Support Question of the Day: Proposed Profile After The Fact

Oh to be a full-time blogger. But then again, I wouldn't have the client interactions which keep me on my toes and inspire me to blog.



I've got a bunch of posts in progress but the following is a quickie that had me slack jaw for a few minutes.



Q: What happens if you create P&P sheets based off of an existing ground profile and want to add the proposed profile after the fact?



A: If you are creating P&P sheets in a separate drawing (which you ARE, AREN'T you???) and relying on the automatically created data references to pull data to your new drawing, any new profiles created will not automatically get added to the new drawing.



You have two options:

1) Recreate the sheets. (Which is a sucky option if you've gone and annotated and/or tweaked the P&P sheets.)

2) Manually create a data shortcut to the proposed profile.

1. In your main drawing, change your Prospector to Master View.


2. Find the Data Shortcuts area and right-click.


3. Select New Data Shortcuts Folder.


4. Create a folder for the data shortcut.


5. Right-click again and pick Create Data Shortcuts.


6. Put a check mark in the box for your proposed profile. Civil 3D will automatically grab the alignment too. That's normal.


7. Jump to your P&P sheet drawing.


8. In Prospector, browse to your data shortcuts.


9. Locate the design profile, right-click and select Create Reference


10. Repeat steps 7-9 for any additional P&P sheet drawing files.

Once the data shortcut has been made, updates will show up in the P&P sheet files as normal.

Profile Style Weirdness

I have so much on my mind this week, I'm so glad I finally have some time to blog.

This first post is regarding a funny "gotcha" in the profile styles.

It all started when I was doing some one-on-one training on P&P sheets for a client and he wanted all of his profile views to have a vertical exaggeration of 5x, rather than the default found in the OOTB templates of 10x.

To change this I went to the profile view style by right-clicking on the view.

I jumped to the Graph tab and set the vertical exaggeration to 5 and thought I was home free. In theory, I'm changing the style that is active for all the profiles. The funny thing was that all the profiles changed except for the one I had right-clicked on.

After tinkering and repressing my curse reflex in front of a client I discovered that even though the profile in question was not being split, it was grabbing the style as if it were.

To fix it, I went to the Profile View Properties and unchecked the Split Profile View option.

A different way to solve it, if you are always going to have a 5x exaggeration anyway is to change all of your styles to be the scale you want. Just make sure to go into them via the Settings tab - 'cuz right-clicking the object won't get you to the correct style!

The same info applies to both 2008 and 2009 Civil 3D. Hope this saves someone some grief.