Creating Profiles Without a Surface

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My group at work regularly uses AutoCAD to create profiles of streams (for Flood Insurance Studies). We have AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017, but we have been creating these profiles simply using polylines as grid lines/axis and polylines drawn to known points for the profile line itself. 

I want to start utilizing the profile features in Civil 3D to make our lives easier. I have experience using this but my question is how I should go about it, being that we do not have a surface we are using to create the profile. Instead, we only have x/y points for distance downstream and elevation. Is this possible?

[jroot]

So you are looking to just make a "blank" profile and draw from there?

You could make a bogus alignment and surface somewhere in modelspace at a bogus elevation (these could be copied/pasted from DWG to DWG).  Then just create your profile with those.  When setting up the Profile View, set your style, min/max elev, min/max stationing to whatever you want and you should have your blank grid to draw on.

[dben · Accepted solution]

Hi Vito,

Yes, creating a profile manually without a surface is certainly doable.  However, it can be cumbersome and depending on the length of the alignment a bit tedious.  Since you are creating a profile you obviously know where you are going to be elevation wise.  So I personally would create very simple flat surface approximately halfway between the high and low elevation by starting out with an AutoCAD rectangle converted to a feature line from objects and assigning elevations.  You now have a surface and combined with your alignment a surface profile giving you a place to start.    It's down and dirty, but really fast.  I do this all of the time and it takes me less than a minute to get a surface profile and a good starting point.

I hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

Thank you both. This seems like the best option. However, Is there a way I can alter the format of the x-axis, so it's not in the station format (X+00)? I'll have to regularly change this and I'd like to keep it in just feet.

[jroot]

Sure- in Profile View Style on the Horizontal axis tab... Tick label text... change it to decimal instead of Station Format.