Another visual aide - viewing your Profile in 3D

Justin's post last week on Visual Tracking got me to thinking about another visual aide you may or may not have noticed, the 3D Chain item in a Profile Style.  When you create alignments, they are 2D objects, so in a 3D view with a surface, you see the alignment down below at zero elevation.

If you create a profile for the alignment, either from a surface or a design profile, you are adding that Z value, the elevation data.  You can create a profile view but what about visualizing the alignment in 3D with the additional profile information? 

Once your profile is created, look on the Display tab of the Profile Style - set the View Direction to Model and you have this Component called a 3D Chain - what the heck is that?!

 

It is gray by default so you may not have noticed it, but try adding a color and some lineweight to it, turn on Lineweight display and then use Orbit View to check out your surface again.  The alignment is still floating down at zero, but you can see I made a profile from the surface, and now I have a line draped on the surface representing the horizontal data from the alignment and the elevation values from the surface profile.  It is a visual aide only, so you can't snap to it, but can be useful for viewing purposes.