This article provides a detailed guide on how to work with description keysets in Zillow 3D. It explains how to navigate, create, and edit description keysets, as well as how to apply these keysets to points in a drawing.
Key Insights
- Description keysets in Zillow 3D are a categorization of points by the field description. They can be accessed through the tool space under the settings tab and can be created or edited as per the user's requirements.
- Individual description keys within a keyset define how points with certain descriptions are displayed. Users can control aspects such as the code, style, label style, and layer of points by editing these keys. Commonly used wildcards like an asterisk can be used in the code to match all points beginning with a certain string of characters.
- Applying description keysets to points in a drawing is not automatic; users must manually apply these keysets to the points. This also applies when any modifications are made to the description keyset. Points with the keysets applied can have different marker styles and label styles based on the defined description keys.
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.
In this video, we're going to discuss description keysets inside of Zillow 3D. What description keysets are, is they are a categorization of points by the field description.
So to start working with description keysets, we're going to navigate over to the tool space, to the settings tab, select settings tab, and navigate up to points. We're going to drop down points, and we're going to go to description keysets. We're going to right click on description keysets, and we're going to select new.
So inside here, this is the new description keysets window. I'm going to type in for the name survey, and I'm going to select okay. Zillow 3D is now going to place a new description keyset named survey below.
I'm going to right click on that, and I'm going to select edit keys. Now that we're in the panorama window for the description keyset, we can start talking about what an individual description key looks like. So the set of description keys is going to be the list of the keys that we have here, and then an individual description key is the individual line inside of a description keyset.
We're going to walk through how to create our first description key very slowly, and discuss each option, and then we're going to go ahead and use that option as a baseline for creating the next ones. We're going to copy that downwards. So the first item that you come across is a code, and the code inside of a description key is related to the field code that was inside of your survey import or your point import.
Learn Civil 3D
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
If I navigate over to my survey information in my.txt file, what you'll see here is that we have the information that we discussed earlier, which is our point number, northern, easting, elevation, and description. We have there p-n-e-z-d. So the d is what we're talking about now is the description for our description keysets.
And descriptions are broken down into different parameters. So every piece of information inside of your description is broken apart by sections in and broken apart by spaces. So the parameter, the first item that we have is our parameter zero.
Moving on from there, we have parameter one, parameter two, parameter three, until you run out of descriptions that are spaced out by zeros or that are broken apart by spaces. So what we have here is tc or fl. These are codes related to certain features inside of your survey.
So whether it's a tc for a top of curve, or fl for a flow line, or an sw for a point on a sidewalk, or ep for an edge of pavement, we have a description. And then we have more additional codes that come after that. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to close this.
We're going to navigate over to here. And our code, there are additional pieces of text that you can put into your code that are considered wildcards. And so one of the more common wildcards that we use is an asterisk.
And so what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to start with our gs for a ground shot. And so we'll type gs. And then we'll use the asterisk as our wildcard.
And so what the gs asterisk says is that it says, take any point that has a description that has gs at the beginning, and then match that code and use this description key set to define that point. So you can have a point that has more information coming after gs, and it will ignore that information. It'll basically find anything that has gs at the beginning, and then apply these code sets to that point.
So moving on from there, we have our style. And what the style is, is it is the marker style for our point. So the marker style is either this X that we have here, or this square with a circle and a dot in the center.
We're going to go ahead and check the box for style, because we want to force a certain style onto any of our gs ground shots. So I'm going to go ahead and click on default. It brings up the point style window.
I'm going to drop down, and I'm going to select standard. So I'm going to click standard. I'm going to click okay.
And now it forces standard onto the marker style for our point gs. So moving on from there, you have your point label style. And the label style is the text that sits next to your point marker.
So as we did in the previous video, we changed the couple of points in gs to be a description only label style. There are other label styles, and we'll discuss how to create label styles in a future video. But for now, we're going to navigate up here.
We're going to click on default, and we are going to select our description only label style. So I'm going to click okay, and we're going to move on to the next column, which is format. So format is asking Civil 3D how we would like to display the information that is part of our label.
So basically the name of that certain point. So inside of format, you have a dollar sign that signifies a certain parameter, and then you have a qualifier. So in this, we have our dollar sign asterisk, and it basically tells Civil 3D to choose the entire description for that point and display it in as the name for the point.
If you want your surveyor's field information to come in completely as the name, like we have here gs, if we want it to come in completely, we have a dollar sign asterisk. If you want to modify, you can type in text, and it will display that text as part of that point. Or you can use individual parameters.
So for example, I'm going to bring up the survey import again, and if we wanted to just display the descriptions after the first parameter. So say we didn't want to display TC, but we wanted to know what point on the top of curb it was, whether it was a regular point, or if it was a beginning of curb, or an on curb, or an end of curb. We would be displaying our second parameter.
However, the first parameter is zero. The second parameter is one. If we wanted to display the second parameter, we would go ahead and put in dollar sign one, and that would display the second parameter.
For our purposes here, I want to go ahead and display the entire raw format of the description so that my surveyor's description of that point comes in. And so I'm going to leave it as dollar sign asterisk. So then we can force a layer onto a point.
I'm going to check the box, and I'm going to select next to this checkbox to the right. A new window will come up for a layer selection. So inside of layer selection, I want to do a vnode layer.
So I'm going to type v dash, and I navigate. It bumps me down to the v section of my layers, and then I'm going to find node, and I'm going to select it, and I'm going to click okay. And then the most common items inside the description key set that you are going to manipulate are going to be the first five items.
The remaining items are less common. They have to do with scaling your points, with rotating your points, and with rotating your labels based on certain parameters. And those parameters are the parameters inside of your description.
So the scale parameter is always going to be the first parameter. You can't select a new scale parameter, but when you move on to marker rotation, you can actually select any number of parameters that are inside of your description. For our purposes here, we are not going to select any of the remaining options afterwards, and we're going to go ahead and right click, and we are going to select copy.
Now we have a copy of gs, and I'm going to change it to tc star. And we're going to kind of start moving a little bit faster through here because I have a couple of codes that we want to start creating. We're going to go ahead and go with tc as a standard description only, and we're going to do a dollar sign asterisk and a vnode.
And so we're good, and we're going to go ahead and do another copy. We are going to do a fl star for flowline. We're going to go ahead and copy again, and we are going to go with an ep star.
And we are going to copy again, and we are going to go with sw star. And we are going to copy again, and we are going to create FND and a star. And this one is a found monument so I am going to change my style from standard to basic.
Then I'm going to copy my SW star again and I am going to type in top star and I'm going to copy top and create toe star. Now we can modify these more if we need to in future videos. However for now we're going to go ahead and check this box and the next thing to understand inside Civil 3D is that points that have already been created do not have a description key set applied to them unless you already have a description key set in the drawing.
So in our instance we did not have a description key set so all of the points that are inside of this drawing have not had a description key set applied to them yet. We have to go in and apply our description key set to the points inside the drawing. If you ever make a
Modification to the description key set you also have to then go back and reapply that description key set to any of the points in the drawing that you want to have it applied to.
So I'm going to go ahead and select any point. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to select similar.
We'll see that all of these points here are selected. If I zoom out all of the points over here are selected. If I right-click I can navigate down and apply description keys and I can select it and so what will have happened in here is now all of our description keys have been applied to our points and we can zoom in here and we can see there are a large amount of ones that have a standard marker and a label style that says what the raw description of that file or that point is and then we have a couple of found corners that have a different marker style but the same label style.
So from here we're going to go ahead and save this drawing and then we'll move forward from in the next video we'll talk about manipulating point markers and label styles.
