On Civil 3D 2017 Reference Templates

Jump Kit

The Framework for Civil 3D
Get More

Templates Only

See The Framework Work
Get More

Become a Member

Master Civil 3D
Get More

Autodesk Civil Videos

Free Civil 3D Training
Get More

Framework Videos

Free Civil 3D Videos
Get More

There is always some fear and loathing for writers associated with a post about newly introduced feature in the latest AutoCAD Civil 3D. New product features do tend to arrive as a work in progress. Autodesk often introduces something new with little real documentation. This allows them to change the officially undocumented behavior of the new feature in the next Service Pack. Yep. There’s a reason many people wait around for SP1.

Hint: You should expect changes in shared Corridor behaviors in Civil 3D 2017 SP1. Autodesk already alluded to this in webinars. Go here and watch the Leveraging Corridors video on the page.

There are trippy things I hope that do not change about Reference Template behavior.

Reference Templates in 2017

I posted earlier about my Civil 3D 2017 Template Reference Mania. You should consider this post an important addendum to that.

Let’s face it. Most basic Feature Styles in Civil 3D are not the big issue. Ok. Maybe View Styles cause some consternations. People love our InstantOn choices.
Label Style maintenance is the big issue with Style Management in Civil 3D. The nuance of the annotation make the whole Style thing difficult. I did an in-depth series of posts about Label Style in Civil 3D this spring for a reason. Here’s the entire list of those posts.

The Civil 3D Label posts:

Civil 3D Label Style Practice
Compound Interest Labels in Civil 3D
Label Trickery in Civil 3D
Group Labels with Reference in Civil 3D

Good Reference Template News

Reference Templates ignore all Template Settings. Yeah.
The References are all about the Style definitions alone. Hoorah.
More significantly in regards to Label Styles, the referenced styles inherit the current drawing’s Label Style Defaults. Can you hear me screamin’ like a teeny-bopper. You know like a ‘60s Beatles fan.

Peace Not War on LSD

God Forbid. Some major customer will discover this and demand this important behavior be changed ASAP. Oh, some numbskull will. I trust Autodesk will ignore that person as much as they ignore me and do what it right in their own eyes. Is this like the time of Judges? Now there’s a reference. Ok. Never mind.

Why is the local drawing preservation of LSD so important?
Publication template and working production template flexibility. We all are after…

Adaptive Standards for Civil 3D

Reference Templates work on the principal of all in. No matter what you get all the Styles in the stack of Reference Templates. There is currently no way to identify Styles that do not update except visually in the Toolspace. Oh yucky pooh. So the first rule of Civil 3D still applies. Manage your Style names. Mange the availability of Style by the principal of deletion (The Power of NOT).

As I said in that other post, better Style is about management not top-down control. The LSD hierarchy is one of the best adaptive management tools in Civil 3D. It provides educated and professional Civil 3D users managed annotative flexibility to deal with real world project demands. We shouldn’t have to have two different managed Styles to annotate differently all the time.

They’re playing our song.

“We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Hope you have enjoyed the show”

Our hits for AutoCAD Civil 3D do keep coming.

Release 7 – The Latest Framework for Civil 3D

Ok Beatles fans. You caught me. SPLHCB was the eighth album. You probably watched the movie with Peter Frampton, Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, and Maurice Gibb. Those guys had best-selling albums. The Monkeys outsold the Beatles in 1967. Sad but true. I prefer the best-selling album of 1968 anyway. Now that was a radical shift in popular taste. Are you Experienced?

Posts About Reference Templates in Civil 3D