Occasionally, a user will discover something that I have never seen (or noticed) before. That tends to not bother me too much, as I realize that Civil 3D is a very large program that does many, many tasks. But yesterday, a call came in about a grip that I’ve never paid attention to. The question did not pertain as much to “what is that grip?” as it did to “what does that grip do?” So to answer the question, I embarked on a journey and finally figured it out.
The grip in question is the circular one found on assembly baselines, as shown to the right. If you hover over this grip, it is called “Toggle assembly origin grip to baseline grip.” Oh – well, that apparently explains it, right? If that was all you were reading for, you can go peruse your (other!) favorite web sites now, because that’s the answer. However, if you want to find out what it does, you should probably stick around.
The user explained to me what it was being used for, and I didn’t really buy into it that much, until I found out that he was right. When this particular user designs roads, everything is designed to the top back of curb elevation. In his design standards, the centerline elevation should be 0.24’ lower than the top back of curb. Instead of creating a new profile that replicated his back of curb minus 0.24’, he simply used this grip to adjust his assembly.
The way that he did this was to design the assembly as normal. If I zoom in pretty close to my assembly, you can see how things attach up on the baseline just as I would expect them to. The top of the pavement attaches to the baseline as it normally would, and everything is fine. But remember that I am trying to design this so that my baseline is pulling from my top of curb elevation, so my crown point is actually 0.24’ higher than I want it to be. To fix this, I am going to select that
circular grip (you may have to zoom way in to see it) and left-click it. Doing that will turn the square grip below it into a diamond shaped grip – and now we are ROLLING! Once the grip is diamond shaped, we can select it and use it to move our baseline location independent of the assembly! So in my scenario, I would select it, enable ORTHO mode (F8), move the cursor upward, and enter in a value of 0.24. That will give us a result that looks more like what we are expecting – our crown point is actually lower than our assembly baseline insertion point.
Hopefully, this undocumented feature will be of some use to you. And just to satisfy my curiosity, how many of you knew what this was and what it did? Drop me a comment if you did!
A very special thanks for this post goes out to my good friend Nick Zeeben, QA Analyst for Civil Test Development here at Autodesk for helping me along my journey in finding the answer to this question. Thanks, Nick!
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