Taking Advantage of AutoCAD's Annotative Objects in Civil 3D!

welcome my name is jeff bartles i'm an infrastructure technical specialist here at autodesk and i am joined today by my colleagues dana judge and jerry bartles who is now back from vacation this is our 10th installment i believe of the 30 minute workout series today we're going to be looking at how we can take advantage of autocad's annotative properties to create annotations within sybil 3d if you're unfamiliar with the 30 minute workout concept i'm sure you'll agree if you've ever taken a civil 3d training course before you know there's never enough time to talk about all of the features that that application has civil3d is built on top of autocad it's built on top of map and it includes a ton of functionality in its own right so there's never enough time during a typical class to cover all that information usually classes are focused on the need to know functionality what do you need to know in order to do your job those remaining features and workflows are the type of things that you just pick up over a lifetime using the application so we put together these 30 minute workouts as a way to demonstrate and walk through some of those lesser talked about tools to provide a resource to fill in some gaps and provide more value for those who have made an investment in autodesk applications couple ground rules many of the examples that we show are of an abstract nature and we do that on purpose so that we can focus solely on the function of the tool itself once you understand how a tool works you can then apply it in whatever situation works best for you these sessions are only 30 minutes long we hope by making it 30 minutes it makes it easy for you to get in and get out and get on with your day since we're only together for 30 minutes our goal is to always start on time and end on time because we value your time these sessions are recorded so if you have registered for the session you will get a follow-up that contains a download of the session so you can have the video stored locally on your server if you have questions during the session go ahead and put those into the q a pane dana and jerry will be chasing those down as we go in the event there are any questions that we don't get to during the session we will follow up with you so you will get your questions answered one more thing if you would like to have a one-on-one follow-up call with one of us please put that in the q a pane too we always appreciate talking to other users our agenda for today we are going to introduce autocad's annotative property in the event you haven't had a chance to explore that feature before we'll kind of get into that from an introductory level we'll talk about the various objects that can be annotative we'll look at how we can create and edit annotative objects we'll also talk about when may be a good idea to use an annotative object as opposed to a traditional civil 3d label since we're talking about the annotative property we'll look at some settings that control it and then i've got bonus content on there if we get to everything that i wanted to talk about today there's always things to talk about in the event we don't get to it we can just push that forward to another session as always this is going to be a powerpoint free zone we are going to be working live in the application for the duration of our time together today all right now that our housekeeping is taken care of i'm going to jump over to civil 3d and i'm going to try and find a good place to hide a interface item here on screen in the interesting full disclosure let me mention that i'm working in civil 3d 2021.1 having said that everything that i show you today will work regardless of the version of civil 3d that you may be using on screen i have some geometry that represents a single family home we'll say that this geometry was picked up via survey so this is just line work in fact if i hover i think these are polylines although they don't have to be polylines they could be feature lines or survey figures or something like that i would like to label this house as a single family home typically when we create a label in civil 3d that label is tied to data in this case i don't have any data i just want to create a text string to put a label on this to create generic labels in sybil 3d we do that by going to the annotate tab and in the labels and tables panel i'm going to expand add labels and i'll choose notes we label these generic objects with a note and i've got several note styles in here i'm just going to select this one called general notes and i'll click add and then i will click to place it on screen once the label has been added i can then select this i can go to edit label text and then i can edit this to read whatever i need there we go once i put my label on there let me we'll close this the labels in civil 3d are fantastic in that they will automatically scale if the scale of our drawing changes you can see as fast as i change this the size of that label updates i'm going to flip this to one inch equals 30 feet when the drawing scale is set to one inch equals 30 feet this label is now appropriately sized for a one inch equals 30 foot viewport let's test that i'm going to jump out to a layout and then here on the layout tab i'm going to create a rectangular viewport we'll pull this out and then i will select the viewport and we'll set this to one inch equals 30 feet i'll do a quick regen all to clean that up and then i'm going to create a copy of this viewport i'm horribly old-fashioned i just typed that in and i'll drag this over i will then select this viewport and we'll set this one to one inch equals 60 feet and i'll do another regen and we'll zoom in you can see that civil3d is doing exactly what it's supposed to this label is showing up in each view at the appropriate size however in the 60 scale view this text is a little bit big and it's not centered in there very well let me double click in this view and i will select the label if i click the grip i can kind of move this around but as i move things you can see that as i move the one while i could be maybe making the one view look better i could be making the other view look worse likewise maybe i'd like to rotate the 60 scale version independently and i just can't do that i can't do what i want here using a civil 3d label since this label is not tied to data it's simply a text string that i typed in maybe an autocad annotative object may be a better choice let's take a look at that i'm going to go to model and i'm going to select this label and we'll delete it the annotative property in autocad was introduced in 2008 so it's been around for a while it applies to multiple objects we're going to look at text first here on the annotate ribbon tab in the text panel i'm going to open up the text style dialog box from here you can see the text styles that are in this drawing you can see the ones that are annotative with the icon next to them to make a text style annotative all we have to do is click this toggle i'm going to turn it off for just a second and if we come over here we can see a height property this is the height i'd like my text to be notice that when i turn this on this changes to paper text height what this means is the dimensional values or the heights that i put in here represent the height i want this text to appear on the printed sheet that actually makes it very easy to create annotations i'm going to cancel out i haven't made any changes if we look at the top of the screen we can see my text style is current and it's annotative if i create a label using this text style it will look right here to determine the size such that when printed it'll be 0.1 tall to create that text i'm just going to use the mtext command and then i will type single family house i will then select this text and i'd like it to be centered might like this justification to be middle centered that looks good if i hover over this label notice that icon that shows me that the label is annotative and it is annotated to the scale let's jump out to our layout and take a look notice where the label shows up notice where it doesn't show up why doesn't it show up in the one to sixty viewport because it's not intended to show up in that viewport it is designed to show up at one to thirty so already this is doing something that i can't easily do with a civil 3d label without manipulating some layers let's say i'd like this label to show up at 1 to 60. i'm going to go back to model the way i can do that is by simply adding that scale to this annotation one way i can do that is by selecting the annotation and i can go to the properties palette right here i can see it's an annotative object and i can see the scale using this dialog box i can click add and i can select a new scale note that i can also use this dialog box to delete scales if i want to when i click ok this annotation now supports two scales if i hover over it now you can see the icon has changed i can see multiple icons that shows me it supports multiple scales currently it is sized for the 30 scale view if i select it though we'll see the 60 scale size here as well it's kind of ghosted in the background let's go back out to our layout notice where the label shows up now shows up in both views here's where it gets interesting if i double-click in the 1-60 view and i select this annotation notice that i can move this version independently of the other version can't do that with a civil 3d label in addition to just being able to move it i could rotate it i could select this and i could come over to the properties palette and i could change its rotation to 25. let's click the grip and i will position this a little bit closer there we go so i have one label that's displaying in two views appropriately sized and i have independent control over the location and the rotation and this is one label i can come in here we'll double click to edit it here and i can do this in either view or i could do it in model space we could say two story house you can see it's the same label in both cases so for this particular application maybe the autocad annotation would be a little bit more valuable than the civil 3d one i should also mention that these annotated objects are supported through an external reference just like the civil 3d labels are let's take this to another level maybe i would like to create a leader i'd like to identify that this sidewalk is concrete now i don't have any civil 3d data that i can tie to i just want to create a label that says concrete for that reason maybe an autocad annotation might be a wise choice in autocad our multileaders can be annotative here in the leaders panel i'm going to click to bring up the multi-leader style manager from here we can see the multi-leader styles that are in this drawing i can see the ones that are annotative if you'd like to create an annotative multi-leader style if you visit the leader structure tab you'll find that same annotative toggle here so if i turn this on every one of these sizes every one of these dimensional settings applies to how i want this leader to be sized on the printed page so it's the same as with the text let me close onto this i just want to show you that my current multi-leader style is annotative let's go ahead and put a label on this when i create the label it is going to be sized for the 30 scale view let's go to multi-leader and i'm going to place this nearest to here we'll call this concrete if i hover we can see that that's an annotated object and it is annotative to the current scale let's go back to layout notice where it shows up notice where it doesn't show up if i want that label to show up in this viewport i'm going to do the same thing all i have to do is add that scale to this object now we've already seen that i can add remove scales by selecting the annotation and i can come over to properties and i can do it here so that's one place i can do it let's look at another option i want this to be suitable for a one inch equals sixty foot viewport if i come down and open the scale list and set this to one inch equals sixty here in the annotate ribbon tab i can come up and click add current scale when i click add current scale it says okay add current scale to what i can select this object or multiple objects or i could type all if i want to to add that scale to all the objects let me press enter and we can see this one now supports 60 scale i'm going to go back to my layout tab here we can see it in both views let's double click just like with text i have independent control over the location of these leaders that's something i can't do with a civil 3d label one more thing let's go back to model since this is a multi-leader if i select the object i have the ability to add or remove leaders once again something i can't do with a civil 3d label style let's go back to layout and we can see that in both views let's go back to model space and we'll talk about some helpful settings if i select an annotation that supports multiple scales we can see kind of like the ghosted version there if you have an annotation that supports multiple scales like maybe five or six scales when you select it it could get a little bit busy on screen seeing all those variations i don't have to see all the variations there is a system variable called selection anno display if i choose that we can see the default value is set to 1 meaning it's turned on it's going to display all of the sizes if i set that to 0 if i click an object now you can see that it doesn't show me all of those extra versions this is how i typically work in a production let's put things back the way they were i'm going to right click and from the menu i'll choose repeat selection nano display i'll set that back to 1 and press enter another thing if you independently adjust the multiple scales of your annotation there may come a time where you'd like to bring them all back together again if i select a label now i happen to select the current one which is one to sixty you can see that's got multiple variations there if i'd like to bring these together i can select the one that i want and then i will come up and in the ribbon i'll choose sync scale positions the command is actually anno reset if i select that what it did was it pulled all the variations up to match the location of the current one now if i wanted to independently move these here in model space i did it through the viewport before but let's say i'd like to move that 30 scale one down if i just change this to 30 there's the 30 scale variation i can click even though i see that ghosted version there the grips apply to the current one and we've seen how we can turn off that ghosted version if we want to let's talk for a second about this icon it says show annotation objects always what this does is it allows your annotations to display regardless of the scale that we're using in model space we've seen that these annotations support 30 scale what if i flip this to 20. they still display even though they don't support that scale if i toggle this button off then model space is going to work just like those viewports it will only show the annotations that support the scale that i've selected so i can set this to 60. let's go ahead and turn this back on again so we can do that next i want to show you one of the most dangerous buttons in the interface we can argue over which one might be the most dangerous but this one would certainly rank up there add scales to annotated objects when the annotation scale changes currently this is turned off what does this do well let's say right now these annotations support 30 scale and they support 60. maybe i'd like them all maybe i've got a bunch of them in here and i'd like them all to support another scale we've seen some ways to add scales to objects the fastest way to do it let's say i want to make all of these suitable for a viewport that's one inch equals five feet just for the sake of argument a really fast way to assign those scales is to come down and turn this on and then when i make the scale adjustment here it will automatically assign my selected scale to all of my annotations now why is this dangerous because people forget to turn it off if you forget to turn that off each time you go through and select a scale in this list if your annotations don't support that scale already they will and then you may have six seven eight versions there that you don't need so if you use this tool turn it off when you're finished having said that i've got annotations here that now support one inch equals five feet and i don't need that so how can i remove those scales i'm going to choose the scale that i no longer want and if i come up to the annotation scaling panel notice there's an option here called delete current scale it says delete current scale from what i will type all and press enter a couple times to remove those scales okay let's go back to the layout and i'm going to select both of these viewports and i'm going to place these on a layer that is turned off just to hide those from screen let's create a new viewport maybe i would like to create a detail of this stairs area i'm going to create that as a circle just to mix things up here a little bit and then i will go to the layout tab and i would like to create a viewport from an object i'll choose object and select this and then i will select that viewport and let's set the scale of this to one inch equals 10 feet i'll double click to jump in there and then i'll kind of center this on screen notice what we see in that view notice what we don't see we don't see any of these annotations why because they don't support one inch equals 10 feet maybe for this detail i'd like to add some dimensions dimensions support the annotative property i'm going to jump to model space here in my dimensions panel i can see my current dimension style autodesk and i can see it's annotative based on the icon if i bring up the dimension style dialog box we can see the dimension styles in this drawing and we can easily tell which ones are annotative if you would like to create an annotative dimension style in the dialog box if you go to the fit tab you'll find that same annotative toggle right here if i turn that on any of the dimensional items any of the sizes that i assign here are the sizes that i want these dimensions to appear on the printed sheet works the same as the text and the multi-leaders let me hit cancel i'll close out of this so i'm going to be dimensioning this drawing using my current dimension style which is annotative let's zoom in if i create my dimensions right now it's going to look right down here and they're going to be suitable for one inch equals 5 feet that's not what i want i want these for the one inch equals 10 foot viewport once i set that i'm just going to create a couple of linear dimensions let me turn my running object snaps on we'll create one here i'll just hit my spacebar to go right back into that command and we'll pull out another one and then i'll create another one here these dimensions are annotative they're annotative to one scale currently if i jump to my layout notice where those dimensions show notice where they don't show just for a second i just want you to realize everything i've been creating so far is on one layer okay not how you would typically work but notice how the annotative property kind of makes some of these things layer independent let's talk about another annotative possibility here in the civil 3d platform using autocad hatch can be annotative maybe i'd like to hatch this porch area i'm going to go to the home tab and if i launch the hatch command hatch also includes an annotative toggle if i turn this on the hatch that i create will be appropriately sized or annotated to the scale 1 inch equals 10 feet so i'd like to hatch the porch here i'm going to use this ansi 36 it's going to have kind of a light yellow background with gray line work that looks good and then i can kind of dial down the scale here just to tighten up those lines a little bit once i get that the way i like it i can say close if i hover over this hatch you can see that annotative icon so it is suitable for one inch equals 10 feet if we go to the layout notice where that hatch shows up notice where it doesn't show up if i'd like this hatch to show up in another viewport all i have to do is add the scale to that hatch pattern let's go to model space i will select my hatch and we've seen a few ways to do this i'm going to do it from the properties palette again i'll come over here and i will click the annotative scale we'll say add and i'm going to add 30 scale to this so now it supports two scales immediately after doing that i'm going to go to the layout tab and you can see that hatch shows up in both views and it is sized the same regardless of the scale of the viewport so if you've ever hatched things before and you have a legend that represents what all your hatch patterns are sometimes that legend has to be scale dependent because as your geometry gets larger or farther away hatch patterns look larger or smaller using annotative hatch the hatch will always be appropriately sized regardless of the viewport where it's placed and all of these items they're honored through an external reference fantastic we're just shy of five minutes here to the top of the hour let's look at some bonus content and this might be a little controversial okay i'm going to create a copy of this viewport let's copy this over now what scale does this viewport have well same one as the other if i select it i can see it's one inch equals 10 feet what if i'd like to create a custom scale if i open the menu i can see the scale that's being used i'm going to come down and choose custom i used to think that the annotative objects their display was controlled by the scale of the viewport it's not the display of these objects is controlled by the name that's assigned to the scale of a viewport let me show you what i mean if i choose 1 to 10 that's the current scale and i choose edit we can see there's the name of that scale and then down here we can see the scale factor 1 inch equals 10 feet let's click cancel maybe i'd like to create a new scale i'll click add and then i'm going to call this one inch equals 10 feet special and i'm going to set this to the same scale one inch equals 10. i will then click ok what happens if i assign this new scale to my viewport notice that all of my annotations disappear even though these are the same scale the annotative objects are looking at the name of that scale i show you that just so that you're aware of it i noticed this first when i was working in production because i had scale factors that were one inch equals 30 feet but then i had a drawing where the scale factor was one inch equals 30 feet like that and i was wondering why my annotated objects coming from an external reference weren't displaying like they were supposed to it's because it was looking at the name and not at the scale factor knowing that could we take advantage of this we could if i go to model space maybe i could select the objects that i'd like to appear in that special viewport i am going to choose one inch equals 10 special and then we'll go to the annotate tab and i'm going to choose add current scale maybe i would like this object maybe i would like these two dimensions and i'd like this object to display in that viewport when i press enter i can see those are supported let me click this one and i'm going to pull it up maybe we'll put it here i can click this call out and i can pull this over this is one of the things i really like about the independent control over these call outs i can even move the arrow heads if i want to when i jump back out to my layout same label same call out being displayed at the appropriate size in three different viewports with full independent control if i was to get in here and change this text maybe i just want c-o-n-c period you can see it's the same label in all cases here i've got the same label appearing at the appropriate size in multiple viewports independent location and rotation here i've got hatch that's displaying in multiple viewports at the appropriate size regardless of the scale and then here i've got two viewports at the same scale and i'm still able to use the annotative property to control their display do you want to build your empire on this maybe not maybe not but i show it to you just so that you're aware of what the annotative objects are looking at they're looking at the name and not the scale factor with that i'm going to jump back over to my powerpoint slides here today we talked about the autocad annotative property in the event you haven't seen it before i strongly encourage you to get in and explore that a little bit we talked about the objects that can be annotative that's text multi-line text multi-leaders dimensions hatch and blocks support that annotative property so if you're wanting to explore something else that's another good thing to look at we looked at how we could create annotated objects and then edit them independent control we could take and assign viewports for them so that they know which viewports to display in when to use annotative objects let me say this up front i'm not encouraging you to use annotated objects for every label if you're creating a label ask yourself can i tie the text in this label to civil 3d data if you can then use a civil 3d label that's the way to go if you're creating a label that's just going to be a text string that you type in now you've seen two ways you can do it you can do it with civil 3d or you can use an autocad annotative object you can make the decision for yourself which one is best for you we talked about some helpful settings today we looked at how we could reset the label location we looked at how we could turn off those ghosted settings if we want to we also looked at the most dangerous button in the interface so be careful with that one if you do use that make sure and turn it off when you're done and then for the bonus content which we don't get a chance to get to very often we did see how the annotative objects we can control their display within viewports even if they have the same scale all right i am going to check with jerry and dana now and see if they jump in and just identify if there are any questions that have gone unanswered at this point and that's it okay fantastic thank you so much everybody for coming we really appreciate your time everybody's going to be getting a follow up with a link where they can download the video from today's session if you have any feedback our email information is going to be on there so we appreciate feedback good or bad because we want to make sure that the content that we provide to you is something that can be of value on behalf of dana and jerry i just want to say thank you again for coming and we look forward to seeing you guys again in a couple weeks see ya you

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 10,730

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, annotative, annotations, label, how to, hatch, multileader, dimensions, property, text

Id: CXEx71djTC8

Length: 27min 35sec (1655 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020