I know what you’re thinking, “Hey another article from that dude Matt. I wonder where he’s been?” Well, I’ve been busy jet setting around the world. What with the trekking in Machu Picchu, the summit attempt on Everest, and that rash they haven’t been able to figure out yet, I just haven’t had the time to write.

If you believe that I’ll sell you my VBA routine that removes all the bugs from every application out there.

A while back I wrote a piece about placing R.O.W. lines in your cross sections. It worked well…there?s an easier way now. No assembly edits, no code set styles. Woohoo!

It’s all about profile grade lines. Sure we could so this in 2007, but only one section at a time. It didn’t take very many projects for me to figure out that this was not a solution I was willing to use.

The toughest thing you need to do is create a block of what you want to appear in the cross section and make a Marker style that includes that block. Let’s use this block:

And this marker style:

You still need to create a R.O.W. alignment and sample a surface like the other method, so you’re not saving time with this step. Once you have those, create your sample lines like usual. Then import your section views. Except just after you’re finished, right click one of your section views and pick “Section View Group Properties.” Then pick the ellipsis in the Profile Grade column.

Add your ROW alignments and their profiles.

And voila! You’ll see some green lines in the image below under the ROW lines. You can choose to keep these or not. They are part of the section view style. In fact, you don’t even need to create the block and marker style if it’s just these lines you want to see.

Well, that’s it. I hope you can put this to good use. See you next time on. Eventually.