Civil 3D / AutoCAD Tips & Shortcuts - Pt. 1 Interface

hi I'm Jeff bartels and I'm an infrastructure technical specialist at Autodesk today we're going to be starting a new series called civil 3d and AutoCAD tips tricks and industry shortcuts in this session we're going to be looking at several time-saving features that you can use when working in AutoCAD and civil 3d and the items that we look at are going to be focused in three major areas interface helpful tools and workflows throughout the session I'm going to be using a rapid-fire approach so we can get through as many concepts as possible this session represents the tips and shortcuts related to the interface this recording is part one of the overall session as you can see I've just launched civil3d 2016 I'm going to start by opening and drawing I'll do that by coming up to the application menu and I'll click the open icon and it fortunately it's defaulting to the exact folder that I want to use exercise files let's say that it didn't though let me back up a couple directories here's where I would normally navigate through my hard drive until I get to the directory that I'm interested in maybe this directory represents a project that I'm working on for the next couple of weeks I can save this as a favorite place if I click and hold on this folder I can drag it over to the left and drop it in the favorite places area from now on no matter where I am on my hard drive when I'm in AutoCAD or civil3d if I go to open a drawing I can click this icon and go right to my project folder I can hit as many favorite places as I like and in the future if I wanted to remove these I can do that just by right-clicking on the icon and I can select remove from the menu let's open a couple drawings I'm going to select corridor I'll hold my shift key and select earthwork and then I'll come down and click open now that I have a couple drawings open in the interface let's talk about some of the interface tools I'll press ctrl one to bring up the properties palette probably the most powerful palette that we have in the application as you can see it's quite large if I click and hold on this name bar I can drag this around but when I get close to the edges you can see it wants to dock here's another shortcut if you hold your ctrl key you can drag the palettes wherever you like and drop them and they will not dock another thing I like to do with the palettes let me drag this one back out if you right click on the name bar you can choose anchor left or anchor right depend on the side of the screen you want to use I'm going to choose anchor left and you can see that pushes the pallet over into the margin now if I want to access the properties tool I can just hover leverage the commands and when I move away it collapses I can take this one step further if I right-click in the margin I can choose icons only this will reduce the entire pallet down to a single icon now that I've done this I could take the layer properties palette let's right-click on that I'll anchor that to the left let's type X Rath I'll bring up the external references manager this is also a pallet let me right click on that will anchor that to the left now I have the functionality of all of these palettes available in my interface and I'm only taking up three icons in fact the tool space is also a pallet so if I wanted to free up as much real estate as possible I can click this auto hide button to move that down into an icon I'm going to put this back let me click the auto hide button again turn that feature off let's talk about another pallet if you use the map functionality of civil3d you've probably typed map W space a couple times to bring up the workspace we don't have to do that anymore if you go up to the palettes panel and expand this you'll find an icon right here let me click the map task pane icon and then I'll say I'd like to turn that on and we can see that over here on the right side of the interface this is also a pallet so if I wanted to I can minimize this and use the same workflows that we saw on the left over here on the right side of the screen we turn the auto-hide off and then I'll close this pallet if you're someone who uses vault you might be interested in this let me come over to the prospector tab and I'll drag down to the bottom here's where I can see my data shortcuts area if you use vault you will also have a project area here sometimes having both of these options creates a little confusion with users if you're using vault you're not going to be using the data shortcuts we can actually turn that off I'm going to type shortcut node and I'll set that system variable to 0 when I do you can see the data shortcuts are now hidden to turn that back on I'll right click and repeat shortcut node and I'll set that back to 1 let's look at a helpful option with respect to the panorama if i zoom in we can see that I have a corridor on my screen I'm going to select this and I'll come up and choose rebuild when I do it brings up the panorama showing the event viewer and we can see how it's actually it's upgrading the sub assemblies from 2015 to 2016 so I'm seeing these informational messages here I'm going to click the green check to close the panorama and let's make another change I'm going to come over to my assembly and I'll select the day light I'm using here on the right side and I'll just press the Delete key to remove that I will then select the assembly and I'll come up and click the tool palette icon let's choose daylight max-width and I'll drop a new one here at the top back of kerb as far as civil3d is concerned this daylight has no target doesn't know what surface to go to that's all right let me close this pallet I'll go back to the corridor and we'll rebuild this when I do we get several more errors notice that the newer ones are placed to the bottom if you are someone who does not clear your list any time this pops up you'll have to drag to the bottom to see the latest messages now you can clear the list if you want to if I open the Action menu we can clear it right here but I also want to show you that if you open the View menu you can set newest first this will swap the direction so that the newest items are on top I'm going to press escape to deselect my corridor let's back up I have two drawings open in the interface let's view them side by side I'll do that by going to the View tab and then I'll come down to the interface panel and I'll choose tile vertically now since I'm using civil3d 2016 we have this extra start tab and that wants to participate in the splitting of the screen here not a problem let me click the minimize button and then I'll come up and choose tile vertically again to clean that up this is a great way to move content back and forth between open drawings I'm gonna click to put the focus in this drawing on the right and I'll zoom in on this detail I will then click to put my focus in the drawing on the left and I'll zoom in on this detail now I like to drag from left to right if you're someone who wants to change the order of these windows on screen you can click to put the focus on the one that you're interested in and then if you come back and choose tile vertically it will flip positions now I have focus here on the left let me zoom in on this piece of mtext here's a shortcut we can use to move entities if I click to select this I can then click and hold on it and it will copy it to my cursor I can then drag up here and release the mouse button to move that's a great way to move labels and text let me select this again I'll click and hold and drag if I hold my control key you can see the plus icon at my cursor this means I'm going to create a copy when I release my mouse button I now have a duplicate of that text object we can move and copy items within the same drawing or we can copy them between drawings let me select this object again I will click and hold on it and will drag it over into this other file let me click back in the original drawing and I'll zoom out maybe we'll recycle this rectangle used as the boundary I'll click and select it and then I'll click and hold on the edge and I'll drag this back over into the other drawing I will then select the polyline I'll hover over this grip in the middle and I'll choose stretch maybe I'll tap my f8 key to lock my ortho and I'll drag this out to make it a little larger I'll press escape when finished not only can we drag and drop content between drawings we can also match properties between drawings for example let me zoom in give myself some free space I'll go to the Home tab and I'm going to create a circle I will then come up and launch the hatch command and I'll click inside this circle let's change the hatch pattern to ANSI 31 and maybe we'll change the scale here to 30 I'll press ENTER to accept that and then enter again to finish the command I will then click in this detail on the right will zoom in now let's go up to the clipboard panel and I'll choose match properties I'll select this hatch I will then click in the other drawing I'll select this hatch to assign the same properties when I'm finished I'll press escape now this is a good point if i zoom in you can see how the hatch is breaking down here in the event you're working in a drawing that is set to state plane coordinates and you have large coordinates like this your hatch patterns are based on the origin or the zero zero coordinate the farther you get from that origin the more likely that your hatch will start to break down not a problem if I select this I can come up and choose set origin and I can move the origin closer to the object in this case I'll just click here in the lower left corner my hatch resets and if i zoom in I can see it's perfect now at this point I'm going to close the earthwork drawing I won't save changes now maximize this corridor drawing on screen let's talk about some of the things we can do in dialog boxes if you are someone who creates parcels let me come up to the parcel menu here and I'll choose parcel creation tools I will then click the Chevron to expand the toolbar and right here under the minimum area we can see that when we assign this the units are square feet what if I wanted the minimum area of my lot to be 1 Acre fortunately I don't have to know how many square feet are in an acre if I click in this area I can type 1 acre with no space when I press enter we can see the value let me click again I'll type 2.5 acre and I'll press ENTER and we can see that value now that we've seen that let me close this toolbar I'll show you something else in most dialog boxes in this application if you're asked for a number in many cases you can enter an expression for example let me go to the annotate tab and then I'm going to bring up my dimension style manager let me click modify and we'll go to the text tab here text type is point zero eight maybe I would like to calculate my text height for example I'm going to type equals one divided by 12 and then I'll hold my Alt key and press Enter when I do it calculates that value for me let me come down in this one just another one that is looking for a number but I can type a expression if I want equals 0.5 divided by 12 alt enter perfect let me close this dialog box we'll close this now that was an AutoCAD dialog box let's try with a civil3d dialog box I am going to just create a polyline here let me turn my ortho off and maybe we'll put an arc in this let's turn this into an alignment I will come up and launch the alignment command I'll say create alignment from objects I'll select this one and press Enter press ENTER again and let me check this property right here it's expecting me to enter a number let's enter an expression instead equals 100 divided by 3 alt enter once again really easy way to calculate those values when finished I'll click OK and finish my alignment let's talk for a second about some of the mode settings if we look down here at the command line we can see my ortho is now turned off if I hover over this icon we can see that the f8 key controls the ortho so if I if I tap that I can turn that feature on and off so it's off now let me watch the polyline command since it's off as I'm drawing here you can see I can pick any point I like now I can tap f8 to toggle this on or what if I only wanted it on for a couple pics if I press and hold the f8 key down see that icon at the cursor that is showing me that I am temporarily toggling that value until such time as I take my finger off the key ok hold it down my ortho is locked take my finger off and it's disabled when I'm finished I'll press escape this works with any of the function keys for example my running object snaps are currently turned on we can see that the f3 key controls that let me zoom in this detail I'll select this dimension and maybe I'd like to move it down a little bit I'll click to select this grip and as I pull that down you can see because my running object snaps are turned on if I click it's gonna take and go up to the endpoint of that line I obviously don't want that but I don't want to be turning my running object snaps on and off and on and off that's alright let me click the grip and I'll hold the f3 key down just to disable it momentarily I'll pull this down and click and then when I take my finger off the running object snaps are turned back on if I hover over one of these annotated objects so I can see the annotated icon it's it's annotated to one scale in fact I think all of these objects are annotated let's add a few more scales just for an example I'm gonna come down and turn on the ad scales button and then I think I'll choose ten scale we'll choose five scale basically as fast as I changed the annotation scale I'm adding those scales to every annotated object let me come down and turn this off and then I'll set this back to ten I believe that's where we started let me zoom in on this label and I will click to select it and you can see all of the sizes sometimes these visually can get in the way if I click this grip now it's kind of hard to see with all the other variations let me press escape fortunately I don't have to see all of those other sizes if I use the system variable selection a no display I can set that to zero and I'll press ENTER now if I select an annotated object that supports multiple scales we only see the size that's on the screen at this point you may be wondering hey does that system variable affect this drawing only or does it affect my AutoCAD environment as a whole here's how we can find out I'm going to come down to the command line and I'll launch that system variable again selection a no display if you launch any command or system variable and while it's active at the command line press your f1 key AutoCAD will bring up context-sensitive help for that command or variable right here we can see that the selection a no display is saved in the registry so it controls our overall AutoCAD environment and not just individual drawings now that I'm finished I'll close the help documentation I'm going to set things back the way they were so I'll set my selection and/or display back to one and I'll press Enter if you found this content helpful please rate it by clicking the thumbs up icon this will help other acan users identify valuable content on behalf of Autodesk this is Jeff Bartles saying thank you for watching

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 41,092

Keywords: Bartels, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Tips, Tricks, Shortcuts, akn_include, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Tutorial, Help, How to

Id: -7CUbDqmp-g

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2015