30+ Civil 3D / AutoCAD Tips & Tricks in 30 Minutes!

welcome my name is Jeff bartels I'm an infrastructure technical specialist here at Autodesk and I'm joined by my colleagues Jeri bartels and Dana judge for another installment of our 30 minute workout series today we're gonna be focusing on tips tricks and shortcuts if you're unfamiliar with the 30-minute workout concept this is a series of webinars that we put together to give us an opportunity to talk about and demonstrate some of the features and tools that really aren't shown during a typical training course you know many times when you take a training class in an Autodesk application you're shown the need to know tools the things that you need to know to do your job but many of the other ancillary tools and and you know side tools that can be very beneficial to your job many of those things are the type of things that you just have to kind of pick up on your own over a career using the application so we put together these webinars as a means of creating another resource to help get you acclimated to and help you explore some of these tools and help you make the most of your Autodesk investment couple ground rules as we do these many of the tools that we show are shown in an abstract nature this way we can focus on the functionality of the tool itself once you understand how the tool works you can apply it to whatever situation works best for you since these sessions are only half an hour it's very easy we're hoping for people to get in get out and get on with their day and we always record the sessions so anybody who registered for the session will get access to the recording the recording particularly be very helpful today because we're gonna be talking about a lot of things if you have a notepad or if you want to take and write something down that's perfectly fine but don't worry about trying to write a bunch of things down because you will have access to the recording afterwards today we're gonna be talking about a ton of tips tricks keyboard shortcuts and command options covering a range of areas everything from the interface to geometry creation tools to text to making modifications I'm going to be showing these in a shotgun approach so that we can cover as much material as possible I have always wanted to do a 30 tips and 30 minutes session and we actually have less than 30 minutes now so it'll be exciting to see if we can get through everything I want to talk about as we go if you have any questions about what's being covered there is a Q&A panel and a chat area Dana and Jerry will be monitoring that and answering any questions likewise if if you want to if you place in the chats we're more than happy to have one-on-one follow-up calls with anybody who's interested after the sessions over so that's also another possibility so this is gonna be a PowerPoint free zone PowerPoint has no place in these presentations so with that I'm gonna drop out of this and we're gonna get going I'm in civil 3d and I'm running simple 3d 2021 although everything that I show you here will work in virtually any contemporary version of civil 3d or AutoCAD gonna start by looking at some tips having to do with the interface we're going to talk about palettes here for a second I have my properties palette anchored to the interface here I'm just gonna drag this out by the name bar sometimes this is called the masked as you drag palettes around on screen you'll notice that as you get close to the edges it wants to dock now if I'd like to have this open all the time maybe I can't afford to use up that much real estate for this palette I'm a one screen kind of guy most of the time so here's a shortcut if I hold down the control key I can drop a palette wherever I want in the interface and it will not dock another shortcut if you double-click on the name bar it will flip from a docked to a nones at docked state or vice versa so if I double click on this one it's anchored I can take and pop it back out so let me double click on the name I did that with properties but it'll work with any palette this drawing has multiple layout tips I've got a plan sheet that I've started here I've also got a general notes sheet much like the palettes if you click and hold on a layout you can drag these around and rearrange their order let me take a direct plan back here if I drag a layout and hold my control key you'll see the icon changes to a plus this can be a quick way to create copies of layout tabs I can do that with layouts I can also do it with the entities in a file for example if I select these text entities I can click and hold on them and drag them over and place them over here just a quick way to access the move command works great with text works great with anything that doesn't require the specificity of an object snap in addition I can select this text and I can click hold and drag while I'm dragging if I hold down the trol key you'll see the icon change to a plus when I release my mouse button you can see that I just made a copy so just another shortcut so the copy command I'm gonna select these and I'll press delete this drag and drop methodology will also work between drawings if you look at the top of the screen you can see I have a couple drawings open if I'd like to view those side by side I'm gonna go to the view ribbon tab and down in the interface panel I'm going to click tile vertically you can see an icon that kind of shows what I'm going to get now on occasion the start tab wants to participate in this view I really don't need that so I'm going to minimize this and I'll click tile vertically again let me click in this drawing here on the right so knowing what we just saw I'm going to select this detail I will then click and hold on the edge and I can drag and drop this and place it in another file I'm gonna close this drawing not going to Save Changes and I'll maximize my original drawing on screen since we have a layout on-screen let's talk for a second about viewports I am going to from the draw panel here I will create a rectangle let's say this rectangle represents a viewport I'd like to create currently this rectangle is a polyline before I turn that into a viewport I'm going to change it into something else I'll open the draw panel and I'll click the region button and I will select the shape and press Enter it is now a region a region is kind of like a polyline except it's a solid since it's a solid it can be edited using boolean commands like Union and subtract which can be very helpful with viewports let's take a look to turn this into a viewport I'm going to go to the Layout tab and in the layout viewports panel I'll open this menu at the top and I'll say that I'd like to create a viewport from an object I will then select my region it's now a viewport in fact if I double-click in this we can see it works just like any other viewport let me zoom in a touch and I'll double-click out sometimes when we have a viewport meet we may wish to clip the viewports to accommodate other items on the title block like this detail let's try that I am going to create a rectangle we'll place it around this detail now let's turn this rectangle into a region I'll do that by going to the draw panel and I'll grab region I'll click that and press Enter now I have to reach I'm going to use a boolean command called subtract after I launch the subtract command I'd like to subtract from this enter I'll subtract this enter and you could see how quickly that I can match that viewport now it works with linear shapes does it work with more complex shapes like this circle let's try it I'd like to turn this circle into a region now I don't have to go back up to the ribbon if I don't want to if I right click in the menu you'll find a recent input option which will show you the last 20 commands that you've launched so from here I can choose region I'll turn that circle into a region and I'll press ENTER I'll come back and I'll say subtract subtract from this object enter I'd like to subtract the circle enter very quick to make those changes now let me delete this detail after seeing how you could take a notch out of this you may be wondering well how can I take and put that back together again I'm going to turn on a couple of object snaps here for a second let's create another rectangle I'll create it from the corner here to the corner here let's turn this into a region once again I have two regions I will use another boolean command called Union and after I launch the Union command I will select this object and this one and I'll press ENTER ok so definitely not the only way to create a viewport but it is a way to create a viewport and it's just another tool that you have available to you in your toolbox in the lower left corner of the title block I've got some text that incorporates some fields we can see the fields because of the gray bondrée fields represents smart text these are variables that are filled out automatically by the application so by having this text on the title block every time it's printed you'll have access to the file name you'll also have access to the date it was printed knowing what we know now I'm going to select this and then I will click and hold on it I'll hold my control key we'll drag this over and make a copy I'd like to create a new field I will double click on this text to edit now this is just single line text but what I show you here would work with multi-line text as well I'm going to type last saved by and then create the field I will press ctrl F this brings up the field dialog box where I can select from one of those smart text objects they are organized into categories I will select field that's tied to the document itself and I'll come down and grab this field called last saved by and I can see how it's going to be formatted notice I can adjust that here so I'm gonna keep it with all uppercase and I'll click OK I will then click on screen to finish the command and I'll do a quick regen now every time the sheet is printed in the corner of the sheet I will find out who the last person was that made changes to this file which can be very helpful in some cases let's go to model tab this drawing includes an external reference if I hover we can see the xref there in fact if I select it it's even easier to see I've got my external references manager docked to the interface over here we can see the reference Landscaping in the attachment here I can see how it's connected let's be attached if I come down to the details area I can see it's using an absolute path I can change either of these items right from this palette if I simply double click on the attachment type I can flip between attach and overlay if I right click on the reference I can come down and change the path type you know what somebody used absolute these really should be relative if I choose to make relative you can see how that how that changes once again I'll come back down and we'll change that back so we have the opportunity to do that very quickly let's look at attaching another reference I'll go bring up the external references manager and typically we could attach references using this button here or if I just right click in the middle of the pallet I can say I want to attach to other drawing I'll select this drawing called insert demo and I'll click open when I create an attachment to this file I'm going to bring it in as an overlay I am going to use a relative path and I'm not going to adjust scale and certian point of rotation so bring it into the same chord this is the original file now I obviously don't see it on-screen so I'd like to do a zoom extents I'll do that by double clicking the mouse wheel has this ever happened to you before okay obviously the file that I referenced is out the space somewhere how can I find it we can find it using the zoom command if I type zoom and press Enter there is an option of the zoom command called object I want to zoom to a particular object I'll click object and then which object I'll type l4 last the last object I created and when I press ENTER it will zoom on that this is a very small circle here this is probably worst case scenario I've got this circle out it's a coordinate 100 million by 100 million so that's what that could be a really quick way to find objects that are out in space you know when they're difficult to see on screen now that I know that that's obviously incorrect I'm going to right click on the insert' demo file here and I will choose detach and then I will double-click the mouse wheel to do another zoom extents okay if we look down at the bottom of the screen you can see that I'm currently to have my dynamic input input mode turned on we talked about this in a previous session f12 will turn that on or I could click the icon when dynamic input is turned on if you hover over a grip you'll see these additional accoutrements and text labels and things on screen if you're like me and you have bad vision and you spend most of your day looking through the bottom of your corrective lenses this text may be a little small to read there is a system variable called tooltip size that will adjust the size of this text by default it's set to zero the maximum I can set that to is 6 the minimum I can set it to is negative 3 so you can actually make that text a little smaller if you want to now that I set that to 6 if I hover over this grip you can see the change on-screen let me press escape now if you're like me and you've got a bad memory 10 minutes from now you won't remember tooltips eyes but you may remember part of it maybe I remember you know whatever that system very well was it it ended in size if I come down to the command line I can use wildcards to find commands and system variables I'm going to use an asterisk which means everything and I'll type asterisk size and it will show me every command or a system variable that ends in size so I can use this to find commands that start with a text string or end with a text string or include a text string let me tooltip' size and I'll set that back to zero as you learn commands are as you see commands and textbooks sometimes they may be listed as just a command itself you may wonder you know after using a command or typing it in you know man I wish that is in the interface how would I know where to find that if you open the application menu there is a search bar here at the top this will tell you if you enter a command for instance I'm going to type plot a very popular command it'll tell me every place in the interface where I can find this tool so I can see that it's in the quick access toolbar I can see it's in the application menu I can see it's on the output ribbon tab in the plot panel notice it also shows me every command that is related to plot so this could be a great way to find commands in the interface or find out how the many different ways that they can be launched in fact this isn't just a list these things are hot if I click on this I can actually launch the plot command from here now I don't want to plot this at the moment so I'll go ahead and close that let's talk for a second about dialog boxes now if I was smart I had a dialog box open there on screen I'm just gonna open another one here for a second probably should have kept the other one open for right now let's let's talk about any dialog box that allows you to enter text normally we can put a text entry in there or these will also support expressions if you use the appropriate syntax I can type equals 12 divided by 0.25 and I'll press alt enter to calculate the expression let's try that again equals 13 times 0.14 alt enter okay I'm doing it in the text style dialog box but you can do it in virtually any dialogue box where you have an entry that's looking for a number you can leverage an expression okay let's pan the drawing over here I've got a line segment I'd like to create an arc coming off of this line I know the start point of the arc and I know the center point let's draw that I'm gonna launch the arc command here I'll start my arc from the end of the line I know the center is gonna be right here oops I apologize let's try that again arc I'm going to come down and dictate that I want to use Center let's collect the mark and this is exactly the opposite of what I want by default the autocad platform wants to draw arcs in a counterclockwise direction if you hold the control key you can force it to draw clockwise let's Pan the silver let's say I'd like to hatch the area bounded by these straight lines normally when we hatched we have the opportunity of doing points or select objects unfortunately neither of those options is going to help me here because if I click in this area the circles are gonna get in the way and I don't have a single object that I can select to hatch let's look at how we can hatch this I'm going to click the hatch button it's asking me to pick an internal point instead I'm gonna come over and expand at the boundaries panel and I can see that the current boundary set is using the current viewport I'm going to click this button that says select new boundary set I will then select objects basically what I'm doing is saying when I pick points these are the only objects you're allowed to see let me press enter and now if I pick a point in here it will very quickly find that boundary great way to have something like this or in the event you're trying to use pick points on a drawing that has thousands and thousands of items here I've got a hatch that is associative to a polyline is it possible to take a hatch pattern and have it conform to a completely different boundary yes the command is called hatch set boundary I'll launch that command I will click the hatch I will then select the boundary and press ENTER and then do I want to erase the line work no I'll just press ENTER to accept that and you can see the hatch now conforms to this boundary and it's associative let's delete this original shape now has this ever happened to you before I'm going to select the boundary and delete it if you delete a boundary the hatch pattern is now no longer associative I would like to recreate the boundary and I would like the hatch to be associative to that recreated boundary to do that I can select the hatch and right-click from here I'll choose hatch edit in the dialog box I'll choose recreate boundary and now how do you want to make the boundary region we touched on that a little bit ago or polyline finally do you want to associate the hatch with the new boundary yes I would let me press ENTER and I'll click OK you can see it draws the boundary on the current layer so I may have to adjust the layer property but you can see that the new boundary that that hatch is associative to that new boundary when we're dealing with hatch many times it's important for that hatch to be to the back of the drawing so that it doesn't encroach on text or other line work so how can we do that there is a command called hatch to back if I press ENTER after launching that command you can see it automatically pushed 10 hatch objects to the back after seeing that you may be thinking man Jeff you're you type that in is there a button for that in the interface well there's a way to find out let's take a look I'll open up the application menu and I'll type hatch to back we'll practice what we preach here send hatch us to back I can see it's on the home ribbon tab in the modify panel under draw order let's take a look Home tab modify panel under draw order there's send hatches to back as long as this menu is open notice that there are also tools here to automatically bring text to front or dimensions to front or leaders to front or bring all the annotations to front just some some nice things to explore there when you get a chance let me pan this over here I've got a line segment let's say I'm creating some conceptual geometry for a parking lot and I'd like to sketch out the curb and gutter maybe I'm drawing b612 curb and gutter so I would have to offset this line 1 foot to get to the flow line and then a half a foot to get to the back of curb normally if I'm offsetting an object twice with two different dimensions I have to launch the offset command multiple times not in this case though notice that my dynamic inputs turned on that is a requirement for this trick I will come down and launch the offset command and then instead of entering a distance I'm going to use the through option this allows us to offset an entity through a point I will select the object but instead of picking a point you can see with my dynamic input turned out I can type a dimension I can type one foot I'm still in the command I'll click the line and I'll type point five enter still in the command and click this line and then I can enter a different dimension so using dynamic input would be through option I can create multiple offsets at multiple distances using offset just one time let's talk about joining geometry here I've got a line and I've got an arc and I've got a polyline many times when we want to join we tend to lean on the P edits multiple join option not necessary if we expand the modify panel there is a joint option here I can simply select those objects and you can see it very quickly creates a closed polyline let's click on do another thing I like about the joint option is it will do multiple so if I launch join and I drag to make a selection I'll even hit my spacebar to change that remember we looked at this a few weeks ago I can select all of these disparate objects and when I press ENTER it very quickly creates three closed polylines for me join also works with simple objects here I've got a line segment over here I've got another line segment these are collinear I'm gonna tap my spacebar to go back into the previous command using join I will select both of these objects and press Enter and it joined them and created a line segment so I mean had I used like P edit or something like that it would be a polyline and I'd have grips where I didn't need them so that actually joined back to a single line segment works with arcs as well I'm going to tap my spacebar to relaunch the last command these arcs are collinear so if I select both of these and press ENTER it will join them again into an arc now it does matter which one you click first remember arcs are drawn in a counterclockwise fashion so had I picked this end first it would have connected around this way for a second maybe I'd like to create some text and I want to draw that text on the notes layer typically when we select a layer we may use the make current button and then click the layer we're interested in the Senate current I don't have a notes object here that I can click on instead if I open the layer control I can tap the first letter of the layer that I'm interested in I'll type the letter N and you can see it takes me to the first layer that contains that layer or contains that letter maybe I'd like the hatch layer I'll press H for hatch okay can be perfect for finding some unique layers it's it's not the perfect solution for every case I just want to show you that it is here it can be very helpful just as an example let me hit the letter B notice it takes me to the first layer that contains a B each time I tap B after that it will take a jump to the next one and I can simply hit enter when I see the layer that I want so to get to notes very easy I can hit and press ENTER I'm now on that layer I'm going to create some multi-line text I'll launch multi-line text and will take and create rectangle here let's create some bulleted lists now normally we type you know several lines there we could come up and use the I want to create a bulleted list and it will take and put bullets on there but you know you only get one kind of bullet what I want to show you here is multiple objects can be used as bullets if I type a dash for instance and press the tab key point one enter point to enter point three let me backspace let's use a plus sign I can type the plus tab point one point two point three can I use an asterisk asterisk tab yes okay so if you have a need for additional bullets or if you want additional bullets try experimenting with some of the characters available in the in the font that you're using several of those can be used as bullets let's talk for a second about multi leaders typically when we create a multi leader we create an arrowhead first with the arrowhead we pull it out we place the text we don't have to though if not every application creates leaders that way some of them do it a little different if I launch the multi leader command notice there's an option down here let me hit arrow head first so that's the default there's an option down here called content first if I do content first it will let me create my little M text box this is my notes and I've ensured it fits here now I can take and place the leader after the fact so we can go in in both directions there essentially when creating multi leaders let's pan this over here I've got some dimensions have you ever encountered a drawing with fudged dimensions have you ever received a drawing from someone and it has fudged dimensions or you wondered could this have fudged dimensions dimensions that are incorrect to be catastrophic especially if we're using this geometry in a construction situation so how can i determine dimensions that have been faked there is a command called dim reassociate as I start typing that in you can see there's actually two of them here you want the short one you want dim Aria sock if you launch that command it'll ask you to select objects type all and press Enter every fudge to dimension will highlight and then when you press ENTER again they will be fixed to what the actual dimension is now in this case I've got a small example the majority of my dimensions were fudged unfortunately but if I had a big drawing and then I wanted to go back and find out okay which ones had fake dimensions on them how can I establish that after the fact if you remember a couple of weeks ago we went to the properties palette we talked about this select objects button I could say select objects p4 previous it will risa lect the previous selection set let me hit enter to select that and then I'll come over to the properties palette and I will simply put these onto a different layer it could be called fudge two dimensions or something like that I'm just gonna grab this magenta layer here for a second that'll make it very easy for you to scan the drawing and identify the ones that that were incorrect these are areas where geometry is gonna have to be modified okay fantastic um let's do this we are just about at the bottom of the list I think we're gonna make it I just started another drawing here this is an empty file I just want to note that no matter what you do with the interface as you launch commands you're essentially driving the interface with text even though we're clicking a button here for a polyline for instance if we look at the command line you can see it just typed the command in for us so as I pick points on-screen I'm entering coordinates X comma Y you can see there are sub options for this command if I launch a sub option what it do it just type the letter A for me so no matter no matter what you do in the application essentially you're the application is being driven via text knowing that you can create text files that you can drag and drop in here to drive the application as an example I have a text file that I created I'll double click on this one just to show you I created this a notepad as I was generating geometry and doing things on-screen I was keeping note of what was happening at the command line here I'm launching a rectangle there's the coordinate of the start point I entered D for distance there's the distance in the x-direction y-direction here's the coordinate I clicked to finish the rectangle I then do a zoom extents here I'm creating a linear dimension from this coordinate to this one here's where I picked to set the dimension basically you can go through and set this up I then saved this except instead of having a text extension it's got SCR for script if you have a script file you can drag and drop this into the application and it simply plays that string of text at the command line ton of things we can do with this may be one of these 30-minute workouts we can get into scripts a little bit heavier this is something that would be worth exploring if you're interested in that kind of thing let me select this and take it out after seeing something like that you may be wondering if it's possible I mean could you conceivably create an entire drawing that way let me drag in this other script file the answer is yes you can because virtually everything that you do in the application is like I said it's it's all text so this is how I spent my Tuesday night generated a drawing it's going through creating the layers it's creating the geometry and then it's going through and applying the hatch pan to that okay now you may be wondering when would you ever need a script file to draw a picture of Bruce Lee and the answer is never because I'll give you this one we'll make this available as a download with the video what I'm trying to impress here is with a script file you are only limited by your creativity okay with that let me jump out of this we'll get back to this here slideshow so during the session day we covered a ton of tips tricks keyboard shortcuts and command options I'm hoping coming away from this you saw some things that maybe you hadn't seen before maybe this sparked some ideas that maybe you hadn't thought about until today as I mentioned earlier if you have any questions or if you'd like to have a follow-up one-on-one with cherry or Dana or myself please let us know put that in the chat box and we can follow up with you that being said I will check what Jerry and Dana are there any questions that came up that were not addressed I think we're all cut up Oh fantastic all right so knowing that I want to thank you guys so much for coming we really appreciate your time and we look forward to seeing you guys again in a couple of weeks Thanks

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 46,444

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, tips, tricks, shortcuts, how to, learn, 2021, tutorial

Id: 3aDWwt_V6Ms

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/forresja]

There's some handy stuff in here. This guy always puts out good content.

Thanks for sharing!

[u/Differcult]

Jeff makes great videos. He single handedly took me from Microstation to Civil 3d in less than 20 hours.

[u/Sonic7997]

Great video, this guy has awesome stuff.