Starting with object styles creation, this article guides readers through the process of setting up Civil 3D to streamline their office's drawing template file creation. The guide covers the importance of object styles and label styles, the steps for creating a spot elevation label style for a surface, and tips for using the settings tab effectively.
Key Insights
- The article emphasizes setting up object styles in Civil 3D, as someone tasked with preparing a drawing template file in an office will spend much time in the settings tab creating these styles. This ensures every new drawing created in the office will have access to these styles.
- Creation of a spot elevation label style for a surface is demonstrated in detail. The steps involve going into settings, opening up surfaces, selecting the spot elevations folder, and carefully adjusting various parameters to achieve the desired result.
- The guide also highlights the importance of spending time creating drawing template files to include all of the object styles and label styles that an office frequently uses. This approach ensures these styles are readily available for anyone creating a new drawing in the organization.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we're going to go ahead and start creating some label styles, but before we do that, I want to reiterate that for this course, we only created five object styles, two surface styles, two grading styles, and one feature lens style. Civil 3D, you can create object styles inside of the settings tab for every single object in Civil 3D.
We don't have the time in order to devote to walking through each of the individual objects inside Civil 3D and creating object styles for them. We're also not going to use every single object in this course. We only created a few of them so that you can see how to create objects and then use them in a drawing template file.
Somebody who's going to be setting up a drawing template file in your office is going to spend a lot of time in the settings tab, setting up these object styles. And if that person is you, what we're going to be, what you're going to end up doing is you're going to be marching through every single object inside Civil 3D, creating an object style for it, saving it as a drawing template file, like we're going to go ahead and do in this course. And then when somebody creates a new drawing for your office, they'll go ahead and use that drawing template file.
And all of those object styles will automatically populate inside of the drawing and be available for us to use in the future. So that's just something to keep in mind, that it's important to spend the time when you're creating a drawing template file to make all of the object styles and label styles that your office tends to use and create them inside of your drawing template file so that they're available for everyone who creates a new drawing in your organization. So moving on from here, we're going to go ahead and create our first label style, which is going to be a spot elevation label style for a surface.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to settings. I'm going to open up surfaces. I'm going to go to spot elevations.
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I'm going to select the spot elevations folder. I'm going to right click and select new. So inside of here, we're going to be creating a spot elevation label style that I'm going to call spot L. So I'm going to change the name of the label to spot L. I'm going to go to my general tab.
And inside of here, we have our text style, label visibility. I'm going to leave it as true. We're going to choose a layer.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to see topo text. So I'm going to go down here, see topo text, click OK, so that our spot elevation labels are on the correct layer behavior. You're going to either orient your label to an object of you or world coordinate system.
I'm going to go ahead and leave it as object. We are not going to force insertion. We could do top or bottom.
I'm going to go ahead and do none. We have plan readability. So whether or not our labels flip based on the readability bias, and this is the readability bias angle, then we have the option of flipping anchors with text, whether or not those anchors are going to change orientation based on the plan readability.
I'm going to go ahead and leave it as false. So moving on from here, I'm going to go to layout. I'm actually going to delete out this surface elevation or actually, no, I'll work with it because this spot elevation is going to have a surface elevation in it.
What I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to put a block reference and a line in here. So I'm going to go ahead and first add a block reference. Then I'm going to add a line.
And so what I'm going to go ahead and do is change this line. I'm going to delete out the point one and then the block I'm going to put in as node. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and make some of my changes.
What I'm going to do is inside of this preview window, I'm going to zoom in on one of the labels that I'm working with. So I clicked into this window, zoomed in. And so what I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to first deal with my surface elevation.
I'm going to go ahead and change the name to spot elevation. And then I'm going to leave my visibility as true, leave my anchoring component as feature. I'm going to go ahead and change my anchor point to middle left.
And then I'm going to change my X and Y offsets. I'm going to go ahead and leave my contents as surface elevation. So what we can see here is surface elevation.
If I go down here and select surface elevation for my properties, and I see that I have a foot unit, I have a P2, which is precision 2, which is this 0.01. I have a rounding normal. I'm using my decimal symbol as comma. So all of this is looking as I expect it to be.
So I'm not going to change any of it. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. When I'm in paper space, the text height of my label is going to be 0.1. I'm going to leave it as that.
And I'm going to go ahead and change my X and Y offset. I'm going to change my X offset to 0.5 and hit ENTER. Now we see that text move off from our node point or our anchor point right here.
I'm going to go ahead and change my Y offset to 0.1. And we'll see that it moves up above the line here. So moving on from here, what I'm going to go ahead and do is click node. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in at my node point here.
So what we have going on here is this circle, which is this block reference that we have here. What we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to leave the name as node because that's what I chose. Leave the visibility as true.
We're going to go ahead and anchor to the feature. We're going to go ahead and do middle center. We're going to go ahead and attach at the middle center.
We're going to go ahead and choose our block. We're going to go ahead and select our block name. We are going to go to a block of iron pin.
So as I zoom out, you're going to see the iron pin block comes around this purple. This purple is the anchor point for our label. So this iron pin is going to be a double circle around this blue or this purple circle here.
So moving on from here, now we have a label that has a circle at the end of a line with our text on the top of it. I'm going to go ahead and navigate to line now. And I'm going to change my anchoring components for this line because it's now at the top and I want it to be at the center.
We have line visibility, true start point anchor component. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as feature. And I'm going to go to middle center.
Now if I zoom in here, what you're going to see the line going to is the center of that circle. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom out. And this is what our labels are going to look like.
Now I'm going to navigate to drag state. I do want to change the drag state of this label style. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I am going to change what the type is.
I'm going to change it to a spline leader. And then I'm going to go ahead and change what my arrowhead is. My arrowhead is currently set to closed fillet.
I'm going to go ahead and change it to dot. And then I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. Now we've created this spot elevation surface spot elevation label.
So I'm going to go ahead and minimize these. I'm going to go ahead and save my drawing. And then I'll meet you in the next video.
