Datasheet

THE UNDERLYING ENGINE

The Underlying Engine

Civil 3D is part of a larger product family from Autodesk. During its earliest creation, various fea-

tures and functions from other products were recognized as important to the civil engineering com-

munity. These include the obvious things like the entire suite of AutoCAD drafting, design,

modeling, and rendering tools and then to some more esoteric options like Map’s GIS capabilities.

An early decision was made to build Civil 3D on top of the AutoCAD Map product, which in turn

is built on top of AutoCAD.

This underlying engine provides a whole host of options and powerful tools for the Civil 3D

user. AutoCAD and Map add features with every release that change the fundamental makeup of

how Civil 3D works. With the introduction of workspaces in 2006, users can now set up Civil 3D

to display various tools and palettes depending on the task at hand. Creating a workspace can be

thought of as having a quick-fix bag of tools ready for the job at hand: preliminary design calls for

one set of tools, and final plan production calls for another.

Workspaces are part of a larger feature set called the custom user interface, typically referred to

as CUI in the help documentation and online. Creating workspaces is relatively simple, especially

as we’ll be focusing on the display and control of toolbars and not creating new ones.

Table 1.1 shows the default workspaces and their menus that ship with Civil 3D 2008. As you

can see, there are a fair number prebuilt for major design tasks. This is a marked improvement from

2007, when only one basic Civil 3D workspace was included in the product.

The Workspaces toolbar is on by default, but if it is not visible, you can access it by right-clicking

in any gray area around the drawing window and selecting ACAD  Workspaces to display the

toolbar.

Table 1.1: Workspace and Menu Reference Table

Civil 3D

Complete

Design

Annotation

and Drafting

Surveying and

Topographical

Visualization

and Rendering

File ×× × ×

Edit ×× × × ×

View ×× × ×

Insert ×× × × ×

General ×× × ×

Lines/Curves ×× ×

Points × ×

Surfaces ×× ×

Parcels × ×

Grading ××

Alignments ×× ×

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