In civil 3D is there any way to station an alignment using slope distances or along the ground (draped to a surface)? I know in Carlson Survey and a few other programs you can do a 3D stationing. My next question would be can you also have these stations displayed in a profile view? I am using Civil 3D 2010 and I have access to 2011 if it will help.
No, there is no way to do such a thing in C3D as it comes out-of-the-box.
There are ways to kind of "mimic" this sort of thing, at least in plan view. For example, take the following image:
I used the Sincpac-C3D add-on to create the above image.
The white stationing is the Alignment (or "2D") stationing we get by default on C3D Alignments. The orange stationing is created from the ground lengths, and is essentially the "3D Stationing".
I actually used Cogo Points to do this... The orange stationing in the image above is actually created from Cogo Points. To do it, I first created my Alignment and Profile, using the ground surface. Then I used the "Create Feature Lines from Alignment" tool in C3D to generate a Feature Line from the Alignment/Profile. Then I exploded the Feature Line, turning it into a 3D Polyline.
Now is where I started using the Sincpac-C3D tools. I generated Cogo Points every 100' along the 3D polyline, then used the Sincpac-C3D's Dynamic Point Links to link the Cogo Points to the 3D Polyline. I configured the Dynamic Link to stick the 3D Polyline's station in a UDP on the Cogo Point. (When linked to a 3D Polyline, the Sincpac-C3D Dynamic Links return the 3D stationing instead of 2D stationing, due to some quirks of the way Autocad works internally... In this case, it gives us exactly what we want.) Then I created a Point Label Style that displayed the UDP value. I also used the RotateAligned command in the Sincpac-C3D to rotate all the Cogo Points, so that they are aligned with the Alignment. In a matter of a few minutes, I had an Alignment and Profile labeled with both "2D" and "3D" stationing.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help a whole lot for adding the "3D Stationing" to a Profile View. There are some tricks you might be able to use to label specific points, such as by labeling something in Plan view, then turning off the leader for the "dragged state" and dragging the label from the Plan location to the Profile View. This will give you a label in Profile View that remains dynamic to the Plan. But off-hand, I can't think of a way to get the "3D Stationing" into a Profile Band.
Thanks. That is about as far as I can get with Carlson Survey as well. I would be curious to see if this is something that will be available in a future release.
