Creating a Profile view (long-section) without a surface.

[caleb.shawKTJBU]

Morning all,

We've been asked by a client to create a long section of a new road alignment which is being constructed, however the client lacks any point cloud data for the area thus we can't make a surface.

Is there any other way I can produce a long section without having the surface or is this something which isn't possible?

I've attached a copy of the file so you can see what I'm working with.

Thanks,

C

[wol000]

You could just make up a surface plane, nominating levels and use that as existing. You could try extracting the points from google earth, there is a process for it, if you google it or if you have infraworks, you could use model builder and extract the contours for the area and put them into civil3d

[AllenJessup]

Well. Not sure about this drawing. What I see is that a majority of the drawing is composed of 3D lines. You can make a Surface out of some or all of those. Z values run from about 20 at the west end an 40 at the east end. Does that make sense for this site?

I see the drawing wasn't produced in an Autodesk product. So I have no idea if the elevations are correct or an artifact of the original software product being brought into Civil 3D.

Let us know if any of this makes sense.

[brian.strandberg]

If you have the elevations, you can create the profile manually.  You need to have an alignment and profile view created.

Then go to the profile creation tools, and you have a couple of options.  

Option 1 is the Create Profile Tabular option.  In this case you can enter Station / Elevation Pairs for each of the PI's.

Option 2 is the Create Profile from File.  Its the same basic thing, only you are importing your Station / Elevation pairs from an external file.  Here is the help file for that: Autodesk Civil 3D Help | To Create a Profile From a Profile File | Autodesk

[caleb.shawKTJBU]

Allen, sorry for my delayed response, I'm glad its not only me who is slightly confused about this. I will have a go at making the surface using the 3D lines, If i was to hazard a guess I would say that the native software which the drawing has come from is a Bentley software...

[caleb.shawKTJBU]

I'll give this a go, thanks!