One of the PM's I work with likes to do preliminary drawings on a Plan/Plan sheet instead of Plan/Profile sheet. I'm getting sick of having to combine multiple sheets by hand. I'm wondering if there is a way to have C3D generate such sheets like it does Plan/Profile sheets? The templet I have made has the correct "plan" viewports but when the sheets are generated it just doubles the top viewport. Is there a way to tell Autocad to move to the next viewframe and plot that in the next available viewport?
Or how would you recommend creating such sheets if possible?
I'm begining to think that this is not possible due to the amount of programing it would take to generate such sheets, but I thought that its worth a shot to see if anyone else has dealt with such a thing.
All of the programming code that you need to create the plan/plan sheets are available on the internet. You'd grab the size of the viewports from the template and then convert them to plan size. You'd then create polylines that represent the sheets along the alignment and then change them. You'd then have to go through the polylines and create viewports based on their location and set the correct scale. This may or may not include the creation of drawings depending on how many layouts you want in the drawing.
A tip: turn off all of the layers when creating the viewports and then turn them on once done. This way you won't have to wait for Civil 3D to render teh information in the viewports.
I think it took me about 16 hours to create a program, using stuff I found on the internet, to create layouts and viewports to create sheets. Although it was for profile views only and no plan views.