Stephen
You can do some of what you are asking today
1) In the Profile Viewer - you can right click and select Surfaces, and then select the surfaces that you want to slice along the line of the linestring. These then show up in the Profile Viewer in the same way that they show up in the Surface Slicer or Profile Viewer
2) n the profile viewer you can use Explore Object, and while snap indicators are not being displayed it does actually snap to points that you click on and displays their values in the explorer pane, you also get a real time read out of Station and Elevation of the cursor. The elevation readout is of the line selected for the profile. If you also open the coordinate scroll box, that will display you the Station and elevation of the cursor in the Profile view, so you can interpret elevations of the surfaces displayed as well as the elevation of the line you are profiling. The explore object will give you the instantaneous slope of the selected line.
When in the Profile Viewer when you have the Linestring Editor open, when you are in the Distance Along field you will get the correlation cursors in the Plan and Profile View which allow you to see a VPI in Profile and identify which one it is in the plan view. I agree that if a node is clicked in the Profile View it would be helpful if it would highlight in both plan and profile view so you know you have the right one.
3) Because some nodes are Horizontal 3D nodes and some are VPIs you can use the linestring editor to Add nodes and move nodes in the profile view. Once a VPI is selected, you can type in a new value or click where you want the VPI to be in terms of either Station or Elevation (depends on which field is selected, this will move the VPI to where you want it
I agree that it would be good to do the following
1) Have Grips in the Profile Viewer
2) Have Snap indicators in the profile viewer
3) Have the ability to select a reference surface in Explore Object for Profile Viewer so you can query clearance / depth
4) Display Slopes of segments in profile viewer
5) Display line markings in Profile viewer to show elevations
6) Highlight the VPI or Alignment Points highlighted in plan view in the profile view so you can easily cross correlate - the little Bow Tie marker helps, but highlighting in both views would be better.
7) Drawing in Profile View and being able to create plot dynaviews from the Profile View
Note that when editing the profile of the line, if you want to set e.g. a VPI elevation to fall on the slope between the two adjacent VPIs you can do that in the linestring editor using the right click snaps, if you set e.g. the location type to be Incoming or outgoing slope
It would also be nice if you could use Station and elevation offset to a surface profile along the line to give you the depth or clearance that you need as an editor input in the linestring editor
To match grade in a profile, you need to set the Type of Elevation control to be by Incoming or outgoing slope and then you can use point to point snap to determine the slope from the surface profile to set your pipe profile
The videos below show you how these things can be used today
Hope these are helpful
Alan