Learn how to create a custom object style for feature lines in Civil 3D, a crucial component in dealing with basic and advanced grading. This article guides you through the process, from navigating to the settings tab, all the way to applying and saving your newly created feature line under grading design.
Key Insights
- In Civil 3D, feature lines are found under the multipurpose styles within the general options. They are used heavily in dealing with basic and advanced grading.
- Many feature line styles are already created by Civil 3D in most drawing template files and can't be deleted from a drawing if they're attached to a command within Civil 3D.
- Creating a new feature line involves selecting 'new' under the feature line styles, naming it (in this case, "grading design"), and choosing the display options and layer for the new line. Once created, the feature line will be visible within the grading design.
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In this video, we’re going to create an object style for a feature line. Feature lines are used heavily when we’re working with basic and advanced grading.
We want to have one that is related to the grading objects we’ll be creating inside Civil 3D. To do that, we’re going to navigate to the Settings tab. A feature line is not an object that appears as its own individual category inside this tab.
Feature lines are found under General, under Multipurpose Styles. Then we have our option for Feature Lines. We’re going to expand the Feature Line Styles.
You can see here that there are many feature line styles already in this drawing. These are included in standard Civil 3D templates. The gold indicator—the triangle—indicates that an object or control is already using this object style.
When we look at grading commands, these gold triangles show that the style is being used in a command or is already present in the drawing. Since we don’t have anything in the drawing currently, we know that the gold triangle means a command inside Civil 3D is using that style. Because of that, these styles cannot be deleted from the drawing.
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If you want to delete any of these, you’ll need to find the command it’s linked to, change the feature line style being used in that command, and then delete the style you no longer need. I don’t need to delete any of these. We’re going to create a new style.
I’m going to right-click and select New. As you can see, we already have Grading Daylight and Grading Ditch. What we’re going to create is one called Grading Design.
I’m going to go to the Profile tab. This tab controls how your object will display in a profile view window. I’m not too concerned with that, because we’re not going to promote any of these feature lines to a profile view window.
So I’m going to skip this. The same goes for the Section tab, which controls how a feature line appears in a section view.
Then we go to the Display tab. As you can see here, there’s only one component listed for display: Feature Line, and it is set to visible.
I’m going to select the layer that we’re using. So I’m going to scroll down to C-TOPO-GRAD and choose C-TOPO-GRAD-FEET for feature lines. I’m going to click OK.
It defaults to ByLayer. It was already set to ByLayer, so I don’t need to change anything.
Now I’m going to click Apply and then click OK. Now that we’ve created this feature line, you can see it listed here under Grading Design.
I’m going to collapse everything back to how it was before. I’m going to save the drawing, and then I’ll see you in the next video.
