This article provides an in-depth explanation on how to interact with label styles within AutoCAD Civil 3D, specifically focusing on pipe networks, pipes, and structures. The reader is guided through the process of viewing and editing label styles, understanding the data associated with each label, and how this data can be utilized within the drawing.
Key Insights
- The article details how to navigate to label styles for pipe networks, pipes, and structures within AutoCAD Civil 3D's toolspace window. It explains how to identify which labels are currently in use and how to edit these labels.
- Each label style consists of numerous components containing various data, such as 2D length, pipe inner diameter or width, material, and pipe slope. This data can be manipulated and included in the drawing as per the specific needs of the project.
- The information associated with structures and pipes in Civil 3D is extensive, including metrics like wall thickness, frame height, barrel heights, sump depths, structure Eastings or Northings, network names, and more. This level of detail offers immense versatility and customization options for the user.
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We've placed the labels into our drawing, and so we want to go ahead and look at what the styles look like for these different types of labels that we placed in the drawing.
I'm going to go ahead and go to my Settings tab of my Toolspace window. I'm going to go ahead and navigate down to my Pipe Networks. I'm going to go look at my label styles, which actually are not inside of my Pipe Networks.
They are inside of Pipes and Structures, because we have different labels for pipes and different labels for structures. So I'm going to go ahead and go to Label Styles for my pipes. And then inside of here, you have information for Plan, Profile, Crossing Section, or Crossing Profile.
We have not done any crossings. We are only doing Plan and Profile. So from here, we have the option for the different types that we have, or we can create a new one.
I see the golden triangle here, which means that this is currently being used in the drawing. So I know that this label is the one that we placed inside of the drawing here. So let's go ahead and take a look at that.
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I'm going to go ahead and right-click. I'm going to select Edit. And then inside of here, we have the Label Style Composer.
So just like any of the labels that we created when we were creating our drawing template file, we have the Information tab—the name of the label, the description of the label, and who created it. We have the General tab where we're controlling the text style, the label visibility, the layer, the orientation, and whether or not we are forcing insertion with pipes, because you can curve pipes slightly.
You have a force of inside curve—so whether or not you want to curve the text. Then you have your Plan Readability. You can set this to True or False.
Then you have your Readability Bias—the direction at which the text will flip itself—and your flipping of your anchors. Moving on to the Layout tab:
We have the options for text, line, blocks. We can have a flow direction arrow, and then we can have reference text. We can reference different pieces of information into these labels.
So from here, we see that our component for this label is a single pipe text component. And then if we go to the contents and we look at them by clicking on the ellipsis, we get the Text Component Editor. And so this looks like a large mess of a lot of different garbled text.
But what we can see here is that we have a 2D length. We are giving ourselves a 2D length from center to center. We have a pipe inner diameter or width.
We went down here to pipe inner diameter or width as one of the options—pipe inner diameter or width. Then we have a material, and then we have a pipe slope. So inside of the different pipes, there is a ton of information that you can pull from these.
And we could spend probably an entire lesson going through all of these different options. But this is just data that you can place into a label and then place into your drawing. We have different start and invert elevations.
We have lengths. We have end offsets. We have radii of the pipes.
We have hydraulic grade lines—all these pieces of different information that we can place into the drawing and place into these labels. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Cancel on this. I'm going to go to the Drag State.
So the Drag State is just like any other label. We're going to be controlling what our leader looks like. We're going to be controlling what our Drag State components of this label look like.
And then we're going to go ahead and go to the Summary, which is a summary of the previous tabs. So moving on from here, I'm going to go ahead and cancel out because I don't want to make any changes to that label. You can see that we are provided with quite a limited number of labels here for pipes, considering the amount of data that you can pull from a pipe.
And that's simply because they don't want to inundate the drawing with all of these different label styles. But that's why creating a drawing template file based on the work that you do in the office that you're working in is very important—because you can create the labels that are most important to your office. We're going to go ahead and minimize the Plan and Profile for the label styles for our pipes.
And we're going to go ahead and take a look at the structure. We're going to go to Structure Label Styles, and then we're going to look at this data with connected pipes. I'm going to go ahead and do that because we have the current golden triangle, which means that's the one that's in our drawing.
I'm going to right-click. I'm going to select Edit. And then from here, again, the Information tab—the name of the label style, the description of the label style. The General tab controls our label text style, label visibility, layers, the behavior of our text, and Plan Readability. Then we have the Layout tab, which has the different components that can be added: our text lines, blocks, reference text, and text for each.
We can have text for each of the individual structures for all pipes, inflow pipes, and outflow pipes. We're going to go ahead and look at what we have. We have structure text, incoming pipe text, and outgoing pipe text.
So this is a pretty robust label that we have here. If we're going to go ahead and take a look at this, we're going to look at the contents so that we can see all of the different data that we can pull from this. So I'm going to go ahead and click here.
So inside of here, we have a ton of information—and that's because the structures and the pipes inside Civil 3D have so much data associated with them: wall thicknesses, frame heights, frame diameters, barrel heights, sump depths, structure Eastings or Northings. We have descriptions, we have network names—just think of any piece of information about the network that you can have.
You have to fit all of that data into either your structure or your pipe, and then you can pull that out as a label inside of Civil 3D. So there is just so much information inside of these labels, but that means that there's so much manipulation and so much data that you can give to your clients, which you can put into your plans—and Civil 3D is just great in giving you that robust ability. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Cancel on this.
I'm going to go to Drag State. Again, Drag State is the same as all other labels that we've dealt with, which is: you have a leader, and you have a Drag State component. So you're going to be modifying what your leader looks like and then what the text looks like in that Drag State.
You're not controlling the text from here. That's done in the Layout tab. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Cancel.
I'm not creating a new label style for this because we have the current ones that we're using. I'm going to go ahead and minimize these. And because we didn't make any changes, I'm not going to save the drawing, but I will meet you in the next video.
