Building Useable Civil 3D Templates Part 3: Object 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 3: Object Settings and Layers

The most important step in setting up your Civil 3D template is one people often overlook or simply don’t know is there. It’s the Object Settings from the Settings tab of your Civil 3D Toolspace. This is where you set default units, zones, layering, even the measurement and rounding values for every type of item Civil 3D creates. To access this structure, go to the Settings tab of your Toolspace, right-click on the name of your template file, then select “Edit Drawing Settings” That will bring up this dialog:

On the Units and Zone tab, you want to set the default scale, map zone, units, etc. if you’re building location or scale specific templates. This way, every DWG started will have defaults set before any drafting begins. If you’re using a single template for multiple locations/scales, you can leave map zone categories blank (as shown above) with the expectation that drafters will set these for each drawing they work in.

The Transformation tab can be left alone in your template, unless you’re generally pulling survey/field data from a coordinate structure that is going to be different than your default settings. You use this tab to transform the coordinate system specified on the Units and Zone tab to local specifications. Generally, it’s best to leave this blank and change it as a project specific setup. Like so:

The next tab: Object Layers is arguably the most important tool in this workflow. Here is where you set default layering for every type of object, and sub-object, that Civil 3D creates. By doing this, users won’t need to actively set Civil 3D object layers before drawing an object. Civil 3D will automatically draw on the layers preset in this dialog, ignoring current layer settings. It’s a huge time and effort saver.

Admittedly, this is a long list of items, and it requires a lot of time and know-how to get it set properly. It’s particularly difficult if you want “named item” layering. In other words: you can configure all corridors to go on C-Roads layer, or you can configure them to include corridor names in the layer (i.e. C-Roads-Street A, C-Roads-Street B, etc.) You can also configure sub-object layers here to control what turns on/off with the top-level layer. For example, if you turn off layer C-Roads, does it turn off all your corridor items, or does it leave on things like curb and centerlines?

Next is the Abbreviations tab. Here, you set the default abbreviations Civil 3D uses to label different components of the design to match your company standards. For example, the default labeling for left/right offsets from a centerline is to label them with “L” and R” respectively. Maybe your company wants them to say “LO” and “RO” for left offset/right offset. Just change the values shown below, to get custom results for every type of abbreviation used throughout Civil 3D, like so:

Last, is the Ambient Settings tab. These are the defaults Civil 3D uses for units, rounding values, etc. for any Civil 3D objects that don’t have settings specified in their individual styles (more on that in the next installment of this series!) This is a sort of ‘catch-all’ that prevents weird display and labeling issues on your plans in case someone doesn’t properly apply styles while they’re working. You should set default values for using imperial/metric units on linear/area/volume measurements, etc. You can also control how many decimal places (precision) to display for each label type here as well.

You can go back to right-click on the name of our template and set default labeling/XML and Table Tag settings as well and you should but that’s another detailed bit of conversation for another day! 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!