Create alignment styles

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Alignment styles control how alignments are displayed in your model.

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They define the visibility,

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colors and line styles of the various parts of an alignment.

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Each alignment can be assigned a style and the style can be changed at any time.

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For example,

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we often want to have a different style shown whilst we are designing our alignment

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perhaps with some clear bright colors.

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But then when we want to plot these on a drawing,

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we might be using color based plotting.

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And so we will change the style to show the colors for plotting.

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So we'd have one style for designing with

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and a different style for drawing production.

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We're going to create an alignment style

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that is suitable for using whilst designing

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in the settings, tab expand alignment

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and then expand alignment styles.

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When we create new styles,

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we often use an existing style as a template as it already has some of the settings.

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We want,

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we're going to use the layout style and make a copy of it,

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rename your new style to design style.

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You can also give it a description if you wish

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we could continue to make changes in this style.

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But if we save it now and apply it to our alignment.

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Then we can make changes to the style and see the result of our edits,

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click OK to save the style and then apply

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your new style to the Sycamore heights alignment.

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Go back to the settings tab

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and edit your new style

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in the style. There is a design tab which defines the grip edit behavior for curves,

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we'll set the radio snap value to 10.

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I'm going to label the curve on the alignment

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so that you can see the grip edit behavior

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with this set.

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When I make a grip edit on a curve, the grip will snap to an even 10 ft radius

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back in the style. Go to the markers tab.

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Here you can see a list of geometry positions for the alignment

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and we can define markers to be drawn at those positions.

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I can show you the markers in the drawing and

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you can see that they're very small and don't really show

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we need to edit these to make them visible at all. Drawing scales,

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click on the edit button on the point of intersection row for the P point marker.

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In the pick marker style, click on the edit button again.

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In the marker style,

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we'll change the size options from use size in absolute units to use drawing scale

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and set the units to 0.1.

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This will make the marker annotative and it will

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resize so that it's 0.1 of an inch when plotted

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regardless of the scale of the plot.

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When I apply that to the style, you can see the marker shows in the drawing.

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We'll repeat this for the alignment geometry marker,

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but we'll set the size for this to 0.05.

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Click apply to see these on the alignment

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at the bottom of the Marcus tab are the settings for an alignment direction arrow

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in here, you can define the arrow style and size

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set. The size options

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to use drawing scale

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and set the value to 0.2.

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To see the arrow go to the display tab

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and turn on the arrow using the light bulb.

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The fit options for the arrow control. What happens if the line segment is too short,

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the arrow can be emitted

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or shrink or be forced to be drawn.

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Now go to the display tab.

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This tab controls the display of alignment entities in different view directions,

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plan

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model 3d or section

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for each sub entity,

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line curve, etc.

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You can set the visibility layer,

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color,

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line type, line type scale and line weight.

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When we turn off the visibility, we are hiding that entity in the display

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independently from its layer setting.

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If a sub entity is assigned a specific layer,

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we then have the option of controlling visibility by style or by layer.

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The line set the color to yellow,

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for curves,

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set the color to red

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and for spiral

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set the color to magenta.

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This allows us to easily identify where different entities change.

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Using the shift key select line curve and spiral

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set the line weight for these three

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to 0.3

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turn off the arrow visibility. As we don't want to see arrows on the alignment

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note the layer for the line extension,

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we want to set the same layer for the tangent extensions,

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C

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dash road dash line dash

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extension,

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select all of the extensions and change the color to 253.

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So they're slightly lighter.

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Change the view direction to model.

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You can see the lines, curves and spirals are set to be visible when viewing in 3D.

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Let me show you what this means.

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Here, I am viewing the alignment together with the surface in the object viewer.

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You can see that the alignment is only displaying in two D as it has no elevations.

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There's really not much point viewing it in 3D.

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So in the model view of the style, we'll turn all the visibility off

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in the section view direction. We'll only see a marker for the alignment,

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set, the marker color to red,

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click. OK. To save the changes to the style,

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we can now apply the style to all of our alignments.