From the course: Cert Prep Autodesk Certified Professional: Civil 3D for Infrastructure Design

Create a surface profile - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep Autodesk Certified Professional: Civil 3D for Infrastructure Design

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Create a surface profile

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- After creating an alignment, our next step is often a profile, which establishes the elevation or vertical aspects of a linear design. We'll start learning about profiles by first looking at the surface profile. Let's jump right in to get started. What I'd like to do, is create a surface profile which shows the relationship between this surface, my existing ground, and this alignment, the proposed center line of my road. To do that, I'll go up here to the Home tab of the ribbon, and under profile, I'll select create surface profile. I want to choose the alignment along which I want to create the profile. I can do that by the drop down here. And that's, if I know the name of the alignment. But if I don't, I can click the pick icon, and select the alignment from the screen like this. And that happens to be the alignment called, Shady Ridge Lane. Some options that I have, is to sample offsets. I can sample the entire alignment from the very beginning to the very end. Or I can do some subset of that. And to make things happen, I actually select the surface I want to sample, and click add. And we'll talk about what sampling means in just a few minutes. Now, in a lot of drawings, you'll see a number of surfaces listed here. And you can select as many as you like, by picking each one and clicking add. Pick the next one, click add, and so on. You can also sample offsets. So let's say, for some reason, I need to show profiles along the right of way line, or along the edges of pavement. And let's say my right of way is at 25 feet. I can click sample offsets, and enter a value of 25 here. And enter a value of 25 here, which will give me a 25 foot offset on the right. To get an offset on the left, I type minus 25, and that gives me my second offset. At any time, you can click a profile and remove it. So, I'll actually remove these offsets. I'm not interested in them. But I am going to select my main surface here, unchecking the box for offsets, and clicking add. So that will give me my profile right down the center line. You'll see the offset is zero. Now I'd like to actually see the profile in a visible state in the drawing. To do that, I'll click draw in profile view. And in an upcoming video, we'll talk about in detail, what a profile view is. I'll just click create profile view here, and pick a point in my drawing to insert it. So here you see that relationship between the alignment and the surface. Along the bottom, we see these stations. 0, 100, 200, and so on. And what's Civil 3D does, is it travels along the alignment and anywhere, it can pick up a point on the surface. Specifically, anywhere at 10 line, crosses that alignment, it's going to record the elevation of that point, and plot it on what's basically a graph. This is a graph, representing station versus elevation. So when we plot that in a profile view, it actually gives us an image of what the ground surface looks like. So, if I were to walk on the top of the existing ground surface, along the path of the alignment, these are the bumps and high points and low points that I would experience, eventually coming up to this hill, which I would climb, which would flatten out a bit at the top. And then gets deep once again. So that's the purpose of our existing ground profile is that we're establishing the shape and the nature of the ground, as you travel along that alignment path. Now typically, surface profiles are used to establish existing ground. But they certainly don't have to be. Finished ground can be part of it. You can sample rock layers. Whatever your surface represents, you can sample and display in a profile view, just like we see here. Okay, so that's how you create a surface profile to represent the relationship between a surface often in existing ground surface and an alignment. In the next video, we'll talk about representing the proposed elevations, using a layout profile.

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