Building Useable Civil 3D Templates – Part 1: Define Your Standards

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 1: Define Your Standards

You may think you have a workable set of standards to build from, but in most cases what you have is a loose understanding of how certain drawings should look. Problem is, the guy down the hall has a different idea and every engineer wants drawings to look a certain way, since they’re signing the plan. Of course, the owner’s name is on the door and their ideas override everyone else’s anyway. Feeling the stress yet?

Let’s start by making this easier. The first thing is to develop the drafting standards that are going into your template(s). This is where most of us get bogged down because we get into lengthy discussions about layers, colors, fonts, dimension styles, title blocks, etc. How do you get everyone to agree with, or even understand, what those should be?

You begin by printing out a set of DWG files of your most common file types: survey basemaps, layout plans, grading plans, profiles, sections, etc. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the same job or not. You want a set of files that you think presents your company in the best light. Print these out as both PDF and hardcopy paper drawings and bring them to whoever in your company needs to sign off on how they look. Make sure the folks you share this with have the authority to give a Y/N response. Steering committees made up of drafters, engineers, and management work well here, but only if they can make final decisions on the template(s) you’re building.

Once everyone has approved the basic outputs, you’re ready to start on the tech side of things. We suggest you don’t talk to the “approvers” about the CAD side of this process (i.e., layer naming conventions, line weights, etc.) – that’s for you to deal with, just get everyone to approve the way a drawing must look, then build up standards to make it do that.

Now that you have a baseline to work with, you can decide if you want to build out a single template with all the layers, styles, etc. for every type of plan or if you want to use multiple templates for different types of work (i.e., a Survey Template, Grading Template, etc.) There are pros and cons to both methods. A single template is easy to build and can prevent people using the wrong template to start a new drawing, but it will have hundreds, maybe thousands, of layers and dozens of annotation styles that can be tedious when drafting. It also bloats file sizes by having too much data in every drawing that isn’t always needed.

Multiple templates will be smaller and cleaner but there’s always the risk of someone using the Survey template to start a Grading Plan and not realizing it until they’re two months into the job, when it becomes a nightmare to make changes and add missing styles, etc.

Once the template decision is made, build an Excel workbook that spells out the basic components for each of your templates and their related drafting properties. You want to know what layer, color, line weight, naming convention, etc., you want to use for each object created from that template and pre-define as many of them as possible. A great way to start is to extract all your existing Layers from Civil 3D (just open Layer Dialog > right-click > select all, then copy/paste into Excel). Then you can add/remove columns of information as needed. Here at ZenTek Consultants, we have a very detailed workbook we use to help our clients develop all the info they need in this step, but you can start with something basic like the image below.

If you make correct settings the default, people will have to actively work to change them and one thing you can be sure of is everyone wants to do the least work possible. If it’s easier to use your standard, they will.

One last thought for this installment. You need to choose the starting file for building each template. The one thing you NEVER want to do is start with an existing DWG file, trying to save yourself time. All you’re doing is borrowing every mistake, every headache, every problem that went into that job. I suggest using one of the built-in Autodesk Civil 3D template files as a start point (imperial or metric).

These give simple, clean, files with basic National CAD Standard (NCS) information already in place. You can change those if needed, though we do recommend using the NCS layering system whenever possible. It makes life much easier when sharing drawings with clients or other design firms.

Don’t miss the next installment of our “Building Useable Civil 3D Templates” series , where we cover Basic CAD Settings.

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!