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CHAPTER 1 GettinG Dirty: the Basics of civil 3D
6. Select the Avery Drive alignment, right-click, and choose the Select option on the menu.
Notice the change in the Ribbon.
7. Select the down arrow next to the Modify panel. Using the pin at the bottom-left corner of
the panel, pin the panel open.
8. Select the Properties command in the General Tools panel to open the AutoCAD
Properties palette. Notice that the Modify panel remains opened and pinned.
It’s All About Style
Before you get into the program itself, it’s important to understand one bit of vocabulary and
how it relates to Civil 3D: style. To put it simply, styles control the display properties of Civil 3D
objects and labels. Styles control everything from the color of your point markers to the inter-
val of your surface contours, and from your profile-view grid spacing to the text height in the
Station-Offset label of your road alignment. Styles truly are where the power lies in Civil 3D.
Label styles and object styles are the two major categories.
The difficult thing about styles is that it’s hard to talk about them without being specific.
Later chapters spend a fair amount of time talking about the specifics of the styles for each
object, and this chapter looks at the common aspects of style manipulation; but styles may
remain a mystery until you get your hands dirty later in the book.
Label Styles
To get started, look at the styles in the Spot Elevation branch by expanding the Surface branch
and then the Label Styles branch on the Settings tab, as shown in Figure 1.14.
There are two basic label styles in the Spot Elevation branch. Let’s create a new one and
explore the options for making labels. Remember, almost all of these options are present in
other, object-specific label styles.
Figure 1.14
Spot Elevation
label styles
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