Issue
Have you ever wanted to have a marker placed on your cross sections to indicate the location of a property boundary line, or building line, or extent of the contract works or similar?
Cause
Most design packages have this ability but you just have to know where to find it. In Civil3D it is referred to as the ‘Profile Grade’ (which I too do not find particularly memorable and it’s little wonder people have difficulty finding it).
Solution
The Profile Grade is accessed through the last tab in the Section View Properties dialogue box for individual Section Views or through the Section View Group Properties for multiple section views. We will look at this multiple section view scenario in this exercise as it is the more often asked for.
Above you will see a corridor with a white alignment running beside it. This alignment represents the property boundary that we want to mark up in our section views. This alignment will be used to control the horizontal location of the section markers on your Section Views and will remain dynamic when you rebuild your corridor. This can simply be created by converting a polyline you have drawn in into an alignment.
Next create a ‘profile from surface…’ as below, and we will include the EG surface profile to use as the elevation of the section markers in your Section Views. (You could of course, create your own design profile to independently control the elevation of the section markers if you did not want them to be inserted at the elevation of a surface.)
Then create the block we want to insert on our sections. I created the one here. (Overkill I know but at least it stands out.)
All that remains now is to insert this block on our cross sections. To do this select one of your Sections in a Section Group (that you have already made), right click, and select ‘Section View Group Properties…’. This will give you the screen shown below where you click on the button with the 3 dots in the Profile Grade column:
This then gives you the screen shown below and you select your boundary alignment (click the add button) and then the associated profile (in this case our surface). The last thing to do is set the marker style to use our block we created in the drawing, which in this case, is our big arrow. Do this by clicking on whatever marker style is shown in the right hand column here and make a copy of that style.
You then want to edit your new marker style, rename it something appropriate like boundary and switch to the marker tab shown below. Select the option to “Use AutoCAD BLOCK symbol for marker”, then select your newly created block from the list and assign a suitable scale option.
Click “OK” out of all of the stacked up dialogue boxes and you should now have a result that looks something like the image below. (I told you my blocks were a bit over the top, you might want to assign something a bit more nondescript! )
Once you have done this process once it is a simple thing to do next time you need it.