[ORD] Cross sections to even heights?

Easiest way I've found is to create a TM with 2 breaklines at the elevations that you want your grid band elevation. So for your example, a min. breakline at constant elevation 735 and a max. breakline at constant elevation 755. Create a TM of those 2 elements and use a FD that places it on a construction level. I usually have these breaklines located at a constant offset (offset geometry = offset I am showing in my XS grid) relative to the baseline I am placing named boundaries about. Set your clearances to be 0 for top and bottom. This method works pretty well when you don't have a lot of elevation change across your project. If you do, make multiple TMs through the ranges/elevation bands you want to see. Create a named boundary group for the first range, then append to that group to get the rest.

HTH,

Justin

That's exactly what I was thinking about. I'm in "flyover country" - some projects have notable elevation changes, but a lot of them don't.

No different than what I used to do in Geopak to get my sections spaced properly on my sheets - I would create a construction shape to cover the desired elevation range.

Yeah, and now the grids run up to some "random" elevation...It's not wrong but it's not the way people want to see things 'round here.

Can they complain when Excel or Word does something different than the way they want to see it?

When we first started using CAD, some people complained that the way Stationing on alignments looked, was different than how we drafted it. A few even went so far as to change it manually to look like it always looked. Doing so broke up every element of an alignment into separate pieces at every 50' increment. Then, they complained when their files seemed slow.

One department even had a custom program written to draw stationing "their way". I am glad we are beyond that.

In some ways, the argument that "This is what the program does automatically. If you want something different, be prepared to pay someone to manually modify it every time, for every change, for every project from now on." will hopefully dissuade them from their possition. 

Oh, I know...

It's actually funny to me that items like cross section grids will be that big a deal. I have one engineer who INSISTED that there HAD to be three cross sections on a sheet, no matter what the software was going to do about it. 

But I also recall getting into a surprisingly heated discussion about the fact the 11x17 printouts were not exactly half-sized sheets of  24x36 plans. I tried to explain that for a true half-size, we needed to create 22x34 full-size plans instead, but he was convinced that I was too lazy to figure it out, and just plain wrong.

Not every Engineer is as smart as they think they are.

We actually changed our standard plan sheets from 24 X 26 to 22 X 34 so we could get true half size drawings. 

But is it a real issue if it is a personal preference vs. something that is an actual CADD standard?

That is a big thing that held us back  in the early days of ORD, but we have since just focused on what is actually required by the client and things are much better now.

But is it a real issue if it is a personal preference vs. something that is an actual CADD standard?

That is a big thing that held us back  in the early days of ORD, but we have since just focused on what is actually required by the client and things are much better now.