Define a profile model - OpenRoads Designer Tutorial

- [Instructor] Prior to creating vertical geometry, you must first define a profile model view to display the vertical geometry into. A profile model is used to create, edit and view vertical geometry elements. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to define a profile model view, how to review the profile model view and also how to set an active profile. For this lesson, we're going to continue working in the "Geometry DGN" file and we're going to begin by creating a profile model view. Prior to creating vertical geometry, you must first define a profile model view to display the vertical geometry into. So we're going to do that by utilizing a new tool called Open Profile Model. To define the profile model view, we'll simply go up to Geometry under the Vertical panel. Go ahead, select the Open Profile model. You'll be prompted to locate a plan element. So let's go ahead and zoom into our horizontal alignment so we can better select it. So, select the horizontal alignment for London Road, and then from here, you're going to be prompted to select or open a view. The profile model can be defined in any of the eight views available at the bottom of the screen, utilizing the view toggles. We're going to go ahead and define it in view number four. So go ahead and select view number four and you'll see the profile model is created in view number four. Notice at the top of the view window it says View Four, Profile, London Road. So this is profile model for the London Road alignment. And what you see here is the existing ground profile along the London Road alignment, it's been extracted from the attached existing terrain model. This will be used as a guide for designing the proposed vertical geometry. Notice the horizontal axis along the bottom represents the stationing along the alignment. Notice the Y axis displays the elevations. Let's go ahead and fit our view so you can see the entire existing ground profile. Next thing we're going to do is select the existing ground profile, and we're going to set that active. Setting the existing ground profile active will make it associated to the horizontal alignment. We'll use this as the default profile for now until we design the proposed vertical alignment. To set the profile active, select the element selection tool, navigate into the profile model view, select the existing ground profile, hover your cursor there for a few seconds until you see the context-sensitive menu up appear and then select Set as Active Profile. And when you do that, what happens is this existing ground profile gets associated to the horizontal alignment for London Road. Also in the 3D view, you will see 3D feature line that is created representing that particular profile. The active profile can be changed at any time. So when we go to design the proposed vertical geometry, we'll be able to use that as the active profile later in the course. By default, the profile model view exaggeration is exaggerated 10 times vertically. This is because, a lot of times, the existing ground may be too flat. You may not be able to see the variations in the vertical elevations very well. If you further need to adjust the vertical exaggeration, you can simply go to the view attributes, select the view attributes from the top-left corner of the view, and under the civil panel, you can expand that. And you'll see there's an exaggeration tab. Now, you can see the default exaggeration is set for 10. We're going to go ahead and set that to 20 so that you can see the vertical exaggeration change and then go ahead and fit to view. So now you can see that the exaggeration has been changed quite dramatically and you can clearly see the vertical differences. So you can see the exaggeration can be dynamically adjusted as needed, and this can be used to help when we start designing the vertical geometry. To summarize what a profile model is, it's basically used to create, edit and view vertical geometry, and keep in mind, the profile model view has some unique characteristics. A profile model corresponds to one, and only one, horizontal alignment; in this case, London Road. A profile model can display multiple profiles, but only one can be active at any given time. Also, the associated horizontal geometry name is in the title bar of the view. Note, the elevation labels are along the left edge of the view, and station labels are along the bottom of the view, and that this profile model is a true profile space whose coordinates are station and elevation, instead of X and Y. So keep that in mind when you're working with the profile models.