Trimble Business Center

I think i have seen that it should be possible to import profile drawings from pdf into BC-HCE (or TBC) and be able to use that profile on an alignment, is that correct? If i can, where is the button?

Hello Fredrik

You can use the INSERT IMAGE command in the profile view, and it uses any image OTHER THAN a PDF.  Then you can scale and have it for reference.

Frederik

If you import a PDF file into the Plan View as an Image and either "Place It" or "Georeference It" using the Easting as Station and Northing as Elevation you will get the Profile Image into the Project. Once you have the PDF in the Project you can extract the vectors from the PDF to create "CAD Linework" in the Plan View. You will likely need to clean up the Profile Linework that you need (Join the lines into continuous lines) and ensure that the profile lines have their direction set so that the positive direction is that of increasing Station. 

Now that you have the linework in the Plan View, I make sure that I have the Profile Lines, plus enough of the Profile Grid Lines / labels visible so that when I move the data to the Profile View I can get it into the right place (Station and Elevation) through use of the Move and Scale commands.

Before you can use the Copy To Profile command you will need a Horizontal Alignment in the Plan View that matches the Station Range of the Profile drawing that you have (i.e. the Start and End station of the Profile ha to be in the horizontal alignment - the alignment can be longer than the profile of course). Once you have created the Horizontal Alignment you can open a Profile View for that Alignment.

Now use the Copy to Profile command. On my Menu Ribbon I have it on the Corridor Menu - I can share my Ribbon (English only) if you would like that. That allows you to specify which HAL the profile belongs to, it allows you to select whatever linework and other objects that you want in Plan View and make a copy of it in the Profile of the selected Horizontal Alignment. I select the profile Line plus some Grid Lines and Grid Labels in this process. You should see all the copied linework in the Profile View after this is completed.

You can check that the Station and Elevations match - if not you may need to Move the objects in the Profile view from Station / Elevation to Station / Elevation, and you may also need to scale the selected objects in the Vertical (z Axis) to remove vertical exaggeration. Once you have done that you should have the profile in the correct place and at the correct vertical scale (of 1). You can exaggerate in the profile using CTRL - SHIFT - Wheel in the normal way.

Lastly you need to edit the HAL, then go to the Vertical Tab, select the Append Selected Alignment button, pick the Profile Line that you want to use and add it to the HAL as a Profile. Note that this will likely have many Grade Breaks as opposed to true vertical geometry because the PDF would have chorded lines representing the verti#cal curves etc in the profile, so while this will provide a Quick Solution for Estimating, it is likely not good enough for real construction purposes.

I will post my training video on this workflow for you also here. The video starts with CAD data as opposed to an image / PDF but once the CAD linework is extracted and cleaned the process is basically the same.

Thanks for the question - Hope that this helps

#corridors

#dataprep

#bc-hce

Here is the Video of how to create a Profile from imported CAD data / Georeferenced Vector PDF Data

Hope this helps

Alan

Thanks!!      

Let us know how you get on

Alan

Just used this one, this is great!! Works perfect. Thanks Alan.

Awesome Fred - Thanks for the feedback - always good to learn new tricks

Alan

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 1:34 PM fredrik@fredriksmarktjanst.nu <

What formulas do you use for vertical scaling? On a 1=50 H and 1=5 V I ended up with .10, it was very close, within 0.02 but not 100% on the money, close enough for the project I’m working on but couldn’t get the exact formula figured out. Thanks if you can help! 

If you are in Sheet View if you have 1” = 50’ that would be scale 600 to get to 1:1. If 1” = 20’ that would be 240 scale etc. in Sheet View you have to do inches to Inches so multiply the 50 x 12 to get the foot scale you need

If we are talking cross section conversion from PDF in Sheet View then above is correct.

If you have a profile or sections in plan view - typically it is drawn 1:1 horizontally and then scaled 2x or 5x etc vertically - in that case  you would use horiz scale =1 and Vert scale = .5 or .2 etc to bring it down to 1:1

If you have CAD sections then scale is likely to be good - if you have PDF I have seen it off in some sheets and the only thing you can do is measure a long distance on the pdf and use that to compute the overall scale - the longer the distance the better - however inside the section or profile you may get some internal errors from design - likely ok for estimating but not good enough for model building - you need to watch those closely and check the grids especially - some systems when they use bold lines for grids get the lines offset slightly in a PDF output - not much we can do about it other than to scale to make it work

Hope this answers the question

Alan

Sent from my iPhone

Thank you Alan for the video.

GENERALY

the goal is to make a VAL from a CADline/profile ....so I guess to have setting in "append to aligment" menu (my suggestion) could be more alegant way without the steps-aside in profile view....

the need is:

1: selected line

2: elevation of the begining of the selected line

3: Station where the line starts

4: Scaling: it could be solve with Range of station (e.g. 0+000 - 0+640) 'scale to' or 4 points (Start and End point of selected line 'scale from' and Start and End point of HAL alignment 'scale to') or other scale setting

I suggest to add 4 items mentioned above into "append to aligment" menu