It is nice to come from behind the coding page and peek at some of the new features of C3D 2009. One of the new features that caught my eye was being able to set design criteria. What is it and how can it help you?

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While I do like the new modeless toolbars for both alignments and profiles in Civil 3D 2008, I do find three potential problems that users can sometimes encounter.

Read on to learn about why your buttons may go “gray” or other glitches.

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 In 2006 and 2007 we could show pipes that crossed into our structures in profile, but doing so was a manual process. 

Once you got the pipe crossing into profile, you had to give up on structure style part masking in order to see that coveted ellipse.

In Civil 3D 2008, we now can build showing those connected parts as part of our style- so they show up and adjust automatically AND they show up even if structure masking is set!

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Two years ago I taught a House of Style class at AU that spent almost the entire time discussing profiles and profile views. Up through 2007, getting these styles right was a pretty big headache. The sheer number of options, in conjunction with some pretty obtuse dialogs made for a lot of trial and error work in getting it just right. With 2008, the team in Manchester has drastically changed the interface for this monster, so let’s look at the improvements after the jump.

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We all have figured out the standard transparent commands by now for drawing lines by direction, etc.,  but there are a few buttons on this very handy toolbar that most people don’t take advantage of (myself included). 

I thought it would be worthwhile to take a short breather from the exciting world of 2008 previews and review some of these “From Plan to Profile” Transparent commands.

(I also have a little time to kill as I just sent a fly-through to render using WAAAY too many frames per second.)

Click more to learn about each command…. 

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So, I was grading a site and using a feature line to define the rear property lines along a row of lots. I then wanted to convert this feature to a Profile. Right-clicking on the feature line, I noted the option to create a Quick Profiles. Then inspiration struck.

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In Civil 3D 2006, when you did Pipes>Draw Parts in Profile View, the default was “Selected Parts Only”.  In Civil 3D 2007, the default is “Entire Network”.  What this means, is that unless I remember to type “S” for “Selected Parts Only”, I wind up with profile pipe spaghetti with every single pipe in my network trying to show itself on the selected Profile View.  Fixing this problem means that I sometimes wind up with Disappearing Pipes.

To make life easier on myself, I created a very fast tool palette button that remembers to press “S” for me.

Click more to find out how (it’s super easy)

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You’ve been slogging through your template creation and doing pretty well.  Then you get to Profile Bands. 

And you wind up with this (white text in your band):

When what you wanted was this (color by layer text in your band):

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Over the holidays, I took the opportunity to clean out my old files. In one of my old planners, I found my notes from a road design I did in June of 2004. There were about 20 pages of diagrams, sketches, ideas and most of all- record keeping.

I still keep lots of notes about my thoughts, typical sections and trial runs these days, but a good chunk of the checklists and record keeping that I used to do has been replaced by tools inside Civil 3D.

I thought it might be fun to show you some of the ways I used to solve design problems in my notes, and how you might want to leverage Civil 3D to help you do the same tasks now.

Click more to see my original notes from June 2004 when I was using Land Desktop, and ideas on how I tackle those tasks now.

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Ed Note: Steve Boon, the first of our guest contributors, weighs in on Alignment and Profiles. Please, let me know what you think! Should we bring him back for round two? It’s a tough room…. JW

You’ve built a really good roadway alignment – nice smooth curves with enough tangent between them to allow the superelevation to work, and a profile that balances your cuts and fills effectively. Great – but then the client wants you to “move the first PI over here, and change that radius.” After you have done this you have to go back and fix the profile because the length of the alignment has changed.

This problem has been annoying me for a long time now, and I have seen enough discussion group posts and wishlist requests to know that it is an issue for others. Autodesk may be working on a solution but in the meantime here is my workaround. I can’t take all of the credit – I actually stumbled into this because I was half asleep and misread one of Dana’s posts.

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