From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2023 Essential Training

Understand profiles and profile views - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2023 Essential Training

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Understand profiles and profile views

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- [Instructor] Profiles are a very important part of nearly every civil engineering project. Because it's difficult to deal with all three dimensions at once, we often break things down into plan view and profile view. In the case of our roads, the alignment represents the plan or horizontal view, and the profile handles the vertical or elevation aspects of the design. Profiles can be created by sampling a surface. That means that Civil 3D records the elevations of a surface as it travels along the alignment. The result is a graph plot of station versus elevation. You can see a surface profile shown here in the red dashed line here in the Civil 3D drawing. This profile represents the elevation changes along the existing ground as one travels along the road center line. And if you look at it, it's a little rough for our future neighborhood residents to drive along. That's where the blue profile comes in. This is our proposed profile along the road center line. You can see that this one is much more smooth, with straight tangents and long sweeping curves to handle the grade changes. All of this is housed in the grid that you see called the profile view. So profile views are the graph paper that profiles are plotted on. Profiles and profile views are both Civil 3D objects, so they have properties, they can be controlled with styles, and all of the other wonderful things that you now know about Civil 3D objects. In this chapter, you'll learn all about profiles and profile views, as well as the tools and techniques used to create and modify them.

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