profile structure styles

[sweapon]

Hi everyone,

Im working with Australian standards at the moment and I have an issue on trying to show exactly some structures in the profile view as they are showed in the standards.

is there a way to show the structures in the profile view as shown below. any ideas of someone that uses c3d in Aus?

[tcorey]

Well, there are Aussies who frequent this forum, so you should find someone.

Regarding using your blocks as structure styles in profile views, yes, this is accomplished without much effort.

First, draw the block, in plan view, as it should appear in profile.

Edit your Structure Style, go to the Profile tab, change to Display as Block, pick the block, set values. That's it.

You might need to play with the scale a little because your block will be stretched vertically if the Profile View Style has vertical exaggeration.

[sweapon]

Thanks Corey,

To bad I cannot link the starching parameter to the depth of the structure, but after that I can manually add the lines.

cheers.

[MMcCall402]

I could see this possibly being accomplished with a simple cylindrical structure with the floor thicknesses being modified to include 0.001 as an available thickness. That will allow the floor, bottom, of the structure to coincide with the bottom of the pipe.  The structure style would 'Display as Boundary' and "Enable part masking' (to clip the pipe ends from within the structure boundary)

That get it close to being as shown in the pic but there is still the boundary of the structure showing where the pipes connect. We can cover these up with a wipeout type of block in a pipe label. The size of the block will need to be controlled with an expression so it will resize based on pipe diameter. Make an expression that returns the inside diameter of the pipe. The block will need to be a circular (nearly circular, 20 sided polygon) wipeout as blocked used in pipe labels align themselves to the pipe, so a circular one will always be aligned vertically. Use the expression we just made for the size of the block. The block will appear like a vertical oval in the profile due to the vertical exaggeration of the view. Ok, so there is our block component to hide the structure wall and sized to fit the pipe. Now we need to place it at the correct location. There is no anchor for the ends of pipes, however you can add a flow direction arrow to a pipe that will span the entire length of the pipe, set it to not plot, and use its end points to anchor our block. Offset the block from the ends a distance equal to half the width of the structure.

It takes a bit of doing, but doable. Set it up once, put it in the template file and use it forever.