Can you really see through Transparent Commands?

While working on a support call today, I derived a solution for a customer that included using a Transparent Command. That got me to wondering how many people actually use the Transparent Commands in Civil 3D. I know that I did not use them very often in past employment engagements. It was not until I started teaching classes on Civil 3D that I fully understood the power of these commands and how they could help me work smarter and not harder.

For example, at one of my past jobs I worked with an older gentleman who was very close to retirement. He was fairly proficient with vanilla AutoCAD, but almost completely illiterate when it came to Civil 3D. I am not knocking the guy, because he was good at what he did. He just did not see the need to learn new software while being on the verge of retirement. A typical scenario for one of his projects was that I would take the survey data and create the surface and then hand the drawing off to him. He would complete the geometric design and give it back to me to produce profile drawings. When I created the profile drawings, I would have to plot them at an exaggerated scale and he would break out his old HP Calculator, complete with card reader, and design the profile on paper.

Then he would had the paper copies back to me and I would input the data into Civil 3D and finalize most of the design before handing it back for his review. At the time, I did not use the Transparent Commands very much because I did not understand what they were. So to input his design data, I would create a layout profile and get the PVI's close to their desired locations and elevations. Then I would open up the profile editor and hand correct the stations and elevations.

Does this sound familiar to you? Well, after a while I learned that there were commands in Civil 3D that run "inside" of other commands and allow us to input specific data in that command. Instead of having to get the PVI's close, I could have used the Profile Station Elevation transparent command to specifically enter the station and elevation of the PVI without having to go back and edit.

Which brings me back to today's case. The customer was working on a paving project. A contractor had constructed a leveling course and the customer had sent his crew out to collect profile elevations at an offset left and right of the center line. He then wanted to show those offsets in his profile view. I didn't want to have to try and create another surface and extract the data from the surface when we already had the point information in the drawing.

I began looking for a Transparent Command that would let me harness that point information and apply it in the profile view. To both the customer's satisfaction and mine I found the transparent command that would allow us to do just that. The command was Profile Station and Elevation from a Cogo Point, or 'SPE.

To use the command we went to the Ribbon and selected Profile Creation Tools from the Create Design panel. Once we entered the profile name in the dialog box and set our styles we invoked the Create Tangents command and then invoked the 'SPE transparent command. We selected the profile view in which to draw the profile and began to pick the point objects we wanted to see in the profile view. Then the steps were repeated for the opposite offset.

If you have not looked into using Transparent Commands, I encourage you to look into them. They can definitely help us work smarter and not harder!