What Happened to My Crown?

I’m very excited to be blogging for MasterGraphics. This is a great way to distribute information to users that “everybody” can benefit from. To that point, my first topic is inspired from several support calls I received within a two week period. If that many people had called about it, I’m betting there are that many more that are suffering in silence.

In this case, we have a road design, and either the COGO points from the road are needed, or the elevation offset labels in the section views are needed. Sounds easy, and the information is there. For some reason the crown of my road is oddly left out. Well, this is very easily overlooked, but also very easy to fix.

(Click the images to get a better view)

If you are having this problem chances are your road design is utilizing one of the super-elevating subassemblies. These subassemblies have a lot of power to them. Don’t be scared off by their names. Even if you never superelevate roads (or don’t know what that means) these subassemblies are worth investigating for the design work they make possible!

One of the parameters you have control over for these subassemblies is Crown Point on Inside, which is defaulted to ‘No’. Well, ‘No’ prevents the crown point from reporting as a point code.

Aha! Turn it to ‘Yes’ and where you use that assembly you will now have the labels.

Now, that’s great if you catch that setting before you start your design. What happens when you’re three days past building your corridor when you realize your crown points aren’t showing up? I haven’t done that several times…this week…no way! Like I said, it’s easy to miss, especially when you are rushing. The fix is to simply edit the subassembly to change the Crown Point on Inside to ‘Yes’. You can do this by right-clicking on the assembly name in the Prospector, or selecting the assembly, or the subassembly, and editing the properties in the Construction tab. In my screenshot I have chosen to edit the assembly’s construction. The subassembly to the right is the one that I am editing.

As I was writing this, and making screenshots, my cross-section view didn’t change immediately as it should have. Then I realized the Code Set Style that I had assigned had the crown point label set to <none>. A quick detour to the toolspace, settings tab, general, multipurpose styles, code set styles…

…assign the appropriate Crown point label…

…and I was happily rewarded with my labels in the section view.

Depending on your standards/workflow/design output needs you may set the Code Set Style in your template file, and you’ll never worry about that not being set again!

Hope this helps clear up any confusion you might be experiencing!