Civil 3D Utilities

What it does

CAPCAD_CIVIL3D_TOOLS opens a modeless window with four tabs:

• Alignment & profile — load the alignment and the profile from Civil 3D into the CapCad project, draw them, frame them, query the profile and draw grades and notable points on the alignment.
• Surface — load Civil 3D TIN surfaces and query them: elevation, grade, section, drape.
• Tools — freeze layers by object type, purge styles, turn the geographic map off, open an empty dwg and call the COGO point conversion.
• Property Sets — install and attach the active style's property sets, and choose between the 2D and the 3D set in this drawing.

The command is registered in plain AutoCAD, but it checks for Civil 3D before showing the window: without it, it warns that Civil 3D is not loaded and ends. The same window works on any Civil 3D version CapCad recognises.

Workflow

Bringing alignment and profile from Civil 3D

1. Open the drawing in Civil 3D and run CAPCAD_CIVIL3D_TOOLS.
2. On the Alignment & profile tab, choose the alignment in Alignments (1). The list carries the drawing's alignments plus the entry <all>, meaning "every one". If the project's alignment already has the name of one of them, it comes pre-selected; otherwise <all> does.
3. Click Load (2). The alignment becomes the CapCad project's alignment. With <all>, the alignment file takes the drawing's name; with a single one, the alignment's name.
4. If you chose one alignment (not <all>) and it has exactly one profile, that profile is set in the same click, and CapCad says so.
5. Otherwise, choose the profile in Profiles (7) and click Load (8). The combo is disabled while <all> is chosen — a profile belongs to one alignment only.
6. Draw (3 and 10) and Zoom (4 and 11) work on the alignment and profile already written into the project.

Querying the profile from the plan view

1. With alignment and profile set, click Identify profile data in alignment (13).
2. Click a point on the alignment — the command projects the point onto the alignment, converts it to a station and reads the profile there.
3. The command line answers with the station, the elevation, the local grade and the stations of the previous and next PVI.
4. The command repeats until you press Esc. A point that does not project onto the alignment is reported and ignored.

Drawing the profile's grades on the alignment

1. Click Draw profile slopes on alignment (14).
2. Each straight stretch of the profile is converted into a start and end station, and the matching piece of the alignment in plan is drawn on a layer named CAPCAD_RAMPA followed by the grade value — CAPCAD_RAMPA-3.50, CAPCAD_RAMPA5.20… — all in colour 53.
3. Uphill grades are drawn reversed, so that the drawing-direction arrow points downhill.
4. Nothing is flagged as critical here: this button only plots every grade.

Notable points of the alignment and the profile

All four depend on the alignment (or the profile) having been loaded from Civil 3D by this window: it is the segment data and the PVIs brought in by the conversion that feed the labels. An alignment drawn by hand has no such data, and the command says so.

Working with the surface

1. On the Surface tab, choose the scope (24 to 26) and click Load (23).
2. With the surface loaded, the left-hand buttons answer on the command line, in a loop, until Esc:
3. Find the surface elevation (27) — the elevation of the clicked point, the highest among the loaded surfaces.
4. Find the surface slope (28) — two points, the grade between the two terrain elevations.
5. Find the surface slope across the alignment, 1 pt (29) — one point only: CapCad builds a 1 mm chord perpendicular to the alignment there and measures the cross slope. The result comes out in a box, not on the command line.
6. Extract section (31) uses the bottom frame to know how to define the cut line: two points (34), a line in the drawing (35) or a cross-section of the alignment with the width from 36 (37, the default). Vertical exaggeration (33) multiplies the elevation axis of the drawn section.
7. Break the line at the surface's points (30) drapes a chosen curve on the surface and draws a 3D POINT at each crossing with the TIN, on layer CAPCAD_PLAN_POINTS.
8. Generate 3D polyline from alignment and surface (39) does the same with the project's alignment and returns one 3D POLYLINE per element.

Cleaning the drawing

1. On the Tools tab, tick the families you want hidden (40 to 44) and click Freeze (45). The layers actually frozen show up in the read-only box (46).
2. Purge unused styles (47) runs Civil 3D's PURGESTYLES three times, answering Yes — the native command does not clean everything in one pass.
3. Geo map off (48) turns the background geographic map off.
4. New emtpy dwg (49) creates a new drawing and forces the insertion units to metres.
5. COGO points conversion… (50) fires CAPCAD_POINT_TO_COGO.

The form

The numbers are unique on this page: 1 to 21 on the Alignment & profile tab, 22 to 39 on Surface, 40 to 50 on Tools and 51 to 57 on Property Sets. The screenshots are of a Portuguese session; the numbering is the same in both editions, and the tables give the English captions.

Tab 1: Alignment & profile

The two notable point sign buttons sit under the heading Railway vertical [Beta], but they are not restricted to a railway project.

Tab 2: Surface

Tab 3: Tools

The five boxes are born ticked. The current layer is never frozen — AutoCAD refuses — and so it does not appear in the list at 46 either.

Tab 4: Property Sets

How the options combine

What the conversion brings with the geometry

The profile load (8) does not keep only the vertical alignment's line. It also writes into the project's alignment:

With Only PVIs (9) ticked, the line drawn becomes the PVI polygon, without the vertical curves, but the first three rows of the table are still written the same.

The profile's vertical exaggeration is treated as real length

The Civil 3D profile is stored in drawing coordinates: x = station, y = elevation × the view's exaggeration. On reading, however, CapCad always divides by 10.

That has two consequences:

• In Draw profile slopes on alignment (14), the length each stretch is compared against the limits in metres is the 2D length of the drawn stretch, that is, already stretched by the exaggeration. A stretch of 100 m in projection at 5 % grade measures, in a drawing at 10×, about 112 m. Stretches under 10 drawing units are discarded before any arithmetic.
• In Identify profile data in alignment (13), the elevation returned is y ÷ 10 without subtracting the profile view's origin: it is only the true elevation when the view's elevation zero sits at y = 0 of the drawing. The grade, being a difference, does not suffer from this.

In both cases, the right number comes out when the Civil 3D profile view is at exaggeration 10. See Notes.

Surface scope: which one each button uses

If you use Use every surface (25) in a drawing with both existing ground and design surfaces, it is worth checking which one ended up first before draping.

Remembered between sessions

Nothing. The window writes no options to the preferences. Being single-instance, though, what you chose stays there while AutoCAD is open: closing it and running the command again reopens the same window, with the same combos, radios and boxes. The loaded surfaces also survive between openings of the window, within the same session.

The only thing written to the file is the choice between 2D and 3D Property Sets (54/55), which goes into the drawing's own configuration.

CAPCAD_GEOMETRY_TOOLS — not available in this version

This command is not available in this version. Running it in AutoCAD only opens a box saying so.

Two points that usually cause confusion:

• It has no ribbon button in any country profile.
• The ribbon button labelled Geometry Tools, on the CAD Utilities panel, is a different command. It fires CAPCAD_ROAD_LANE, the lane assistant — the tooltip says Lanes.

If you are after geometry tools, what exists today is spread between the Alignment Manager, the alignment tools and the drawing utilities.

Notes

• The window needs Civil 3D, not just AutoCAD. The command is registered in plain AutoCAD so that it can give the right message, but it ends before showing the window when Civil 3D is not loaded. It does not exist in BricsCAD, GstarCAD or ZWCAD.
• The reading exaggeration is fixed at 10. Identify profile data in alignment (13) and Draw profile slopes (14) always divide by 10. On a profile view built at another exaggeration, the elevation and grade those two report come out proportionally wrong.
• If CapCad cannot read the profile view, the vertical alignment comes out flat. In that case the vertical scale is stored as zero and every elevation of the converted profile becomes y = 0. A profile that appears as a horizontal straight line is the symptom.
• Grade lengths are measured on the stretched drawing. See How the options combine: the grade limits in metres are compared against the 2D length of the already-exaggerated stretch, and stretches under 10 drawing units are discarded. Nothing is flagged critical on this button anyway — the threshold used here is unreachable by design.
• The grades and the vertical signs only see the alignment's first element. Draw profile slopes (14) maps the profile's stations onto the alignment's first element, and the signs of 18 take their insertion angle from that same first element's tangent. On a project alignment made of several elements — the case for anyone who loaded <all> — whatever falls outside the first element is not drawn, or comes out at the wrong angle. Load one alignment at a time when you use those two buttons.
• The grade and notable-point layers keep fixed names. CAPCAD_RAMPA…, CAPCAD_TC, CAPCAD_PIV, CAPCAD_PLAN_POINTS and company are created under those names, in a fixed colour. They do not get the active style's prefix or renaming, unlike the rest of the drawing.
• "Use the active surface" and "Select" do the same thing. Both load the surface named in the combo (22); in this version there is no concept of an active surface separate from the combo's choice. Only Use every surface (25) behaves differently.
• Two boxes on the Surface tab are not used. Draw points (32) is saved with the form but not used by this version; Add grid (38) is not available in this version.
• The notable points depend on the conversion. 15 to 18 read the segment and PVI data that the Civil 3D load writes into the alignment. On an alignment assembled from CAD curves that data does not exist, and the command warns instead of drawing anything.
• The horizontal signs are inserted in both directions. Signs at horizontal notable points (17) makes one increasing pass and one decreasing pass, so each transition gets two signs.
• The style purger runs three times. It is not a mistake: Civil 3D's PURGESTYLES does not clean everything in one pass, and CapCad repeats it three times answering Yes.
• A number of the window's messages are not translated: the command-line summaries, the surface warnings and the "reload from Civil 3D" texts.