Displaying Civil 3D Corridor Targets Inside the Section Editor!

welcome to the relaunch of the 30 minute workout webinar series my name is jeff bartles and i'm an infrastructure technical specialist here at autodesk today i'm joined by my colleagues jerry bartles and angel espinosa as a side note alan gilbert will also be participating in these sessions however he wasn't able to attend today we're excited to have angel and allen on board and we look forward to their insights and their unique tips tricks and workflows as we go forward in addition to having some new faces on the team we also plan on expanding our horizons and exploring more civil infrastructure applications in the coming months we'll be exploring everything from civil 3d to map 3d infraworks vehicle tracking recap and others so keep an eye open for that today's session we're going to look at how we can make civil 3d corridor targeting more graphical now if you're unfamiliar with a 30 minute workout concept i'm sure you'll agree if you've ever taken a civil 3d course in the past there's never enough time to cover everything the application has to offer usually courses focus on the need to know functionality what do you need to know to do your job the other tools features and workflows are the type of things that you just pick up over a lifetime using the application so we put together these workouts as a way to have an opportunity to demonstrate some of these lesser discussed features and provide a resource for folks using civil 3d in this case such that they can make the most of their autodesk investment we have a couple ground rules for the sessions first of all the examples that we show are going to be abstract in nature and we do that on purpose by looking at things in an abstract way we can focus solely on how a tool functions once you understand how a tool works you can apply it in whatever situation works best for you since we're only together for 30 minutes we will always start on time and end on time no need to worry about taking notes these sessions are always recorded anybody who has registered for the session will get access to a recording if you have questions during the session go ahead and put those in the q a pane jerry and angel will be fielding those as we go if there are any remaining questions we will address those at the end uh in the event we don't have time and there are questions left we will get back to you with an answer one more thing if you'd like to have a one-on-one follow-up call with one of us regarding the topics that we talk about during these sessions go ahead and put that in the chat area we always enjoy scheduling those sessions and speaking with other users just a quick agenda for today's session we're going to start out by looking at how we can make the section editor work harder for us in hindsight that may have been a better title for this session because that's exactly what we're going to do we're going to look at how we can make our targets and potential targets display within the section editor things like alignments and profiles feature lines and survey figures to do that we'll look at how we can optimize the section editor settings we'll be adjusting the viewport display we'll look at how we can control the properties of the grid i'll also show you how you can save those settings to a template if you'd like to use those in future drawings we'll look at how we can optimize some of the object styles in civil 3d to predictably display potential targets within the section editor and then i will show you how we can adjust the display of those items using toggles finally i've got bonus content there i've kind of held a few things back in the event we get to everything on that list that i want to talk about today we can always get into the bonus items if not we can just push those bonus items to a future session as always this is going to be a powerpoint free zone we will be working live in the application for the duration of our time together today all right our housekeeping is taken care of let me drop out of this as you can see i am working in civil 3d 2022 having said that everything that we look at today is going to work regardless of the version of civil 3d that you happen to be using i'm going to start by doing a quick tour of this drawing in this file i've got an existing ground surface called eg and i have a corridor model representing a simple roadway design if you zoom in here we can see that i've got some alignments in this file i've got an alignment called row a that represents the center line i also have a pair of alignments that represent the left and right right away geometry if we pan the drawing over we can see the profiles that i've created for the center line of the road here's my finished grade profile and here's my surface profile that i sampled if i pan the drawing up we can see here the assembly that i'm using for my corridor generally speaking it's a pair of lanes i've got a shoulder on either side and i've got a daylight max width that i'm using on either side let's pan the drawing up so all those items come together to create this corridor model currently my corridor is displayed using kind of a minimalist approach i like to call this a plottable style i'm basically just showing the longitudinal geometry of this corridor since the corridor selected if i wanted to i could come over here and change its style to kind of a working style so that we could see the assembly insertions in there that's what i would typically do if i was editing my corridor but to keep things simple on screen i'm going to go with more of a plotable style for right now you can see the longitudinal geometry that i'm displaying is basically the edge of traveled way i've got the edge of the paved shoulder and i've got a dashed line here that represents the limits of my daylight so going to be talking about targeting today let's target something i'm going to open my layer list and i've got a layer here called target alignment i'm going to turn that on on this layer i have an offset alignment i would like to use this offset alignment to drive the width of my right lane in the roadway here to assign that target i am going to select my corridor and then from the contextual ribbon i'll choose edit targets i will then click within this region this is the region i want to edit i just have the one region in this case this will be a width target so i will look in that category of settings and i'm going to find the lane on the right side and i would like to map that to an alignment and i'll choose my offset alignment now even if you can't remember the name of the alignment we can always use the green block here and we can pick the alignment on screen let's click add to add that as a target and then i'll click ok and okay and when i do you can see how my corridor is updated it's now using that target to drive the width of the right lane now that i've made those adjustments let's take a look at the section editor the corridor is still selected i'm going to come up to the contextual ribbon and i'll bring up the section editor and we'll take a closer look at some of the things that we can see here notice that in addition to my corridor i'm also seeing my alignment geometry and it has a consistent look and feel as the alignment that we see here in the plan view same goes for my offset alignment same goes for my profiles you can see there's my proposed profile and my existing ground surface profile that are associated with this center line alignment by having these display it gives me a more visual approach to my targeting i'm going to lock my view here i just pan this down let me open this menu and i'll choose zoom to an offset and elevation that'll kind of lock this view on screen as i step through the assembly insertions now if you remember that alignment takes and widens things as i come over you can see how the lane moves over so in addition to seeing the lane move i can also see the target that it's following i can hover over that and get the name of it if i want so this allows me to see my targeting in context with my corridor when i'm viewing it in the section editor so it helps me it also helps anybody that comes along behind me uh that may get into this drawing and not be familiar with it they can have all these visual cues to understand which objects are targeting which linear or uh profiles things like that let's take this a little bit further but let me also mention here i can i know that this target happens to be width only because if there were profiles associated with this alignment i would see the symbols much like i see over here let's create some profiles for this alignment just as an example i'm going to select my widening there and from the contextual ribbon i'll choose surface profile i'd like to use this alignment to sample the existing ground surface i'll click draw on profile view create profile view and then i will place the profile view over here to the right so there's my surface profile for that right side lane let's create a finished grade profile for this as well i'm going to select the grid and from the ribbon i'll choose profile creation tools i'll keep the default settings here and i'll click ok i'm just going to create a simple proposed profile in this case let me zoom in and we'll start the finished grade a little bit higher than the existing and then i'll come down and we'll set a pdi and then i'll come down and i'll place this to the end there we go after making those profiles let's go right back to the section editor if i select my corridor and come back to section editor immediately you can see those profiles are now displaying as part of this alignment let's now tie the up the edge of pavement here we'll tie that to that finished grade elevation i'm going to target that if i select my corridor and go to edit targets i can click inside this region that's what i want to edit and this is going to be an elevational target in this case so i'm going to look for the lane on the right side and i would like to map that to a profile that's associated with my offset alignment we'll tie that to the finished grade profile let me click add and okay and okay corridor updates if we go back into the section editor it's very easy to see now as i step through my sections as i step through my sections not only can i see that that lane is following that alignment from its width for its width property i can see that it's getting its elevation from that profile okay very very easy looking at this very visual approach graphical approach it allows me to see my targets and potential targets in context with my design what i'd like to do for the remainder of our session i'm going to show you how we can set this up in civil 3d so let me close the section editor and i'm sure that all of us have different template settings uh everybody's temple settings are always a little bit different so what i've done i'm going to jump to a different drawing here this is basically the same drawing but i went through and assigned all of the settings that i would need to accomplish that prior workflow i assigned all the default settings so this is going to force me to go through and have to make changes to those and by doing this it'll show you everything that you need to know to set this up on your end should you want to do that all right first thing i'm going to do we'll take a look at the section editor i'm going to select my corridor and then from the textual ribbon i'll bring up the section editor what we see on screen is the default settings that we get the with when it comes to the section editor if we're using civil 3d right out of the box you can see the viewport configuration is using four views personally i'm i'm not one that likes to or necessarily needs to see the assembly when i'm editing my corridor so this is a view that for me is unnecessary everybody's got their own personal preferences but let me show you how i can configure this and eliminate this extra view in the section editor if i come up to the view tools panel i can choose viewport configuration this is how we can control the the way the screen is divvied up on the left side of the screen here in the layout menu we've got some pre-loaded settings i'm going to choose three above this gives me a nice large viewport on top viewport one i'm gonna say i want viewport one to display my section and then viewport2 in the lower left i want that to view the plan view and viewport three in the lower right i want this to view my profile when i click ok we can see that looks a little bit better i'd like to make another adjustment currently the grid that we see in the section view is using the default settings that you get out of the box with civil 3d i'd like to adjust this because in in my opinion the grid is a little bit aggressive it's kind of hard to see my geometry as i zoom in and out the grid squares change and things like that so i'm going to show you some adjustments that we can make that i believe makes this a little bit easier to see when we're in the section editor in the view tools panel i'm going to choose view edit options this is where we can adjust the properties of this section view particularly the grid and let me also reiterate the changes that i make here or my own personal preferences you can adjust yours however you like first setting i'm going to change is the adaptive grid that's what allows the grid squares to resize as we zoom in and out i'm going to turn that feature off when i come down we can see the properties for the major and minor grid lines currently i in my opinion i believe those are a little too bright so i'm going to set the minor grid lines to 252. we'll make those darker major grid lines going to set those to 252 as well display the center axis i really don't need to see the center axis this will compete with my alignment geometry so i'm going to say no in that case center axis color doesn't matter because we're not displaying it text color that's the labels around the outside these are a little bright i'm going to push these back we'll make those 252 and then text height my eyes are getting a little old so i'm going to make the text larger we'll make that three percent and then a couple more things if we come down to the bottom here we can see the color of the sliders that are used here in plan view and profile i can see that in the plan view it's white and in the profile view it's yellow those are actually those have good contrast one of the nice things about the settings that we see here they're not plottable so you can go through and pick out the the properties that look best on screen let's click ok and when i do i can see that looks much better in my opinion than it did before i've got much better contrast now i can still see the grid i can still see the numbers and i've got a much nicer view of my corridor and my existing ground surface let's close the section editor from now on whenever i'm working in this drawing every time i return to the section editor it's going to show me the settings that i've assigned after seeing that you may be wondering well that works great but what if i want to assign those settings to my template how can we do that i'm going to open a template drawing here quickly let's just go to open and i'll select dwt i'm going to grab the default template that comes with civil 3d so normally we get into the section editor by selecting a corridor i obviously don't have a chord or here in my template but what i can do i go to the modify ribbon tab i can say i want to modify a corridor and here in the contextual ribbon if i click the bottom half of the section editor icon from here i can jump into the viewport configuration you can see how it defaults to the four views i can also go to the same place to bring up the view edit options so here's where i can dial up the settings i'd like to use for the section editor save those as part of my template and they will apply to all future drawings that are created let's close this and i'm going to return to my file let's bring back the section editor again so now that we have a good view of our corridor let's look at how we can view alignments how can we make our alignments display within the section editor to do that i am going to edit my alignment style and there's a lot of ways you can edit styles in civil 3d if you come over to the settings tab here for alignments for instance if you know where it is you can go to alignment styles and find it and double click to make changes otherwise even quicker i can select the alignment from here right click and from the ribbon i can say let's edit the style that's assigned to this alignment this is considered an object style all object styles in civil 3d have a display tab this controls the display of the object and when it comes to alignments if i come down to the components you can see the components that make up the alignment line curve spiral extensions warning symbols i can control what's visible and i can control the layer property and the general properties notice that when it comes to these styles they are dependent on view the settings that i have here are perfect for the plan view which is what we see down here i'm going to open view direction and i'm going to say that i would like to control how this alignment is viewed from a section view which is what we have here i'm going to say that i would like the alignment to be visible and i'm going to use the same layer properties that are being used in the plan view just to keep things consistent so i will come down to pr propose centerline road i'll grab that layer and click ok everything else is by layer let's click apply okay looking looking good looks very similar to what i have the only thing i'm not seeing is the line type it's taking the line type from the layer the the biggest difference that we have here is this distance is quite a bit shorter than the distances that we see down here so to make the line type show up i need to set the lt scale a little bit smaller i'm going to make this .05 as an example and when i click ok you can see how that now shows up here so this gives me a nice visual cue that i can identify that alignment in both places and you can feel free to adjust the lt scale to whatever settings work best for you if i wanted to do the same thing for my offset alignment i could grab this right click edit alignment style you can see from a plan view the layers that i'm using from a section view just to make this a little bit faster i've already grabbed the layer all i have to do is turn that on when i click ok that now displays let's do as long as we're at it let's do one more we'll do the right away geometry i'll grab the right away alignment i'll right click and say edit alignment style we can see the layers being used there for the plan view i'll go to section as courtesy i jumped in and did that already i'm just going to turn these on i've already set the lt scale for these and when i click ok and back up you can see my right away alignments are displaying so just by adjusting the alignment properties or the alignment style you can control which alignments will show up in your section editor so this i've done it in this drawing you can also do this in your template if you want it to to be this way in future drawings now that we've seen how to do alignments let's look at how to do profiles how can i make profiles display in the section editor to do that i am going to adjust the profile layer lay um object style i will select the profile here once again i could come find it over here if i want to but even faster i can grab the profile right click and say edit profile style just like with an alignment this is an object style it has a display tab we can see that the display properties here for all of the components of our profile currently it's set for the profile view direction which is what we see here i can see the layers that are being used for the various components i would like to use similar settings for when this profile is viewed in section view so i'll choose section view and i'll set that to visible and then i'm going to pick the same layer we'll come down and we'll grab that pr road center line profile and i'll click ok at this point if i click apply notice nothing happens all i've really done here is i've said you know the layer settings and the properties that i would like my symbol to have or my marker to have where do we set the marker we do that using this markers tab if you've ever created a profile style before you know the markers tab is typically used to control the markers that you see here in the profile view we can set markers at the pvi locations at the beginning and ending of the profile places like that if i drag this all the way to the bottom i have the opportunity to assign a marker for when this profile is displayed in section view so i'm going to come down to marker style let me click this is where i can assign a marker style i'm going to create a brand new one let's look at that i'll open the menu here and i'll choose create new i want to make a brand new style for the name i'm going to call this ads k dash profile and then in brackets i'll write section editor so i'll know what this is used for i'll go to the marker tab this is where i can control the appearance of the marker i can create a marker using autocad points or i can toggle these items here to create a custom marker if i have a block in the file i could use that for a marker all those are possible opportunities we have there i'm going to choose use custom marker and i'm going to choose the x and the circle we can adjust the rotation here if we want to for the size of this marker i'm going to leave this set to drawing scale and remember in the view here this geometry is quite small so i'm going to use a small size i'm going to make this .0125 inches one more thing let's go to the g to the display tab a marker style can also be controlled visually you know display wise for the different views so it's kind of like having a style within a style what i'm going to do is for this marker i'm going to go to the display tab and i'm going to say in the section view i want the marker to be visible and then for the properties i'm going to leave this set to layer 0 and then all of the other properties i'm going to set to by layer any one that i can i'm going to set the by layer i do this because when you create a marker like this markers work just like a traditional autocad block now autocad block if you ever created a block we may do a couple sessions on blocks here in the future if you draw your geometry on layer 0 and you convert that geometry into a block that block will assume the properties of any layer that it's inserted on so rather than having 10 identical block symbols that all have different properties for colors we can create one universal block by drawing it on layer 0 and it will assume the properties of the layer that it's inserted on put it on a red layer it'll be red put it on a layer with a dashed line type it'll have a dashed line type that's basically what i'm saying here i'm making this a universal marker i'm saying it'll be as though it was drawn on layer 0. let me click ok and okay so i've chosen the marker that i want to use in the profile view if i go to the display tab here this is where the marker is going to get the display properties when i click ok and zoom in we can see how that profile now displays in the section editor we could do the same thing for the existing profile i'm going to right click on that and say edit profile style for the view direction of section i've already set the layer for that let me just turn that to visible and for the marker i'm going to come down and i'm going to choose that universal marker that i just made we'll go to autodesk profile section editor there we go so it's a universal style that's going to assume the properties that i've assigned right here when i click ok now i can see that profile and it has a consistent look and feel to what we can see here in the profile view okay just by doing that i can very easily see alignments and profiles displayed within the section editor and it's easier to tell if i have objects that are targeting those now after seeing that let me close this after seeing that you may be saying well you know we that works great but there are other objects that we can target i can target feature lines i can also target survey figures how can i get those to show up we'll look at that i have got a layer in this file that's got a feature line on it i'm going to turn that on and let me drag the drawing over so here i've got a feature line it's using the style grading edge and i would like to use this feature line as a target for my day lighting let's do that i'm going to select the corridor and then i will come up and choose edit targets i'd like to edit targets in this region and this is going to be a width target so i will find the daylight on the right side of the road and i would like to map that to a feature line and i'll choose the feature line from the drawing i'll select that i'll click ok and ok which updates my corridor you can see how it's now tied to that feature line geometry knowing that we're going to go back to the section editor and i am going to drag this slider over just before we get to that feature line and let's zoom this in and we'll use the zoom to an offset and elevation to kind of lock that view on screen as i step through the assembly insertions now eventually once we get to right there we can see that it's targeting that feature line but it would be nice if i could see a symbol for that then i'd be able to identify what it's targeting here in the section editor view to display that feature line we're going to use a similar workflow i'm going to come down and select feature line i'll right click and from here i'll choose edit feature line style if you remember the feature line style that's being used is called grading edge this is an object style as well feature lines are a little more complex than an alignment or a profile alignments or profiles are considered 2d feature line is 3d so it actually supports more view directions we can see from the plan view the feature line geometry is visible and it's this is the the property of the geometry and we can see the other properties there if i come down to section i can say i want in a section view i would like to see a crossing marker notice though that these items are grayed out it won't let me adjust these any time that you see settings like this associated with a component in civil 3d it means these settings are controlled someplace else or they must be controlled someplace else let's keep that in mind for right now we're just going to turn that on let's go to the section tab this is where i can pick the marker that i'd like to use much like we did with a profile so here's the marker style i'm going to come down and select that same universal marker that we looked at a second ago let me choose that and i'm going to click edit and then from the display tab i'll set this to section so if you remember on the display tab for the feature line it it didn't let us adjust those properties it said those properties need to be controlled someplace else well one place i could control it is here i could take and assign those properties here on the marker now i don't want to do it with this marker because i'm already using this marker for my profiles i'd have to create another style and and i could assign the properties here and that would work if however i'd like to continue to use this universal option basically i'm saying assume the properties of the layer you're inserted on let's do that let me click ok and this particular feature line style isn't letting me assign those styles the styles are then defined by the object layer that the feature line is sitting on let me show you that let's click ok you can see the marker displays if i come over to my layer settings here this oh we can see it even better down here if i hover over the feature line you can see the layer that it's sitting on target feature line here with my layer settings i can set this to maybe we'll set the layer to yellow okay or if i set this to green okay a little different than a profile but not difficult just just uh understanding of where you're going to assign those properties you can assign it at the marker level or you can take an assign it or have it assigned automatically based on the layer that the feature line is sitting on one more thing if we wanted to talk about survey figures the workflow is going to be similar here on the settings tab i don't have a survey figure in this drawing but if i come down to survey figures figure styles if i double click to edit this figure style on the display tab if we go to the section view direction you can see it's the same i can just determine the markers visible but you can see i don't have access to adjust its properties so the properties would have to be controlled elsewhere i would either control them here at the marker level i would i could control them here with the marker in fact i could use the same marker here that we we did if i want to do it universal if if i do it choose to do it universal then i would be controlling these settings based on the layer that the survey figure is sitting on okay one more thing as you add items to the section view you can see i've done this for just a couple targets you may have some concerns well you know in a complex design i may have a lot of items on screen maybe this could get busy if it does that's what this setting is for if we come up to the view tools panel i can open display objects and here's where i have a very granular list of settings that i can control what displays in the section editor for instance i can turn off all the alignments you can see the alignments no longer display i can go through and i can also turn off profiles and feature lines how about we turn off the profiles and feature lines and i only want to see the offset alignments let me click ok you can see those display on the screen all right so by adopting this approach we can go through if we want to and control the display of those objects those those targets and potential targets on a more granular level okay we are dangerously close to the top of the hour let me jump back to my powerpoints so during today's session we looked at how we could make the section editor work harder for us i showed you how you can actually have your targets and potential targets displaying in the section editor things like alignments profiles feature lines we also saw how we could do it with survey figures we looked at how we can optimize the section editor by adjusting the viewport configuration and the properties of the grid i showed you how you could adjust those settings and save those to a template for future use we also looked at how we could optimize the styles of the object styles within civil 3d so we could predictably display alignments and profiles and feature lines and things like that within the section editor and then i showed you how you could adjust the display toggles in the section editor can to have granular control over those individual items okay due to the interest time i'm going to say that any questions that have not yet been answered during today's session we will get back to you with an answer let me say on behalf of jerry bartles angel espinosa alan gilbert and myself i want to say thank you so much for coming today we really value your time we hope that you find value in these sessions and we look forward to seeing you guys again in a couple weeks thanks

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 7,014

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, Section Editor, corridor, targets, advanced, display, tutorial, 30, workout, how

Id: E2azZ_rbwEw

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021