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CHAPTER 1 GettinG Dirty: the Basics of civil 3D
Drawing Settings
Starting at the drawing level, Civil 3D has a number of settings that you must understand before
you can use the program 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. Because 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 Sample Site.dwg from the installed tutorial drawings.
2. Switch to the Settings tab.
3. Right-click the filename, and select Edit Drawing Settings to display the dialog shown in
Figure 1.4.
Each tab in this dialog controls a different aspect of the drawing. Most of the time, you’ll 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 you’ll visit the Units and
Zone and the Transformation tabs frequently.
Units and Zone Tab
The Units and Zone tab lets you specify metric or imperial units for your drawing. You can also
specify the conversion factor between systems. In addition, you can control the assumed plot-
ting scale of the drawing. The drawing units typically come from a template, but the options
for scaling blocks and setting AutoCAD variables depend on your working environment. Many
engineers continue to work in an arbitrary coordinate system using the settings as shown
Figure 1.4
The Drawing Set-
tings dialog
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