Trimble Business Center

Hello, I have point cloud scans of power poles and lines and I'd like to be able to take sections (with thickness) of power line runs to plot elevations and add dimensions. Is this possible? I understand how to create planes and open the Cutting Plane View window in TBC but not sure how to plot it on sheets so I can export to pdfs. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much!

benjamin, i am not an expert in this area. but we did try to dig into it and we did not find a built in way to do it in tbc or in civil 3d. might be possible in civil but we have been trying to keep away from loading large clouds into civil to keep the drawings moving at a reasonable speed. if anyone has tips let me know.

a non automated way is that you can create an 'ortho' from your cutting plane view. this is an odd ortho in that it actually exists in tbc in the orientation of the cutting plane. but that does not really matter for what you are trying to do(maybe you can load that ortho into the profile in tbc, i don't think we tried that). it will also be saved in the tbc folder structure for the project. you can then take this image, i forget what it is, jpg i think and bring it back into your project in a flat plane(this is maybe different for us because we are going into civil so it makes it flat automatic). then you can place it manually into your profile view, you will need something to line up to, if you have extracted powerlines then this works well, the ground typically does not work as well because of the thickness of the cutting plane will give a pretty fat profile of the point cloud. you can make a couple orthos with the line points region on or off and swap between if you don't want those points showing. if that makes sense.

all this to say that it should be automated, but i don't know of a way. but you can get nice plots if you do the steps i have mentioned. one other issue with it, is that if you have deflections in the line profile then you will need a cutting plane for each deflection, so that is a heck of a pain and again it should be automated.