Immerse yourself in the world of Civil 3D, an advanced architectural design software, through an in-depth exploration of its user interface and key features. This article unravels the differences between AutoCAD and Civil 3D, the functionality of the tool space window, and provides a comprehensive understanding of the prospector tab, the settings tab, the survey tab, and the toolbox tab.
Key Insights
- The article discusses Civil 3D’s user interface, highlighting that while it shares similarities with AutoCAD, it differs in certain aspects. For example, the menu bar, which is common in AutoCAD, is usually switched off in Civil 3D.
- The tool space window, a key feature of Civil 3D, houses four tabs: the prospector tab, the settings tab, the survey tab, and the toolbox tab. Each of these tabs has specific functionalities and applications in the creation and manipulation of Civil 3D objects.
- Despite being built off AutoCAD, Civil 3D features unique commands and workflows alongside standard AutoCAD commands. For instance, the 'create design' section under the main home ribbon bar allows the creation of various design objects such as parcels, feature lines, grading objects, alignments, profiles, and corridors.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Hi, welcome to Civil 3D 201. In this course, we're going to cover four different objects in Civil 3D. We're going to cover points, survey imports, parcels, and surfaces.
Before we get into doing anything in Civil 3D, first we're going to go through what the user interface looks like for Civil 3D compared to AutoCAD. So you may be familiar with AutoCAD. Civil 3D looks generally the same as AutoCAD, but there are a few important differences.
So first, I'm going to pull up an AutoCAD window so that you can see what the original out-of-the-box AutoCAD desktop looks like. From here, we'll compare this to a Civil 3D user interface. In AutoCAD, you can see we have the ribbon bar, we have a menu bar, we have all of the standard things we're used to in AutoCAD.
I'm going to switch over from this AutoCAD window into a Civil 3D window. In this Civil 3D window, what you'll notice is that we have most of the same objects. One of the things that we are missing in the Civil 3D window when you open it for the first time in the user interface is that the menu bar is missing.
This is something that Autodesk has decided to do. In the out-of-the-box portion of Civil 3D, the menu bar is turned off. I often find myself using the menu bar quite often, so the first thing that I do on any fresh install of Civil 3D is that I type in the MENUBAR command.
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So I'm going to go ahead and type in MENUBAR for the MENUBAR command. I'm going to press ENTER, and I'm going to press 1 to activate the MENUBAR command and set it to 1 for on. Now that we have the MENUBAR command turned on, if I switch back to AutoCAD, you'll notice that there's not much of a change anymore.
We have the menu bar, we have the ribbon bar, but there is this new window that's off to the left called tool space. Inside of the ribbon bar, you can see tool space up here in the upper left corner. If I click that, it'll turn off, and now if I switch between AutoCAD and Civil 3D, they look almost identical.
One of the things that you will notice in Civil 3D though is that a lot of your commands will take place in the tool space window. So oftentimes, most users will have that tool space window open at all times. So I'm going to go ahead and click the tool space button here to open up that tool space window again.
Now the tool space window is broken up into a section of tabs. In the tool space window, we have four different tabs. We have the Prospector tab, we have the Settings tab, we have the Survey tab, and we have the Toolbox tab.
In the Prospector tab, we have all of the Civil 3D objects that you can have in a drawing. So in this course, we're going to cover points, surfaces, and parcels. Parcels actually fall under another object in Civil 3D, which is sites.
Moving on from here, we jump to the Settings tab. In the Settings tab, we have a lot of the underlying, under-the-hood settings for Civil 3D. These are things that will come up in additional windows when we're creating objects in Civil 3D, and we can choose these settings as we create the objects.
We can also create these settings before we create the objects so that we have those settings to select when we're working with objects in Civil 3D. Moving down from there is the Survey tab. In the Survey tab is all of the information that we're going to need to perform a survey import, which is going to be one of the objects or workflows that we cover in Civil 3D 201.
And moving on from there is the Toolbox tab, and the Toolbox tab has workflows for creating reports and tables that we would be using in Civil 3D. More often than not, you don't see many users using the Toolbox tab. The most common tabs to be working in are the Prospector and Settings tabs.
And then if you are a surveyor, you will be working heavily in the Survey tab. Moving on from here, we'll go up into the ribbon bar and just discuss the main home ribbon bar. In the main home ribbon bar, we have our palettes section, which has our tool space.
It also has additional palettes for creating objects in Civil 3D, and we will get into those later. Then we have our ground data information, so mainly points and surfaces. You do have some parcel traverse information as well.
Moving on from there, we have the major portion of what you work in within Civil 3D, which is your Create Design section. So from here, once you have your ground data available and you have opened up your user interface, you can start creating things like parcels, feature lines, grading objects, alignments, profiles, corridors, intersections, assemblies, and pipe networks. We won't cover all of these objects in this course, but in future courses, we'll cover all of these objects.
From there, we have the objects that are used with profiles. So some of these objects in the Create Design section or window will have profiles associated with them, and this is where you will create the profile views to work with those objects in a Profile View window. Moving on to the next section, we have the draw window or the draw section, and this is for standard AutoCAD commands.
Because Civil 3D is built off of AutoCAD, all of the AutoCAD commands that you learned in your AutoCAD courses translate across into Civil 3D. So any of the commands like move, circle, polyline, those are all commands that have full functionality in Civil 3D. And then if you didn't learn the hotkeys or the command line information, those commands can be found in these dropdowns, for ellipses or a circle, lines, arcs, and polylines.
Moving on from there, we have our modify commands, and these are AutoCAD modify commands. Civil 3D modify commands are found in the modify tab, so in the home tab are the AutoCAD modify commands. We have things like stretch, scale, copy, move, rotate, and any of the normal modify commands you would have learned in an AutoCAD course.
Moving on from there, we have the layers section of the window, and we have our layer properties, our layers, our current layer, and all of our layer controls. And then moving on from that section, we have our clipboard, for copying, pasting, and cutting in Civil 3D.
