Most of the people we talk to everyday are advanced Civil 3D users, CAD Managers, and organization Project Managers and Principals who try to get work out the door and keep the wheels on the bus. Many of these folks are literally rebuilding the Civil 3D Magic Bus while it rolls down the road.
That is truly an act of daring do. That is also something we all must do.
Around…
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Posted by
Tench Tilghman
May 29, 2025
Tags Civil 3D, feature line, alignment, surface, DREF, XREF, IREF, parcel, Project Management, benchmark, heuristic
Many, if not most, of our Civil 3D Projects will involve multiple Reference Replacement processes and workflows. Many of us in Civil 3D Land employ the classic AutoCAD-based External References (XREF) basemap strategy in our plan set publications. We publish a stack of separate drawings to better separate and effectively manage the content of the…
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Posted by
Tench Tilghman
May 22, 2025
Tags XREF, DREF, IREF, Project Management, Data Shortcut Manager, Data Shortcut Editor, Reference Explorer, video, DWF
Sometimes a broken Reference problem in Civil 3D will stare us right in the face and we still miss and/or cannot find and/or see the reason why. Been there. Done that. Got my T shirt. How can this be? Out here in Civil 3D Land every day we use this vital and basic file Reference stuff like our lives depend on it.
If you tell me that the…
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Posted by
Tench Tilghman
Oct 10, 2024
Tags DWF, XREF, IREF, TREF, project template, Data Shortcut Manager, Reference Explorer, Project Management
Let’s face it. Most of the time in Autodesk Civil 3D we all tend to initially shoot for some form of immediate and published annotation. It’s an old school CAD User’s habit. Can we call this lust the One and Done? For surveyors this may mean Point data from Survey Dbs. I trust we have all moved beyond imported point files and drawing-centric COGO points? The Lord…
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Posted by
Tench Tilghman
Jun 12, 2024
Tags annotation, annotative scale, Label Style, Label Style Defaults, Style Management, Style Library, DREF, XREF, IREF, TREF
We all occasionally hear the refrain or claim: “Our projects in Civil 3D are too small to make Data References (DREFs) and Data Shortcuts worth the effort. We manage to get most of our work done in one drawing.”
We can work this way in Autodesk Civil 3D.
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Folks do successfully work without DREFs every day in Civil 3D Land.
Like it or…
Posted by
Tench Tilghman
Dec 06, 2023
Tags DREF, XREF, IREF, Data Shortcut Manager, Project Management, project template