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CHAPTER 1 GETTING DIRTY: THE BASICS OF CIVIL 3D
Civil 3D is built on both AutoCAD and Map, so Civil 3D 2008 comes with a variety of templates.
However, most users will want to select one of the top few, which start with _Autodesk Civil 3D
and then have some descriptive text. These templates have been built on the basis of customer feed-
back to provide Civil 3D with a varying collection of object styles. These templates give you a good
starting point for creating your own personal template file.
Settings
The Settings tab of Toolspace is the proverbial rabbit hole. Here you will adjust how the draw-
ing relates to the real world, how Civil 3D objects look, and how the Civil 3D commands work.
You control styles, labels, and command settings for each component of Civil 3D here. We’ll
start by looking at the top level of drawing settings and a few command settings to get you
familiar, and then we’ll cover the specifics for each object’s styles and settings in their respec-
tive chapters.
Drawing Settings
Starting at the drawing level, Civil 3D has a number of settings that must be understood before the
program can be used efficiently. Civil 3D understands that the end goal of most users is to prepare
construction documents on paper. To that end, most labeling and display settings are displayed in
inches for imperial users and millimeters for metric users instead of nominal units like many other
AutoCAD objects. Since much of this is based on an assumed working scale, let’s look at how to
change that setting, along with some other drawing options.
1.
Open the file SampleSite.dwg from the installed sample files.
2.
Switch to the Settings tab.
3.
Right-click on the filename and select Edit Drawing Settings to display the dialog shown in
Figure 1.5.
Each tab in this dialog controls a different aspect of the drawing. Most of the time, you will pick
up the Object Layers, Abbreviations, and Ambient Settings from a companywide template. But the
drawing scale and coordinate information change for every job, so the Units And Zone and the
Transformation tabs are visited frequently.
Consistency of Feedback
Just as in Prospector, the button on the top row toggles the display of the various drawing item state
icons that tell you if a style or label is in use. There’s also a dropdown menu for a few different views of
the Settings window.
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