Is there a way to draw a line at a certain station and offset within the referenced profile view in ORD?

Hi Phani,

You can only do this with the Drawing tools like a Smart Line - the Geometry tools will not work for an Attached Profile model. The X coordinate is the distance along the Alignment so you could draw a line at a specific station that way. Not pretty, but works.

That is what I thought. Thank you for confirming. 

Are there any plans to add the ability to draw elements accurately in a profile or cross section drawing? I can think of several reasons I might need to manually add elements to a drawing that are not actually part of the model. Often we get existing utility or structure information that would take to long to attempt to model - placing a 6" circle at Sta/Elev is much faster than trying to model an existing water line (especially when we might only have that Sta/Elev to work with).

Both Geopak and InRoads had some type of (semi? Non? graphical?) data to identify a "base point" Sta/Elev so that the software could calculate from that and place elements precisely. Is there any consideration of something similar in ORD? I understand that you want us to model everything, but there will still be times when information needs to be drawn manually. It would be nice if the software made ANY accommodation for that.

It doesnt look like there are any plans for that. I get that they are trying to have a system where you have direct representation of a 3d model, but in real world project delivery you will never have the time to model everything, especially if its just to show it on a section. I think the issue is that the current drawing production engine doesnt have any ability for a "hybrid" mode to allow users to do graphical edits (easily). There is a lot of versatility in how we can model things, but not with drawing production (yet).

You get it!

I'd love to post an Idea, but it won't let me log into that right now...

I fee that Plans production has been overlooked for quite some time, and it seems that it is just now starting to come to the development team. You are right that we do need better options for a hybrid approach. Modeling is great, but as you said, there are always going to be small items that aren't worth modeling (or impossible to model, depending on the avaiable data), or other items that (depending on time, development stage and budget) are just plain faster to do by hand.