Building Useable Civil 3D Templates Part 4: Label Styles

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 4: Label Styles

The beauty of Civil 3D is that as you place items on screen, it can automatically read and label things like elevation, coordinates, even do calculations for things like top/bottom of curb. It’s a wonderful automation process to have labels pop up with the info you need instantly but for it to work properly you need to have Civil 3D Label Styles fully set up in your template for every type of item the program creates. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, yea, it is. There’s no way around that I’m afraid. The idea of good CAD Standards is to reduce work for the everyday user while they’re designing, not less work for those of us building the standards!

If you look at the SETTINGS tab on the Toolspace panel, you’ll note that every type of object Civil 3D can create has a “Label Styles” sub-folder.

Here’s where you build the labeling appropriate to that type of object, set the defaults, and organize them for use by your end users. You’ll want to do this for all thirty-six (36) Object groupings in Toolspace, and there are up to a dozen sub-folders for these Label Style folders, with an unlimited number of styles you can build. That can mean -literally- thousands of styles to build. I recommend you build only the ones that are absolutely needed and not try to cover every possible permutation that may show up on a job. We’re going to cover the basic process of creating a single Label Style and you can use that for doing all the other you need.

We’ll create a simple line label for bearing and distance. To start, expand the “General” category and right-click on the “Line” folder, then select NEW:

Start by filling out the “Information” tab so users know what this label is used for. I recommend you put a company abbreviation on the front (I’m using ZTK – for ZenTek) so users can identify which are approved company labels they can use in any given drawing.

Next, go to the “General” tab and set the font, layer and orientation you want for this label. For a linear object, you should set the “Orientation Reference” to OBJECT, so the label follows the line at whatever angle it’s drawn. For other items, like Points, you may want to set the to View or WCS so thee labels read left-to-right in rotated viewports, etc.

Next, we move to the “Layout” tab and begin by creating a new text field, using the “A+” drop down menu to start building a new, dynamic, field that will read the information we want from Civil 3D.

We’ll change the name from the default of Text.1 to “Bearing” and then click the (…) button next to “Contents” to define the Civil 3D field we wan t shown here. Let’s set the Property for “General Segment Direction” and use the DD MM SS option for degrees/minutes/seconds from the “Format” drop down. Make any other changes needed to format the label as you want to see it, then remember to click the right-arrow to input the settings into the window on the right that’s highlighted in blue below.

That’s hard to read so I show it below, but it’s the code Civil 3D needs to be able to dynamically update your labels and if you forget to hit the arrow and load it here, you’ll get no label at all. This is what that box says:

<[General Segment Direction(Udeg|FDMSdSp|MB|P4|RN|DSn|CU|AP|EN|DZY|OF)]>

Just OK your way back to the main window and we’ll create a second Text item called “Distance” as shown:

<[General Segment Length(Uft|P2|RN|AP|GC|UN|Sn|OF)]>

One important point: you’ll need to adjust the “Y Offset” for each of these labels, so they draw above/below the line and not right on top of it. I’ve set Bearing to be on top, so its Y Offset = .1, and Distance to show below the line, so its Y Offset = -.1 That will give you a label style that looks like the below and it will adjust the bearing/distance to each line you label.

That’s the basic process. Now whenever you label lines on a plan, the ZTK Bearing & Distance label is available from your template and everything is at the right size/layer/color, etc. you need. Now, you just have another few hundred of these styles to go and you’re all set. Or you could call ZenTek to help you out! Don’t miss the next installment of our “Building Useable Civil 3D Templates” series! Subscribe to our Blog today to be notified.

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!