Being Civil

Surfaces – Multiple Viewports, Multiple Styles

Here in Product Support, we all have certain features of the application that we naturally gravitate towards.  For me, I love working on Surface related issues.  After having to manually triangulate a Surface during that winter Land Surveying class I took my freshman year of college, you’d think I would be scared for life!

Anyways, we all know that Civil 3D has some incredible Surface functionality.  Being able to change the Style on the fly to display elevation ranges and slopes is such a great tool.  But what happens when you want to show all of that information at the same time.  For example, your planset needs to show the Contours, the Slope Analysis, as well as the Elevation Analysis.  And, they want to show them all on the same sheet.  The Surface can only have a single Style assigned to it, so what is the best way to do this?

Export Styles from Drawing to Drawing

We are all aware that styles can be easily copied from drawing to drawing by drag & drop. The only requirement was the the drawing in which the styles are copied to is active and the other from which the styles are being copied from is opened. This was helpful but slow since styles needed to be copied individually. I am not aware of any way of copying only selected styles and would be glad to know if anyone figured it out already. But....what if you needed to copy all styles to the new drawing?  That’s when DWT file come handy.

If the drawing with desired styles are saved as a template it will also save the styles. Now, all we have to do is to import that DWT into the new drawing as a layout (also DWT) and styles will become part of the new drawing. So, to demonstrate…

1. Open your drawing with all styles you want to copy and add another style (for instance, a style called TEST under Profile Styles).

 

Reapplying Description Keys to Points

As I have been digging deeper and deeper into Civil 3D 2010, I have found a few hidden gems, and have been slacking just a tiny bit about sharing that information. Today’s post is a preview of something a small feature that will make a world of difference to some people. It’s not a very long and in-depth demo, just one screen shot, but I think you’ll like it anyway.

Have you spent a lot of time setting up description keys in your template only to find that your survey crew fat-fingers a point on the data collector and it doesn’t come in correctly? Have you repaired that point description only to find that it didn’t automatically pick up on the correct description key? This worked fine in Land Desktop, but description keys in Civil 3D have always only been applied at the initial import process. That is, until now. No further explanation needed, because a picture speaks a thousand words:

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?

Parcel Style Display Order

Here is a quickie for you.  Perhaps you have had two adjacent Parcels in the same Site, but each had a different Style.  What happens to that common property line?  Which Style would it take?  Well, you either got lucky and the Display order just happened to be what you wanted, or you wondered how/if this could be changed.

To change this, simply expand out your Site in the Prospector so you can see the Parcels.  Now, right-click on Parcels (the header, not the actual Parcels) and select Properties.

On the Composition Tab, you can see the “Parcel Style Display Order” in the lower left side.  This allows you to change the priority of which Styles are on top.  Think “draworder” for Parcel Styles.  Keep in mind, this setting is specific to the Parcels in that Site.  Each Site is able to have a different Display Order. 

Enjoy!

My Colors Will Not Display!

This issue may not arise frequently – as a matter of fact, you may never see it. However, you can guarantee a headache if it does. Have you ever added a table with colors (i.e. a slope arrows table?) What if the colors don’t show up? Do you know how to get them back?

Adding a comma to your Distance or Parcel Labels

When labeling your Line segments, wouldn’t it be nice to add a comma to the value at the thousands place?  How about in your Parcel Labels, that display areas?  Well, some of you think so, because you have asked for it.  With a little bit of work, and by utilizing Expressions we can turn this:

into this:

Creating a Label to show spot coordinates

I had a recent request asking if there was a way to add a Label to a plan, showing only the Northing and Easting for a property corner.  This is a fairly common requirement of Planning Departments for final plan sets.  If you look through the "Add Labels" dialog box, you wont see any mention of this, so I was surprised I hadn't had seen this request before. 

This is actually quite easy to do in Civil 3D by simply adding a Point at your desired spot and assigning a Point Label Style to display only the coordinates.