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Projecting Section and Profile View Points to Plan Coordinates with View2Plan

A Civil 3D Section View or Profile View is a drafting construct: a grid drawn somewhere in model space, with its own local geometry. A point you see inside that grid has a meaningful station, offset and elevation, but its actual drawing coordinates are arbitrary. Getting that point onto the plan — at its true Northing and Easting — normally means reading values off the grid and calculating the transformation by hand.

View2Plan removes that calculation. It is a small Civil 3D automation tool that lets you click directly inside a Section or Profile View and immediately creates the corresponding object at its real plan coordinates.

What the Tool Actually Does

View2Plan is a digitiser, not a converter. It does not select, move or transform existing drawing objects. You pick points inside the view, and for every pick the tool creates new geometry in plan: a Civil 3D Cogo Point, an AutoCAD Point, a vertex on a 3D Polyline, or a combination of those.

This matters in practice. Typical uses are tracing a feature off a cross-section — a ditch invert, a subgrade line, an existing utility crossing — and getting it into plan as real, snappable, correctly elevated geometry.

The Coordinate Problem It Solves

For a Section View, the tool reads the view's sample line, walks back to the sample line group and its parent alignment, and takes the station from the sample line. Each click is converted into an offset and elevation, and the alignment then resolves that station/offset pair into an Easting and Northing. The elevation becomes the Z coordinate.

For a Profile View, the alignment comes from the view itself and each click yields a station and elevation. Because a profile is drawn along the centreline, the offset is zero — picked points land on the alignment at the derived station, at the picked elevation.

The result in both cases is a true 3D position: Easting, Northing, and the elevation you clicked at.

The Workflow

  1. Type SPPMAPPER to open the settings palette, or run the commands directly: GR_S2PL for a Section View, GR_P2PL for a Profile View.
  2. Set your layers, colours and operation mode in the palette. The palette's From Section View and From Profile View buttons save the settings and launch the matching command.
  3. Select the Section View or Profile View. The prompt rejects anything that is not the right object type.
  4. Click points inside the view. Each click immediately places its plan geometry, and a temporary marker appears at the point you clicked.
  5. Type U (Undo) to remove the last point — the created objects are erased and the 3D Polyline is rebuilt without that vertex.
  6. Press ENTER or right-click to finish.

Four Output Modes

  • Cogo Points + 3D Polyline — the default. Civil 3D Cogo Points, connected by a 3D Polyline.
  • AutoCAD Points + 3D Polyline — standard AutoCAD points instead of Cogo Points, still connected.
  • Only Cogo Points — no connecting line.
  • Only AutoCAD Points — no connecting line.

The 3D Polyline is built live as you click, so the traced feature exists as a single continuous object by the time you press ENTER. Cogo Points are created with a fixed raw description so they are easy to isolate afterwards.

Temporary Graphics You Can Actually See

Every click leaves a marker inside the view, drawn as transient graphics rather than real drawing objects — so it costs nothing in the drawing database and never has to be cleaned up manually. You choose:

  • Temp point style: Cross, Circle or Node, in a colour of your choice.
  • Temp line style: Continuous or Dashed, connecting consecutive picks so you can see the shape you are tracing.
  • Maintain Temp Geometry till REGEN: when ticked, the markers stay on screen after the command ends, so you can check your work against the section. They clear automatically the next time you type REGEN, REGENALL, REDRAW, or save the drawing.

Clicks Outside the Grid Do Not Break the Command

The coordinate transformation is isolated: if you click outside the grid boundaries or past the end of the alignment, the tool reports a warning on the command line, ignores that click, and asks for the next one. The command keeps running, and nothing partial is written to the drawing.

Layers, Colours and Saved Settings

Point and line output layers are set in the palette, defaulting to C-SCT-POINTS and C-SCT-LINE. If a layer does not exist it is created; if it does, its colour is set to the colour you chose. The objects themselves are drawn ByLayer, so the layer stays in charge of appearance.

Colours are picked through AutoCAD's own colour dialog, with both the ACI and True Color tabs available. All settings — layers, colours, temporary graphics styles, operation mode and the keep-temp option — are stored per user and restored the next time you open the palette.

Requirements

View2Plan is a Civil 3D tool. It reads Section Views, Profile Views, sample lines and alignments through the Civil 3D API, so plain AutoCAD is not enough. It ships as two builds — a .NET Framework 4.8 build for Civil 3D 2024 and a .NET 8 build for Civil 3D 2025 — and is 64-bit Windows only.

View2Plan is deliberately narrow: it does one transformation, and it does it on every click without asking you to do arithmetic. For anyone tracing features off cross-sections into plan on a road or utility corridor, that removes the slowest and most error-prone step in the job.