We’ve been hard at work at continuously improving our annotative productivity in AutoCAD Civil 3D. If you missed the groundbreaking Alignment Based Point Groups post and the Better Deliverables in Civil 3D training videos, you could fix that. Intelligent Publish On Demand (iPOD) for Civil 3D is the real deal. Today, the iPOD has been replaced by the iPhone. Civil 3D civil engineers and surveyors still have to publish their work.
Create Labels for Point Groups
Point Groups Management
If we talk about Annotation Management by Point Groups, what about Point Group Management itself?
A customer complained about Civil 3D’s nasty habit of reversing the order of Point Groups when the Point Groups are copied from one drawing to another. One hopes that Autodesk may fix this behavior in the upcoming AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017.
Yes. We can copy Point Groups around in recent versions of Civil 3D.
What? You don’t keep Point Group collection drawings to drive more standardized and consistent Point Labeling for the various quality check tasks and forms of deliverables you have to produce?
The point is: Point Groups and Description Key Sets work together like McCartney and Lennon or they don’t like Paul and John.
“It’s been a hard day’s night. I’ve been working like a dog.
When I get home to you, the things that you do make me feel alright.”
You can manage them. If you want an external textual method of documenting Point Group details here’s the post. We supply those in the Civil 3D Production Solution products. I’ll keep dreaming of another Civil 3D Spreadsheet Tool to help.
Think Forward and Act Backwards
Stop. You don’t have to manually reorder the Point Groups. Use the existing code behavior to your advantage. Start a new drawing from your Civil 3D template. Copy in the Point Groups. Save the sucker after a Style Purge of all the unused Styles. Perform multiple passes. Remember to Purge the AutoCAD stuff you don’t want.
The Point Groups are still in reverse order all ready to get copied into any working drawing.
Your Point Groups standards collection is also off and running. Put the drawing away – maybe somewhere others can find it. Jump Kit supplies a ready-made Style directory framework for exactly that sort of thing organized by Civil 3D Features in the Toolspace. That is forward thinking. We do the details so you don’t have to. Nice.
Style Me Not
You can also employ the important NoStyles Civil 3D template rather than a custom one. This is a template built intentionally with nothing in it except a few AutoCAD settings, ACAD Styles, and only the code created Civil 3D Standard Styles. We supply and use the NoStyles template to do important things in Civil 3D like project storage of Data References of Civil 3D features.
What? You store your project Data References with custom Styles? Oh. No.
Project upgrades must be nigh to impossible and much more difficult. Not much fun that’s for certain.
It is not so funny that we all tend to project problems on ourselves.
“Dave? Do our Civil 3D templates do that?”
The NoStyles template method for copied Point Groups may work even better. You only get the stuff connected specifically to the copied Point Groups. That gives you a chance to note exactly what get transported over. Do you really want all this stuff moving around?
Clean up is the way to get to better and more consistent working Civil 3D Standards, isn’t it?
Such a drawing will produce a list of the approved Styles in various flavors. This is easy to document. Register and see the Spreadsheet tools documentation for Description Keys for the How to Build a Style List details.
Remember we get to our approved Publishing template one simple step at a time.
Ok. Maybe you don’t care about the documented checklist. I get it.
You have work to do…