Digitizing Profile Sheets to Create a 3D Alignment

We often get asked how to utilize provided plan and profile sheets to rapidly extract the vertical alignment profile and ground profile for an alignment so that we can use that to build a corridor / road or utility / trench model.

In the following video we show you how to

  • Import 4 profile sheets from a PDF
  • Create an alignment for digitizing the profile sheets
  • Georeference the 4 profile sheets and clipping them to match lines
  • Digitize the Design Profile in Plan View
  • Use copy to Profile command to move the digitized profiles into the profile view of an alignment
  • Scale the profile data to remove exaggeration
  • Move the profile data so that it is in the correct station and elevation location
  • Use the profile to create a Vertical Alignment for the alignment
  • How to use the 3D alignment to build a corridor

We show the process 2x - once to show the basic process and then a second time to show you how to add it to the real alignment for the project.

You can also use the vectorize PDF functions to extract the linework automatically and then join it together using Smart Join to speed up the digitize process to reduce the time required by ~10 to 15 mins depending on how many profiles you need to create.

Hopefully this is a useful tool set for you to learn

Video shows you how

Alan

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