Rotate Survey Point Levels to Align with String

When using the survey tools in Civil 3D there will likely be things that the software (or any software for that matter) appears to not be able to do at first glance. Digging a little deeper usually provides a solution or workaround. One of those cropped up today.

Can you automatically rotate survey point labels to match the orientation of the survey figure? The answer is... well no actually you can't as far as I am aware but there is a decent workaround that gives the same result.

After playing around with survey point settings I concluded that you couldn't rotate the label based on the orientation of the survey figure - you cant reference another object in the label settings. Likewise with the figure labels you couldn't reference the elevation of anything in the definition. Similarly nothing of use in creating a marker point label to label the vertices of the figure. The answer lay in regular line and curve labels which I hadn't thought of using on survey figures before.

Open the Add Line and Curve Labels dialog box as below:

Next create new labels styles for both lines and curves. Set the anchor point for the text component of the label to the start of the line and then in the text contents dialog box set the property to read the 'General Segment Start Z' - see below:

Delete any unnecessary label components. Next add the labels to the desired survey figure and you will have labels that are now rotated with the survey figure.

Experienced Civil 3D Users Required..

Calling all experienced Civil 3D users.... I have a had an enquiry from a survey company looking for someone with Civil 3D experience. The role is based in Ireland and would involve the processing and drafting of river x-section data. Send me an email on civilintentions@gmail.com with your CV if interested

River Sections - Culverts

This post  is a follow on from a previous post about an add on we are developing for Civil 3D. In that post we looked at commands for creating and annotating river cross sections. The following video looks at the command used for drafting culverts on the longitudinal section. The command allows the user to select data from the cross sections to draft the long section view.

One of the issues when surveying culverts along a reach is that (depending on culvert length, surveyor access and a number of other issues) the two ends of the culvert may not be surveyed on the same day or by the same field crew. Another is that the two ends of the culvert may have completely different shapes and picking up what the surveyor perceives to be the crown, invert and top of parapet for each end may not be that straight forward in the field. More often then not the best approach is to survey each end of the culvert, draft these up in cross section and then use the cross section views to provide information for drafting the culvert in long. section.

As you can imagine measuring points from the culverts on cross section and then transferring this information to the long. section is time consuming. The following video shows a custom command that enables users to select points from cross section for the start and end of the culverts and automatically drafts the culvert on long section using this information. There is also a second tab in the dialog box for creating bridges - this uses a similar approach in that users select points to define the bridge dimensions from cross section and the command inserts a dynamic AutoCAD block on the long section. The block is sized and scaled correctly to suit the information pulled from the cross section.

http://youtu.be/Z_muuxkuC_4