What NDA Post?

Yeah, ok. So expressed some annoyance at what I thought to be people yapping about Civil 3D 2009 too early. Dana set me straight tho. Apparently not al NDA's are created equally. Check back here later this week for a smorgasboard of information about Civil 3D 2009.

Support Question of the Day: Static Cross Sections?

Q:
Hi Louisa,

I try to use the Edit Sections command under Sections without being able to edit a section. I check help and get

"Use this dialog box to edit static sections in a section view and to display information about dynamic sections and corridor sections.
Static sections are those which do not maintain a link with their elevation data source."

I checked to see how static sections are created, trying do drop them, looked for section utilities, and checked all my web resources with no luck. Can you help? How does one create static sections?


A:
If I’m understanding your question right, you’ve gone to Corridors > View/Edit Corridor Section and are trying to modify, say, a side slope? If that’s the case, you can edit individual sections (or a range of stations’ sections) by holding the CTRL key while you click the element graphically. The result should look like this picture:

Alternately, you can modify the section numerically as shown here:

By static, in this case, they mean that you can’t make any edits to a cross section that has slopes controlled by superelevation.

Good to hear from you! Let me know if you run into any other snags.

---

Followup: My recommendation is to not set the views to static, this divorces the data from the cross section and just makes a pretty picture. In other words, you can change those slopes in the view but it won’t be reflected back in your surface model. Additionally, you’ll need to make the change in all the views, one at a time. To truly change the data, go to Corridors > View Edit Corridor section and follow the directions above. If you don’t mind that the surface model will not update, go ahead do the modifications in the views.

As far as modifying the assemblies for special situations along the alignment, you are on the right track. Modifying the corridor sections is the way to get around making a new region for each driveway for instance.

Is My ROW Showing?

Holy crap! This is my 101st post. Geeze I've been wasting a lot of time I could otherwise have been clipping my toenails or watching copious backlogs of DVR'd episodes of How It's Made.

In reality I'd rather spend my time with YOU, my loyal readers. Or not so loyal? I mean maybe you're just here to see how badly I slaughter the English language. Or maybe you were doing a search on Jessica Simpson and hit this page.

In any case, I'd rather be here, disappointing linguists and Jessica Simpson fans the world round.

And if I can encourage the adoption of my beloved* Civil 3D in the process - its all worth while.

Soooo, anyhoo...

Common support question - got it again today so I thought I'd post a little something I wrote.

How do I get my right-of-way lines to show up in a cross-section view?

Do this.

Thanks to Autodesk AE Jerry Bartels for making a cute little style I used in this document.

---

*Yeah. I said "beloved." You got a problem with that?

SQOTD: Profile Not Lining Up with Plan

Q. I can't figure out why the heck my P&P sheets are not lining up properly. I was expecting the beginning of the profile to line up with my match line, but it is consistently off 1" in paper-space. Why is this happening?

A. The culprit for this is a band's (or multiple bands') title box width.


To fix it, go to Settings > Profile View category. Go to Band Styles > Profile data and edit Elevations and Stations (this is the style used by the default template - your names may differ).

On the Band Details tab, change the text box width to 0.001. If you have multiple bands in your band set, check all of them for the same setting.


What was happening is was the profile was accounting for the text box width, even though you don't have it showing.


You'll need to recreate sheets to see the change take effect (you don't need to redo view frames, just sheets.)