Datasheet

10 CHAPTER 1 GETTING DIRTY: THE BASICS OF CIVIL 3D

Set AutoCAD Units This displays whether or not Civil 3D should attempt to match Auto-

CAD drawing units, as speciﬁed on the Units and Zone tab.

Save Command Changes to Settings This setting is incredibly powerful but a secret to

almost everyone. By setting it to Yes, your changes to commands will be remembered from use

to use. This means if you make changes to a command during use, the next time you call that

Civil 3D command, you won’t have to make the same changes. It’s frustrating to do work over

because you forgot to change one out of the ﬁve things that needed changing, so this setting is

invaluable.

Show Event Viewer Event Viewer is Civil 3D’s main feedback mechanism, especially when

things go wrong. It can get annoying, however, and it takes up valuable screen real estate

(especially if you’re stuck with one monitor!), so many people turn it off. We recommend

leaving it on and pushing it to the side if needed.

Show Tooltips One of the cool features that people remark on when they ﬁrst use Civil 3D

is the small pop-up that displays relevant design information when the cursor is paused on

the screen. This includes things such as Station-Offset information, Surface Elevation, Section

information, and so on. Once a drawing contains numerous bits of information, this display

can be overwhelming; therefore, Civil 3D offers the option to turn off these tooltips universally

with this setting. A better approach is to control the tooltips at the object type by editing the

individual feature settings. You can also control the tooltips by pulling up the properties for

any individual object and looking at the Information tab.

Imperial to Metric Conversion This displays the conversion method speciﬁed on the Units

and Zone tab. The two options currently available are US Survey Foot and International Foot.

New Entity Tooltip State You can also control tooltips on an individual object level. For

instance, you might want tooltip feedback on your proposed surface but not on the existing

surface. This setting controls whether the tooltip is turned on at the object level for new Civil

3D objects.

Driving Direction Speciﬁes the side of the road that forward-moving vehicles use for travel.

This setting is important in terms of curb returns and intersection design.

Drawing Unit, Drawing Scale, and Scale Inserted Objects These settings were speciﬁed on

the Units and Zone tab but are displayed here for reference and so that you can lock them if

desired.

Independent Layer On This is the same control that was set on the Object Layers tab.

The settings that are applied here can also be applied at the object levels. For example, you

may typically want elevation to be shown to two decimal places; but when looking at surface

elevations, you might want just one. The Override and Child Override columns give you feedback

about these types of changes. See Figure 1.7.

The Override column shows whether the current setting is overriding something higher up.

Because you’re at the Drawing Settings level, these are clear. However, the Child Override column

displays a down arrow, indicating that one of the objects in the drawing has overridden this

setting. After a little investigation through the objects, you’ll ﬁnd the override is in the Edit Feature

Settings of the Proﬁle View as shown in Figure 1.8.

Notice that in this dialog, the box is checked in the Override column. This indicates that you’re

overriding the settings mentioned earlier, and it’s a good alert that things have changed from the

general Drawing Settings to this Object Level setting.