Get to the point

You work in a survey shop. You’ve got a couple thousand points on the screen and you need to weed through them. How did you accomplish this in Land Desktop (or likely ANY AutoCAD based program)? You either used description keys to assign proper layers, symbols, etc. to your points, or one at a time, you assigned points to layers as needed. Once it was time to work with the points – to get a job done – you isolated the points a layer at a time, and weeded through them as necessary. What was the easiest way to accomplish this? _LAYISO. The command now sits on the AutoCAD Layers II Toolbar.

Exceptionally common, makes sense.

One problem, how do you set up Civil 3D to make this happen? You know – like you’re used to? I’ll leave it to you to weed through the plethora of documentation on why this works, but you want to do the following:

Make a layer for points, I’ve called mine DC-PNTS. Change your command settings to use this as the default layer for point creation as shown below:

Set up default styles as well. Notice object styles and label styles carry the same name for simplicity – your end users will thank you.

Your object style components should reside on layer 0 as shown below:

Your label layer needs to be the same as your object layer, and I know it sounds odd:

Points created with these settings in place can be isolated by layer, the colors of the object layers can be changed, the labels can be turned off via the object style component, and most importantly, the label can be gripped, and its location – relative to the marker – can be modified. In a nut-shell, you’ll be able to work like you have in the past, isolating, modifying, making notes, unisolating, and moving on.

Let’s say you have a layer for control points called DC-PNTS-CONTROL, and you want to use description keys. Make a “Control Points” style, but set the marker and label components to layer 0. Make a label style (Control Points), but set the label layer to DC-PNTS-CONTROL. Turn on the layer control as part of the desrciption key, and select the same layer (as shown below):

If you work in this fashion, any points set manually will reside on the layer you choose, you can easily make a layer filter for points (using DC-PNTS* as your filter definition, for example). You can freeze and thaw all your points via the layer dialog. You can turn off the label and leave the marker on; you can turn off the marker and leave the label on; you’ll be able to harness the power of the old _LAYISO command you’ve been using since about AutoCAD 13.

That should cover about every option you’ll need. Nice.

Civil 3D Library
Looking for Survey tutorials? Check out The COGO Branch in the Library. These downloads aren’t software demonstrations. They were created for clients using AutoCAD Civil 3D in the real world. Registration is required.