From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2025 Essential Training

Understand profiles and profile views - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2025 Essential Training

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Understand profiles and profile views

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- [Narrator] Profiles are a very important part of nearly every civil engineering project. Since it's difficult to deal with all three dimensions at once, we often break things down into plan 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 drawing, represented by the red dashed line, and you can also see that it's kind of a rough path for a car to follow. And if you could imagine this being the center line of the road for one of our subdivisions, it wouldn't be a necessarily comfortable experience to drive a car along these bumps and valleys. That's where the blue profile comes along. This is our proposed profile along the road center line. You can see that it's much more smooth with straight tangents and long sweeping curves to handle the changes in grade between those tangents. All of this is housed in the grid that you see, called the Profile View. So Profile Views are like the graph paper that the 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. Throughout 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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