From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

Alignments, profiles, and profile views - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

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Alignments, profiles, and profile views

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- [Instructor] As we get into vertical geometry, or profiles, it's good to understand the relationship that profiles have with Alignments. To demonstrate this, let's open up our exercise file for this video. Go to the Quick Access Toolbar, we got to chapter seven in 07_01 Relations. And what we have here is an Alignment profile, actually two of them, as well as a profile view. Profiles are really whatever the road or the Alignment represents, that linear path, as if the earth was cut at that linear path. So you need a linear path defined to create a profile. More than that, to properly show a profile, you need some means to view it. So Civil 3D was built on top of AutoCAD. AutoCAD's really focused on that Cartesian coordinate system, everything having an X,Y and Z value and profiles don't have that. They have a station and elevation for each portion of the geometry and so you need some way for the software to tell the CAD space that we're drawing in that this XYZ equals this station elevation. All of this goes back to the Alignment. The Alignment establishes the linear path. Since you can't have a profile cut along a linear path without that linear path established, profiles are children of an Alignment. If you erase the Alignment, the profiles go away as well. In addition, and we need some means to display those profiles on this Cartesian grid that we draw on in AutoCAD and thereby you have another Civil 3D object called a profile view. So you have the profile view, or we'll call it grid often times, to try to differentiate it. And then you have the profile itself. So as we go through this course, we're going to try to clearly identify when we're working with a profile view, or grid, and when we're working with the profile. The profile view, of course, is connected with the Alignment as well. And thereby, if you erase the Alignment, the profile view that profiles all of them are erased as well. We can see that in Prospector simply by the way it's organized. I come to Prospector for this drawing, expand out Alignments and choose the Centerline Alignment types. You see the different Alignments that we have here. We select this Alignment and go to its geometry, you can see that it's KINGSLEY DRIVE. So I hit escape, KINGSLEY DRIVE here. Now if I expand out KINGSLEY DRIVE, you'll see that under KINGSLEY DRIVE, as a child, are two profiles, one is the existing or surface profile and one is the layout profile. You also have a profile view, that grid, as a child of KINGSLEY DRIVE. So if I come and use the AutoCAD Erase and choose to erase KINGSLEY DRIVE, press enter, you'll see all of that now is gone as well. It's a powerful way, it makes sense that they're children. How can you have a profile if you don't have a linear path? How can you have a view without that linear path connection as well? But we have to realize the connection as we work through these and that everything's connected as we go. Let's go ahead and now create our very first profile.

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