box so I can give my new profile a name it'll be called first Street space F G I'll put the word best fit on this as well I'm going to keep the default style and label set and I'll click OK in the toolbar if I open the tangent menu you can see we've got some best fit options here for fixed and floating if I open the vertical curve menu we've got best fit options for fixed floating and free vertical curves let's use these to create some best fit geometry I'm going to open the tangent menu first I'll choose fixed tangents best fit I can then select the objects I'd like to best fit through I could do kogo points and these or by clicking on screen I'm going to use that option I'll click OK and then I'm going to use my running object snap here to grab some points along this geometry and I'll press Enter this brings up a regression graph here I can see the points that I selected those points were used to create a tangent segment right here I can see how close that tangent segment matches the existing profile note that if I want to I could exclude points from this if that helps improve the geometry I can also force the entity to pass through selected points I can even increase the weight of certain points such that they influence the geometry more than other points as it is things look pretty good I'm going to go ahead and click Save and then I'll click the green check to close the panorama let's back up will create another change in segments I'm going to do that by clicking points on screen I'll click OK and then we'll see if we can run this entire length here with a single tangent there we go let me press ENTER offsets look pretty good I'm going to go ahead and click Save and close let's make one more I'll use that same fixed tangent option by clicking points on screen and then we'll create a single tangent from this area I'll click enter save and close now that I've created my tangent segments I can create best fit vertical curves I'll do that by opening the vertical curve menu and I'll choose free vertical curve best fit I do that because I want the vertical curve to be tangent to the incoming and outgoing segment I will then choose my first segment and my second i'd like to establish that best fit vertical curve by picking points on screen let me click OK and then I'll pick points along this arc I'll press ENTER I will then click Save and close let's do one more I'll Pan the silver best fit vertical curve first segment second segment I'll establish it by clicking points on screen let me click OK I'll pick a point here I'll pick some additional points around the arc and I'll press ENTER now in this case it doesn't match the arc as nice as I'd like maybe I'll exclude that first point there we go that looks a little bit better I'll click Save and close I will then back up and we can review the geometry now using this option the editing choices we have are a little more restrictive that's because the segments will want to retain their best fit status for example if I bring up the tabular editor now you can see that several of the values are grayed out I'm going to try and make a change for instance let's switch this grade out to one point eight zero and I'll press Enter you can see the warning that I get that's because it's trying to hold on to that best fit property let's click OK that being said if you would like to edit this geometry one way we can do it is by opening this menu and I can switch this from PVI based to entity based now we can see the geometry on an entity by entity basis just for a second I'm going to take my curves I'll slide all the way down to the end and I'm going to unlock those parameters let me drag this back I will then click the constraint type and I'm going to switch the curve from best fit to curve length I'll do that for both this frees up the vertical curve geometry I can now even these numbers out if I want to we'll make this curve and even 170 feet and we can make this curve and even 77 feet likewise I can make some changes to the tangent segments for example let's change this incoming grade to 1.80 when I press ENTER notice it'll accept that change however I will get a shield or a warning over here showing me that I'm deviating from my best fit if at any point I'd like to put this segment back to the best fit configuration I could click this shield for now I'm finished making changes I'll click the X to close the panorama in the big scheme of things if you'd like more flexibility in editing you could always use best fit segments to establish your vertical geometry and then swap them out later with traditional tangents of curves so the next time you need to create a proposed profile that closely matches an existing profile try experimenting with some of the best fit options using best fit you can quickly apply vertical geometry to an existing surface profile would you like to explore other Autodesk infrastructure ideas and workflows if so please visit the civil immersion blog by scanning the QR code or by following the URL listed below

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 84,390

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, best fit, profile, advanced, tutorial, learn, how to

Id: -VE957b29C4

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2017