How to create a portable GIS data layer (.Layer file) in Civil 3D.

hi everybody just a short video today actually the first probably in a series of maybe four that we're gonna take a look at this is going to show us some different ways that we can be maybe more productive when working with geospatial data so in other words what I'd like to do is bring some shape file or other geospatial information into my model here currently I'm just looking at an aerial photo of a subdivision in an area that I'm interested in and I've got some parcel data and I'd like to look at some ways that I could maybe improve the process of bringing that data in so that it's in a more complete state than what I would get otherwise so let me explain first let's bring in some some shape information I'm gonna go ahead and open up a folder here and here is my shape data that contains my parcels so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that because it can exist within my model I'm gonna drag and drop the parcels law to manically be brought in transform to the appropriate projection if need be and then displayed on my screen now once they're displayed on the screen they are brought in and a default style or per display representation that I can go in and modify if need be so I'm gonna go ahead and turn on what's called the map task pane or the command is M map W space to turn that on we'll turn that on and we can see our geospatial data represented here now if I'd like to change this and in most cases you probably will I can go through and tweak this by double-clicking on the style and then looking at the different aspects of it we're just gonna focus on not necessarily scale or range or anything like that today we're just going to focus on the style itself we've got two main components we can control how it's going to be displayed we can also control whether or not it's kind of negation associated with it so if I'd like to change how it's displayed I'm gonna double pick on the green box here that will expand that and then we can go through and make some changes so right now it's got a black border outline with a green fill so the black border outline I'll maybe come down and set that to blue and maybe we'll make that a blue dashed line hidden line will come down and he set that to hidden x2 notices we make changes it's automatically showing it to us in the preview in the window will come down to the fill I'm going to set that to color blue as well and then what I'm going to do is in the transparency window here I'm just going to click and hold with my left mouse button and then we'll drag to the right to get the appropriate transparency that we're looking for we'll click on apply and it will apply that I can see what it looks like we'd like to tweak it maybe a little bit more increase the transparency we'll click on apply we'll go ahead and close we zoom up and take a look at that we can see our parcel information now the dashed line isn't necessarily coming out as well as what I'd like I'd maybe like to make that stand out a little bit more what we can do is we're not limited to just one border and one fill we can add more to adjust the representation to meet the specific needs of what we're trying to show so let's come back we'll double pick on that style what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a additional border layer to our style it's going to put that down at the bottom here so if I scroll down you can see there's a new one that was created let's go ahead and make that color white so go ahead and select that white and let's give that a width of maybe three we can see the display in the window hasn't updated at all from what we were looking at before and the reason is because there's a draw order associated with these so the fact that my wide lines on the bottom we can't see it actually probably be hanging out the top here a little bit but it's being cropped by the window so I'm gonna select this we'll move it up one now we can see that let's go ahead and grab this I'm gonna adjust my transparency here a little bit more try and lighten that up just a touch maybe even grant a little lighter fill that that's a little a little too dark for me there we go let's go ahead and apply that okay much better it's a more of a subtle subtle turn parents emails me drop that down just a touch will say okay all right I'll go ahead and close out of that so I've got a - blue line with a a white border around it all right now you'll notice as i zoom in the dashes and the white border don't get any change representation with my scale so no matter what my display representation is those lines remain exactly the same width that may create the effect that we're interested in when we're working in our model but it may also create a situation where if we back up too much the the border or the display representation doesn't quite look the way that we would like it to or the way that folks would expect so depending on how we would like to use it we also have some controls that we can adjust so that the the representation isn't based on our display but instead but based on our map so let's come back to the style editor here take a quick look at that if I expand that that information is up here at the top so we're gonna go ahead and set it to map now because my models and feet I'm gonna go ahead and set my my information or my units here from set of millimeters we'll set that to feet we'll start at the dash line here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set the the width there might be some predefined ones in here that will select or I can I can add my own so we'll go ahead and select in the box here I'm gonna set my width the six that's gonna be the width of my dash and then I'm gonna click on advanced here I'd like it to repeat every eight feet or every eight units we'll go ahead and click on apply that updates my my - the other thing that I'm going to do is we'll take a look at the white line here let's click and click on the map we'll click on close let's zoom in and see what that white lines doing all right my my dashes are working but I'm my width of my white line is not working the way that I'd like so let's come back double pick on that we'll come back to the white line for the border we'll come down and the the width on that guy we'll take and set that now to three now sometimes when we set these and it's it's the map unit is set to feet the preview I've noticed doesn't always display exactly the way that we would expect but that's alright if we click on apply it should still update on the screen correctly and now you'll notice that I have essentially the same display representation we had before however now my line work and that is consistent with the geometry and that is a if i zoom in it actually gets wider alright so that as I back up you know it would operate more like what I would expect it to on a map if we were closer or further away alright so pretty easy to do last thing I'd like to do is I'd like to show that we could add a feature label to this or some annotation so using the same information here rather than having numbers getting bigger or smaller we'll just use map as well I'm gonna set this to feet add a label I've got an attribute in a GIS attribute that is in my geospatial data here that we will instead of using static text I'm gonna set it to area said that is the area of this particular parcel we're gonna set it maybe to have a unit height of 4 feet I could go through and I can underline bold over score number of different things we'll just keep it simple for right now I will however change the color maybe to be yellow so it stands out a little bit better against the darker background let's go ahead and we'll click on apply we'll say close and I'm gonna close this box now and as we we come in here and zoom up and take a look at these we can see that the area for that particular parcel is displayed in the parcel itself and as we look at that if we pan and zoom the numbers don't don't move they don't appear disappear they act more like what we would expect em text to act all right now I've gone through we could argue and spent you know a few minutes adding information to this if I'd like to use this same data in another file what I could do rather than go through and having to reset what was my line width what does I use for spacing how did I get it to come out looking like this what we can do we can save a data layer if you will from our map task I can right-click on this and we're gonna go ahead and our tool for today is going to be save layer so now that I've set up my representation the way that I would like it if I would like to reuse this or have other folks reuse it and come up with the same display representation we can save that layer I'm gonna put it in my Tuesday folder here and we'll call it Tuesday we'll call it parcels we'll say save alright we've saved that information let's go ahead and do this I'm going to close out of this file we're not going to save any of our changes we're then going to open that file up again let's say that I'm somebody else in a different part of the office I've got a file that I would say in projection maybe a different one utilizing the same area I would like to now bring in my parcel data and have it represented using my standards which maybe we've established in the last file instead of bringing in a shapefile like we did before and then setting all of those particular values what I could do is we could come in go to my desktop here we'll grab Tuesday we'll grab our Tuesday parcels data layer if you will I'm gonna click and hold on that drag it into my model when I let go it automatically adds that information we'll zoom up and take a look at that we see that it's already got my settings set for the border width for my white line the dash line and then also my area all right so two quick things first I'm sure a lot of folks are looking at the area and say look I really don't need areas to ten decimal places I'm gonna show you a way that we can tweak that in the next video however the other thing that I would mention is from a data layer or our tool for today is if we're using a lot of geospatial files and we find that when we bring those in we're doing some formatting to control its display representation on the screen we can control that very quickly by capturing that in a data layer through our map task pane such as we can drag and drop it in any other model it will automatically project on the fly and give us that representation without having to go through and reinvent the wheel a second time so hopefully this is helpful look for to talk to you again in the next video where we will look at how to adjust our annotation for our areas such that they are not to ten decimal places see ya you

Channel: Jerry Bartels

Views: 7,617

Keywords: Free, Training, Tutorial, How to, How do, akn_include, bartels, Autodesk, engineering, drafting, CAD, GIS, Geospatial, ESRI, Mapping, .shp

Id: b2nbBpZlMvI

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017