A Tip, A Point, and Tooltips

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Civil 3D Features and their built in Tooltips can be really helpful. One of my favorite improvements in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 is the fact that the Tooltips are generally much more refined. In older releases, you could easily be overwhelmed by Tooltip feedback from every Feature in the neighborhood.

These days you have to mouseover something visible to get Civil 3D Feature tooltip feedback.

Get to the Point

Since Update 1 people have been complaining of some weird behavior around Point Features. I've  personally encountered Civil 3D taking time off to consider things for way too long. 

I won't tell you how to send C3D to NeverNeverLand forever with Points, but it is possible.

Selecting points can cause you issues and things can grind for mouseovers with lots of Points in a drawing.
My "Beta educated" guess is "under the hood changes" were already happening to both AutoCAD and Civil 3D that make this bad behavior happen temporarily until the next update.

Maybe Civil 3D and ACAD are only fighting over the right tip at the right time. Looks like that to me :)

Thoughtfully Managing Feature Tooltips appears to help a lot.

We don't do this "by default" in our Jump templates, because you probably need to think about this By Drawing and By Feature and not do it ALL the time. Tooltips DO help provide useful information. 

Feature Tooltips are relatively easy to Manage. You can do this at the Drawing Setting level via the Drawing Settings>>Ambient Settings tab>>in the General section.

I would NOT turn Show Tooltips OFF completely although this does help solve the Point issues I talked briefly about above.

However, changing the default state for NEW tooltips can be very useful at times.

By default, Civil 3D turns its Feature Tooltips On and turns them on for EVERY thing you create.

You can control this property down through the Civil 3D hiearchy on the Settings tab in By Feature Setting basis or turn off ONLY the tooltip of a specific Feature - like for just that surface for example.

That's what that Show Tooltips check box is there for on the Information tab.

You want to load up a drawing with a bunch of reference surfaces to test solutions. 
You need bunch of surfaces in a corridor that are all visbile at once. Why would he do that?
Perhaps your design produces lots of Alignments and/or Feature lines packed together.
Either turning Tooltips all OFF or temporarily just in time to create those New Features can be useful.

Are these Civil 3D Tooltips controls different than ACAD tooltip display that is controled in Options?

Yep. Sometimes a simple tip can be More of a pain than intended