Point Blocks Independent of your Point Marker

One wish that I’ve heard quite frequently with surveyors who are using Civil 3D is that they miss the functionality in Land Desktop that allowed them to have a separate point block and point marker. I’m not going to jump into the argument about legalities of moving field-located symbology just to make the annotation look better, that’s for a different website entirely. However, after brainstorming some ideas, I think I have found what could be an acceptable workaround. I do need to point out something, though – I discovered this (remembered this is more like it) as I was writing this and had to come back up to edit. This will work for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2006-2009, but requires you to touch each and every point that you want to do this for, so how is it different from just dropping in a block…anyway, I digress – this is automagic in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010! I’m so excited I could…well, let’s just see how this works, shall we?

So what you’re going to be doing is very simple – creating figures. In this example, I am going to have a few fire hydrant shots and I want nothing displaying but the point marker and my independent block that identifies this object as a hydrant.

First, we have so start off with a tiny bit of setup. I’m going to create a new survey figure style with a few simple tweaks. For my marker style on the vertex, I’m going to create one that displays an AutoCAD block (Proposed Hyd), displays it at 0.12” per the drawing scale, and orients the marker to the view – this is just like setting up any point marker style, only it’s not a true point marker. This marker is stored in the general styles.

Once that is set up, I am back in the Figure Style dialog, where I need to make one more tweak – this time, on the display tab. Here, I am going to turn off the Figure Line component and only have the Vertex Markers component displaying.

My next step will be to edit my Figure Prefix Database to add this new figure prefix. For the sake of consistency, I am calling everything the same – HYDRANT.

Now that everything is set up as I want it, I can apply this to a real scenario. I’ll show the automagic-ness with 2010 first. My first step will be to import the points. The good thing about 2010 is that I can import just a simple ASCII file into the survey database if I don’t want to import a FBK file. My file is very simple, with only HYDRANT points in it, as you can see:

1,4938.6730,5329.0471,0.0000,HYDRANT
2,4988.4174,5508.9140,0.0000,HYDRANT
3,4933.5543,5649.5504,0.0000,HYDRANT
4,4792.2817,5657.0968,0.0000,HYDRANT
5,4790.2243,5403.2652,0.0000,HYDRANT

To import this file, I will select the Import Survey Data command on the Home tab of the ribbon and walk through the wizard. This allows me to create a new database, specify my data source (the text file, in this case) and create a new network. On the last window of this wizard, I want to set my points to be non-control points, specify my figure prefix database (very important,) and make sure process linework during import is selected. This part is pretty important, even though I don’t have any linework codes in my text file.

What? How do I create linework if I don’t have any codes???

Here’s the automagic part. My very close friend Scott McEachron and I get all giddy over new survey functionality, so this release just has our eyes glazed over with excitement. However, he discovered this part, and couldn’t wait to send me an IM about it – here’s where it gets fun:

As long as you have a figure prefix defined in the figure prefix database, you do not have to have linework codes to cause linework to get drawn.

That’s right, folks – you don’t have to begin a line as long as that prefix is defined in your prefix database. The program picks up on it and draws the feature line. Granted, I need to research this a little more in-depth, but this does something that I need it to do, so I’m going to run with it. I do think you’d have to think a bit to fit this into your workflow, but it proves to be extremely powerful.

Once I bring in this survey data, my figure is drawn. However, there is no linework, only the vertices are being shown, and they are shown with the block that I want, as you can see:

What’s nice about this is that I can select this vertex and use the grip to move the figure vertex anywhere I want to:

Now, let me talk to the users who are still on a pre-2010 version of Civil 3D. Yes, you can still do this, and in the same exact way. The only difference is that you don’t have the automatic processing that you do in Civil 3D 2010. What you have to do is still set up the initial information but then draw a polyline connecting all of these points that you want the block positioned on. Once you do that, you will have to use the Survey>Create Figure From Object command and then select that polyline. You can then erase the polyline, but you will have to manually insert the newly-created figure into your drawing. Note that this does require that you have a survey database created and open, but your points do not need to live in the survey database. For this reason, you should not select “Associate survey points to vertices” in the Create Figure from Object dialog.

Have fun!