Annotating Utilities/Wetlands in Cross Sections

[scharrat]

I am trying to annotate right-of-way, utilities, and wetlands in my cross-section sets.  I know that this can be done by creating alignments, but this seems very cumbersome for a large project with hundreds of wetland areas and major utilities.  I am relatively new to Civil 3D, but I know that this task can be quickly accomplished using Bentley Inroads by draping the features onto the existing surface and annotating the features in the cross section views.

Is there a workflow that allows the annotation of feature lines in the cross-section views?

[troma]

The command for a profile view is PROJECTOBJECTSTOPROF.

I'm not sure of the exact command for sections, but it's probably something similar.  And I'm guessing it should pop up on the contextual ribbon tab when you click on a section view.

[scharrat]

Thanks for the guick response troma.

I am aware that this can be done for profiles, but I haven't been able to figure out how to accomplish the same thing for cross sections.  I have been unble to find the command listed anywhere and have not see a similar action in the ribbon.

[troma]

PROJECTOBJECTSTOMULTISECT

PROJECTOBJECTSTOSECT

[Joe-Bouza]

Make the wetland a surface and add to the sample line or some other c3d object that can be sampled with the sections.....

[scharrat]

Thanks Troma, that command does work for me.  I just had to set the feature line styles to display the proper marker for wetlands and utilities when displayed in the section views.

Joe Bouza, thanks for the response, but I think that method would require a surface for each wetland area and I'm unsure of how this would work when displaying utilities.

This leads to a secondary question.  Is there any way to project an Xref'd feature line to a section view in a different file?   This would allow us to have one wetland and one utility file containing the feature lines.  Otherwise, it seems like these feature lines need to be copied into each DWG with a section view in order for them to be projected onto said cross-sections.

I realize I may be coming at this from the wrong angle, being used to Inroads and all, but it seems like there could be a way to dynamically link the wetlands and utilities feature line files to the cross-section displays.  This would be similar to the dynamic link between the cross-sections and the corridor file, which is an Xref.

[troma]

I can't think of a way to dynamically link an object from one drawing to be projected in another drawing.  I would like to find one.

[Joe-Bouza]

So you are adverse to creating alignments (that we know can be used to plot a marker on a cross section) and you dont want to create a surface  (that we know can be used to plot on a cross section).

How would you like to see it done? Why would adding an extra surface upset the utilities?

[troma]

Another option would be a pipe network.

[Joe-Bouza]

Those are th"other" c3d objects I refer to

[scharrat]

I am adverse to using alignments because, as I currently understand, to display these alignments on the cross-sections would involve individually adding hundreds of profile grades to the view group properties.  (This is a very large project and I am assuming one alignment is needed for each feature.)

I am unclear of how the the surface method would be done.  Would the wetland / utilities surface include only non-destructive breaklines created from the appropriate features?  Would the breaklines then be annotated with an appropriate marker style in the cross-section views?  Clarification would be much appreciated.

We have devised a workflow in which a corridor is created that contains the wetland and utility features.  That corridor file is then Xref'd into the file containing the cross-section views.  The corridor is sampled into the section views and displays the appropriate marker styles in the section views.  This allows the base file containing wetland or utility features to be dynamically displayed in any section view set.

Now, if we could just bypass the process of using assemblies to target features just to create a corridor that outputs the same features.  In other words, does anyone know of another method to create a corridor that contains existing features?

[Joe-Bouza]

To try and be clear, I am assuming you want to show a flag or offset line to the wet land in section. for this alignment/ profile is how I would approcah it.

You don't have to have a profile view to use alignment - you don't even have to show the alignment (although using your wetland boundary line would be the way I would go); name the alignments "wetlands01 through n# sample the the ground and your done.  Create a General>> MultiPurpose style marker of a block of your choosing. Add the pgl to the sections and they are there. You can probably achieve something similar with a dummy pipe network.

If you are looking to see some representative extent of wetland in section I would approach it this way: Make a new surface Wetlands and paste EG into it, raise or lower a tiny bit, extract the outer boundary and add it as a hide boudary, then add all you wetland boundaries a show boundaries. Create a surface style that only shows in section in a diffrent style that your EG or FG , add it to your sampl line and you should see a line paralell to EG that would be the WL within the section limit