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Michael Kinnear/3 min read

Adding PVI and Curves to Profile Layout in Civil 3D

PVI & Curve Workflow

1

Open Profile Layout Tools

Edit > Profile Layout for the design profile.

2

Insert PVI

Click in profile view at desired station and elevation.

3

Add Vertical Curve

Use parameter (length) or K-value for curve.

4

Verify Constraints

Check that K-value meets design speed requirements.

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This Civil 3D tutorial walks through adding pvi and curves to profile layout in civil 3d, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we're going to go ahead and add a PVI to our profile and also add a curve to our profile. So to do that, what I'm going to go ahead and do is zoom in on my Branch and Profile, select my Design Profile, and select Geometry Editor up in the contextual ribbon bar.

Inside of the window for our Profile Layout Tools, I'm going to go ahead and go to this option here for Insert PVI. From there, I'm going to pick anywhere on the screen where I want to insert my new PVI. Now, if for some reason you clicked more than once, or you didn't want to have as many PVIs as you had selected, you have an option for deleting PVIs.

All you have to do is select near the PVI that you want to delete, and Civil 3D will remove those PVIs from the drawing. From here, I'm going to go ahead and drop down and add in a curve. My curve I'm going to add is a Free Vertical Curve fixed between two objects.

So I'm going to go ahead and select Free Vertical Curve Parabola. I'm going to select this entity, and then this entity. Now, Civil 3D is asking me for a curve length.

I'm going to go ahead and hit 10 for my curve length, and what you'll notice here is that I have a very, very small curve. We're going to go ahead and go back and fix that in a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing with my Dev Main End profile.

I'm going to go ahead and select my Design Profile, go to Geometry Editor. I'm going to go ahead and add a PVI somewhere in the middle, and then I'm going to go ahead and add in a Free Vertical Curve by selecting entity and entity and typing in a length. This time, I'm going to type in 50.

So that's better, but still not great. So to change these vertical curves, we have two options. We can go ahead and go in, click on the Design Profile, and we can select a grip and change the length of the Profile Curve by moving it out.

I want to pick something like this so that I have a very gentle curve. Since this profile is the end of my alignment, and it's doing the profile of the curve line on my cul-de-sac, I want to have the end, the middle of the cul-de-sac be the high point, and then everything draining out towards the edges of the cul-de-sac. So I'm going to go ahead and go down to my other profile, and we're going to talk about the other way to do this.

If we go up here and we look at this label, we'll notice that the curve length is somewhere around 159.57. We want to have something similar to that, but this way we're going to do it by selecting the Design Profile, going to Geometry Editor, going to grid view, and then changing our curve length. We're going to go in, change 50 to 160, and hit ENTER. And you'll notice that Civil 3D changed that curve length.

All we have to do is close this window, hit Escape, and close our Profile Layout Tools. I'm going to zoom back out, I'm going to save my drawing, and I'll meet you in the next video.