The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show

Dan Philbrick and Dave Simeone add their colorful and insightful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Civil 3D and the civil engineering marketplace.

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posted 10/13/06 by Dave Simeone Czech drafting styles… Why do I care?
Did you know that a major requirement for Civil 3D was that it be a product we could sell anywhere in the world? If we want to sell it everywhere, it needs to be capable of meeting drafting standards everywhere. So how did this influence the development of Civil 3D and how does this benefit you? Welcome to the wonderful world of styles!

Civil 3D Styles
For those that are new to Civil 3D, a style controls the appearance of annotation and objects in the drawing. How will a profile (long section) be drafted? Are there vertical and horizontal grid lines, data bands at the sides and top/bottom, etc? How will the annotation appear and what data values will be included? Every object in the Civil 3D model has a style to control it’s appearance. This is what allows Civil 3D to automate the creation of drawings that meet submittal standards.

In the box…
The use of styles to control drafting was built so that we (Autodesk) could provide in-box drafting standards that meet country requirements. Customers in Germany, Japan, China, Russia and many other countries have styles that they can download that ensure that drawings they create in Civil 3D meet local submittal requirements. For those of you in the U.S., we added styles based on the National CAD Standards. If someone knows of more prevalent U.S. styles, please let me know.

Customized content…
Even with all this investment in style content, it was clear from the start that it’ll be impossible for us to deliver every style that every user will need. That’s why the style creation/editing capabilities in Civil 3D are accessible to all users. There are a number of resources that are available to help you become proficient with the style creation and modification process in Civil 3D. For starters, we’ve presented a number of webcasts on this subject.

The key point is that, even with all of this in-box content, successful Civil 3D pilots and corporate-wide implementations generally include some upfront investment in style modification. Make sure you’re management team understands that this investment is needed, but the efficiencies gained in future projects will easily outweigh the upfront costs.

How do you proceed?
- First, make sure you know what ships with Civil 3D. We provide a number of templates that may cover most of what you need either in the box or as downloads for specific countries. Civil 3D 2007 also included styles that match Land Desktop output. Many of you may find that the country content we provide covers exactly what you need and you’ll be ready to go. This will depend heavily on how well defined the standards are in your part of the world.
- Second, use what we provide as a starting point for labels whenever possible. Rather than starting from scratch, copy and then modify label and object styles that we provide. It’s a lot faster and there are “best practices” that went into making the in-box styles that you can leverage.
- Third, don’t try to boil the ocean. You don’t need to build every style you’ll ever need before you start using Civil 3D. Make what you need and get them into production.
- Finally, you have everything you need in the product to create styles. If you don’t have internal resources to actually build them, work with a reseller or consultant. They’ve been doing this for a while and have seen what works and doesn’t work.

Cheers
Dave S

3 comments In The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > All

User Comments

  • Dave - the styles based on NCS are great. The thing that I have noticed with NCS templates is that their main focus is layer naming convention, but I think to make the NCS templates useful, you would need to provide an NCS CTB file so that we don't have to go and change all the colors to match our company CTB file. When the NCS template was used, was any thought given to the colors chosen for layers or the colors for sub-entities within objects? So when we choose the "Contours 1' and 5' (Background)" style for a surface, how did you guys pick a color for "background". Or is everything you created just for onscreen purposes? Are any of the colors chosing based on how they will plot or are all the colors chosen based on how they will look with a corridor, and an alignment and a surface all visible and on top of each other?

    So I guess my point is the NCS templates are great until we need to go plot something to show the project manager or whomever. So I think an NCS.ctb would be very helpful.

    Posted 10/13/2006 2:24 PM by Joshua Nelson

  • there is an NCS.ctb that installs as a sample when you install land desktop.

    Posted 12/21/2006 2:20 PM by Dana Probert

  • BTW, that NCS ctb is not made to NCS penweight standards. So forget what i said above. It is there, it is named NCS standard ctb, but it doesn't match the spec I pulled from my copy of the NCS.

    Posted 1/2/2007 2:15 PM by Dana Probert