Learn how to create object styles and label styles in the settings tab of the tool space window in Civil 3D. This knowledge will enable you to save and create a drawing template file from your designs for future use.
Key Insights
- The Settings tab in the tool space window of Civil 3D allows you to create object styles and label styles. This includes surface styles, label styles, table styles, and commands associated with the object.
- Surface styles can be created with specific contour intervals, displays, and layers. For instance, a surface style with a contour interval of 2 feet and 10 feet can be created to display only major and minor contours.
- Any changes required in future drawings can be directly modified in the object style. For example, the color of major and minor contours in design Topo surface style can be adjusted as per the requirement.
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In this video, we’re going to start working with object styles inside of Civil 3D. We’re going to be creating object styles and label styles inside of this drawing to save and create a drawing template file from it.
So what we’re going to be doing is mainly working with the Settings tab of the Toolspace window. I’m going to go ahead and click on the Settings tab. This is essentially like looking under the hood of Civil 3D.
What we have here are various objects inside Civil 3D. Inside each object, we have various surface or object styles, label styles, table styles, and commands that are associated with that object. We’ll begin by creating some new surface styles.
When we’re working with these surface styles—or the object styles that we’ll create in future videos—we won’t navigate through every single tab of the style we’re editing. We’ll change information based on specific parameters we want to modify, and we won’t cover every single dropdown or option inside of them because we’ve covered some of those in previous courses.
From here, we’ll go to Surface Style. I’m going to expand it. To create a new surface style, I’ll right-click.
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I’ll select New. Inside of this new surface style, I’m going to name this first surface style ‘EX Topo’ for our existing Topo surface. From here, I’ll go to Contours.
Ensure that the contour interval is set to 2 and 10. I’ll then go to the next tab, which is Display. I’m going to turn off the border.
I’m going to turn on Major Contour and Minor Contour. Then I’ll set the layers. I’m going to set the Major layer to C-Topo-Major.
As you can see, it’s gray. I’ll click OK. Then I’ll go to the color setting, choose ‘ByLayer, ’ and click OK.
From here, I'm going to go to Minor Contour. I'm going to go ahead and select Layer. I'm going to go back down to C-Topo.
I'm going to go ahead and choose Minor, which is this 8 or dark gray. I'm going to go ahead and click on Color. I'm going to click ByLayer.
I'm going to click OK. So from here, what we've done is we've created a surface style that has a contour interval of 2 feet for minor and 10 feet for major. And we're going to be displaying only the major and minor contours.
If we have any other changes we want to make in future drawings, we can go ahead and modify this. But for now, I'm OK with this. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Apply and hit OK.
And so what we're going to see is that new surface style shows up down here as EX Topo. Next, I'm going to go ahead and create a new Design Topo surface style. So I'm going to go ahead and right-click and select New.
I'm going to go to Information. I'm going to name it Design Topo. I'm going to go ahead and go to my Contours.
I'm going to verify that my contour interval is set to 2 and 10. I'm going to go ahead and go to Display. I'm going to turn off the borders and only have my major and minor contours turned on.
I'm going to go ahead and select a Layer. I'm going to go down to C-Topo. But this time, I'm going to go ahead and choose C-Topo-Major-N for new.
I don't like this green color. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is choose blue. Actually, I'm going to go with magenta for my major contours.
So I'm going to go ahead and click in here and choose Major New. And I'm going to go ahead and choose ByLayer.
And we're going to have to change these layer settings outside of our surface style window. We're going to go ahead and then click on Minor. I'm going to go down.
I'm going to go ahead and click on C-Topo-Minor-New. It's going to be set to 11 currently, but we're going to go ahead and change that. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the color value (42).
I'm going to set it to ByLayer and click OK. I'm going to click Apply and click OK. And then now I'm going to go up to my Layer Properties.
I'm going to click the Layer Properties button. I'm going to bring my Layer Properties window over here. I'm going to go find my C-Topo-Major-New and C-Topo-Minor-New.
And I'm going to change these colors. So I'm going to navigate down. I'm going to go ahead and go to C-Topo-Major-New.
I'm going to click on this 92. I'm going to select magenta for my major. And then I'm going to go to C-Topo-Minor-New.
And I'm going to select blue for my minors. So then I'm going to go ahead and check this off. And once we've done that, we can go back in and check our Design Topo.
I'm going to select Edit. And inside of here now you're going to see Major New magenta, Minor New blue. Now that that's OK, I'm going to go ahead and go up here and click Save.
And I'll meet you in the next video and we'll talk about other object styles inside Civil 3D.
