Building Useable Civil 3D Templates Part 2: Basic CAD Settings

You’ve got the task of building new Civil 3D standards that are going to be the basis for every job your company does moving forward – lucky you! So, where do you start? What’s the right way to handle this? This series of blogs from ZenTek Consultants is going to teach you how to develop your Civil 3D standards.

Part 2: Basic CAD Settings

So far in this series, we’ve gotten our template file structured and named, with all our Company Standards approved. Now, we need to get into the technical back end of building the required standards into our template. For this blog, we’re going to cover the drafting settings you need in each template. There are five (5) areas we’ll need to address:

Layers

You’ll need a full list of layers that are appropriate to a particular template (or a much longer list if you’re going with one Master Template!)  You’ll need to create layers with appropriate names, colors, line weights, plot styles, and linetypes. If you opted to start with an Autodesk Civil 3D NCS template, this is going to be a lot easier to do.

The NCS standard of Discipline-Description-Major-Minor labeling (i.e. C-BLDG-OTLN-GEOM for a building outline) is very common and easy to understand by anyone. Your firm may have current standards they want to keep using and that’s fine, so long as you make a decision and stick to it consistently. It’s common to see layers that start with P- and E- for Proposed/Existing layers (i.e. P-BLDG and E-BLDG). Keep the layers list as tight as you can and make sure to include Layer Filters to group/sort/work with layers based on the type of items to be drawn. This is something we include in all ZenTek CAD Standards development projects.

Next, you’ll need to decide if you want to go with CTB or STB plotting for line weights. CTB is the traditional process for Autodesk, where the width of a line is based on its color (i.e. all red lines plot at 0.25mm). STB, on the other hand, ties line weight to the layer and completely ignores colors (i.e. P-BLDG is always line weight 0.25mm, if it’s green, yellow or blue.) That can be very useful since people can adapt colors to their personal visual needs or preference without disrupting the plotted output of your files.

Linetypes and Annotation Styles

These are the first thing people are going to see when they look at your drawings. They can identify your brand if done properly or hurt your reputation if done poorly. This is likely to be the biggest point of argument for the group you have approving new/updated standards. Engineers can be very particular about how they want linework to look or how text and dimensions should appear to convey their design intent. The key is automating this as much as possible. In Civil 3D, you should be using label styles rather than basic Dtext/Mtext tools whenever possible and there should be no fonts or linetypes in your template other than the company approved ones. It’s a lot of work removing every extraneous line, font, and dimension that you don’t use but it’s a vital step. People take the simplest path available to get their work done. You have to make using the path you want them to follow the easiest one or this process will fail. As for engineers/managers who want to show things their own way: explain that doing so will delay their projects and cost more money if they deviate from the approved standards. Nobody wants delays or to explain why they went over budget!

Blocks

Blocks have come a long way since the days when they were just an assembly of lines and text you could move about as a group. The development of Dynamic blocks, with varied view states, setting options, draggable sizes, etc. can completely change the way your company works. Something as simple as a dynamic title block, where you choose the border size from a drop down instead of having 6 different borders that have to inserted, deleted, layer controlled, etc. for every single drawing saves hundreds of man-hours each year. Multiply that by the thousands of blocks we all use, and you see intelligent blocks are a vital part of budget control. Dynamic block building isn’t a simple process. It takes time and expertise to do it effectively but it’s vital to modernizing your standards. If you don’t have that skill set in house, that’s when consulting partners like ZenTek can be really handy!

Drawing Units and Coordinate Systems

You need to decide if you trust your CAD users (some of whom may be new hires or right out of school) to correctly set units, map zones, and coordinate structures on their own, or if you want those preset in templates for each region you work in. If you go with the single template model, there’s a level of training and trust you need for your CAD staff to make this workable. It means in each DWG, for every job, the CAD staff has to set all the coordinate/mapping settings before drafting anything or it leads to serious errors/costs down the road.

Using multiple templates for the regions you work in, with map/coord/unit structures set correctly in them can alleviate that issue. Users can just start with a “New York” template for a project in New York. That can be tedious though if you work all over the country/world as the number of templates can cause confusion. Make sure you get complete buy-in on this with the decision makers at your firm! I once had an engineer who refused to use company templates, so he went off standard to do things his own way. Failure to correctly set the map/coordinate on one of his jobs went uncaught until they broke ground . . . on the neighbor’s property! Multi-million-dollar lawsuits ensued, so be sure to pin this down.

Sheet Setup

Should you load all borders and sheet sizes, with scaled viewports, into your templates or use a “per project” border inserted into paper space with viewports as needed? You also need to decide if you want title information on each sheet or if you want to use Sheet Set Manager properties to automate items like Lot, Block, Client, etc. on each page. No pressure, right?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. There are pros/cons to every approach, but you need to decide and be consistent on every project. If you don’t, the mix of processes in sheet setup will cost you far more hours in trying to sort/understand/update each project than you’ll save from good configuration. This is an absolute must area for consensus, training, and serious consequences for folks who violate the process. Sounds harsh, I know, but there’s tons of complex work that goes into properly setting all this up and the potential to break your entire process hits hardest with sheet setups.

That’s the basics. From here, we’ll move onto Civil 3D specifics. Don’t miss the next installment of our “Building Useable Civil 3D Templates” series! Subscribe to our Blog and be notified when it’s posted.

Ready to put your standards into action?

If you’re ready to streamline your Civil 3D setup, reduce project startup time, and ensure consistency across your team, let’s talk. Schedule a free consultation with the experts at ZenTek to get personalized guidance on building templates that actually work for your workflow. Reach out today and take the next step toward more efficient design processes!