hello and welcome to source card in this three-part video series Seth kohen will take you through the basics of civil 3D using a project-based approach essentially this three-part video series is for you if you are completely new to civil 3D and want to get started right from scratch in this three-part video series you will learn the basics of civil 3D while working on a road project if you want to learn with project-based approach that explains everything right from scratch then check the Civil 3D course on sourcecat by Seth Gohan the link to that course is in the description of the video and in the pin comment as well so with that let's get started foreign [Music] CAD in this three-part video series I will be introducing you to civil 3D these tutorial videos are for True beginners who have no knowledge of civil 3D however you should have some working knowledge of AutoCAD because civil 3D runs on the AutoCAD engine the synopsis for this report series will be as follows first we'll talk about the Civil 3D interface and how it leverages the auto kit interface we'll talk about settings and styles and how they are used to control everything of civil 3D they control the way it looks and they control when they get created we'll also delve into a little bit of project management so you can have an understanding of how to data reference and see civil 3D objects in other files similar to AutoCAD X referencing and we'll talk about alignments and profiles we'll get into chord modeling and all of that entails and then we'll plot roadway projects basically what we're going to do is we're going to create a road by the end of this tutorial from beginning to end that's how powerful civil 3D is first let's talk about the Civil 3D interface and how it relates to the auto kit interface so first of all just like AutoCAD you have workspaces so if I click on the bottom right here you'll see that you have the standard AutoCAD drafting annotation 3D modeling but then you have these additional workspaces such as civil 3D I'm in my own workspace which I recommend that you should do the second you start civil 3D that way you don't modify the existing one and you can always go back to it if you need to there's also this last one here called planning and Analysis so with civil 3D you get AutoCAD and you get map 3D pretty much full functionality which is really cool civil 3D of course leverages the AutoCAD ribbon as you can see up here you have ribbon tabs just like AutoCAD you have the Home tab the insert tab the annotate tab Etc but then you have panels on the bottom here and of course these are pretty much different than regular AutoCAD as you can see you do have the draw and modify panel just like you do in AutoCAD but they look a little bit different in fact some of these are specific to civil 3D type functionality such as creating a line by deflection angle or bearing and distance Etc one of the other things about civil 3D and the ribbon is that it is context sensitive you get some of that functionality with AutoCAD such as when you have a hatch object that you pick or when you go to a layout civil 3D leverages the contextual ribbon tremendously in other words if I select this alignment right here you'll notice that the ribbon becomes context sensitive and contains all of the tools you would expect to see for an alignment what's also really cool is it shows you the name of the object that you have selected it even tells you what that object is as you can see this is a loves bypass alignment if I press Escape here and select a surface now this is one of the Contours of this surface you'll see now the context ribbon changes differently because I have a surface selected and it has surface specific tools it also tells you this is a tin surface and this is the name of the tin surface again if you ever want to know what an object actually is simply select it and it'll tell you what it is these are alignment station and label groups the main interface into civil 3D is the tool space palette let me drag this out as you can see here all right so this is just a regular AutoCAD palette but it is civil 3D specific you will not see this in the regular AutoCAD engine I like to dock mine to the left and anchor it without Auto hide that way I can see my civil 3D objects at all times if you right click here like any AutoCAD palette you can anchor left and then if you hover over it you can turn auto hide off like so this way it stays open and you can see all the data within the drawing so the tool space is categorized into many different tabs we have the prospector tab the settings tab the survey Tab and the toolbox tab let's talk about the prospector tab for a second so the prospector tab has two sections you have the drawing section which is right here and you have the project management or data shortcut section which is right here so if I expand the drawing section this will show you everything that is inside your drawing now it may not be in this drawing in other words it may be data referenced into the drawing but it's inside the drawing never the the less so if I expand surfaces you'll see I have two objects in here what's great about the tool space prospector tab is the fact that you interact with it by right clicking so if you right click on this object and choose Zoom 2 it will Zoom directly to that object if let's say I don't see an object in the drawing such as this EG or existing ground surface and I want to see it or change it or do something about it I can right click and choose select now it looks like nothing is selected however it is selected because the ribbon updated up here to show you the surface specific tools this is a Surface date of reference and it's called EG so if I need to change this which I do in this case to a specific style to see it right now this style is set to no display one other thing to note about civil 3D is it does leverage the AutoCAD properties palette for the most part with a lot of the properties that you can change specific to civil 3D so for instance this is a civil 3D style drop down this is using a style called no display which is a quick little trick to shut something off without having to worry about what layer it's on Etc if I however change this to one that actually shows triangles you'll now see that this is now showing the triangles as well as the border of the surface if I simply change this back to underscore no display it shuts it off don't forget to press Escape it's still selected as you can see by the ribbon so the prospector tab is categorized into the different object types that you can have inside your drawing so for instance if I wanted to see what center lines I have in the drawing I can expand this and I have all these Center Line alignments inside the file one of the other things that's really cool about the prospector tab or the settings tab for that matter is that it does show you these nice little icons inside the prospector tab that tell you something so this icon on the bottom left part of the name that shows a little arrow is telling me it's a data reference from some other drawing if I click on the surfaces collection you'll see it's coming from this location here all right and that's the other cool thing about it this icon right here this orange triangle is telling you it's being used by something in the drawing so if I were to right click on that entity and try and delete it you'll notice there's no delete option because it's being used by something this is the quarter surface and it's being used by the alignments and profiles and everything else now that doesn't mean you can't delete it what you can do if you want to do that is simply select it and then what I would do is press delete on the keyboard or erase and it would delete that now I'm not going to do that because obviously this is my actual design so the prospector tab contains all of the entities inside your drawing and then this category right here let's minus this one is the project location these are the available data shortcuts that I can bring into this file to do so we would simply select it and drag it I already have it in here so I'll press Escape but that's how you bring it in it doesn't live in this file it simply is available for you to use for modeling to look at it in a profile view Etc and that's how this is categorized let's talk about the settings tab of the tool space the settings tab as the name implies is there for settings and styles there are three levels of settings in the world of civil 3D you have drawing settings feature settings and command settings the settings are all hierarchical and what I mean by that is drawing is at the top of the list then comes feature and then comes command and and they can all be overridden depending on the level that they're at so the drawing settings are simply here if you right click on the top part of the drawing name here this is the drawing settings the drawing settings contained as the name implies drawing specific settings so they start at the top of the list here so the settings start here and then we'll proliferate throughout the additional settings but you can override the settings above so the feature settings can override the drawing settings and the command settings can override both so as you can see here you define the coordinates you can do things for transformation you define what layers entities should go on when you create them you can Define the geometric abbreviations such as the beginning of an alignment such as the end of the alignment so PC PT Etc and of course you have these ambient settings which work for things like what decimal place do you want to see for elevations or for coordinates Etc notice this Arrow over here this is telling you it's being overridden somewhere down the line by the other settings it could be a feature setting or it could be a command setting so feature settings are specific to the feature or the object type in other words a surface or an alignment or a profile or a profile view so if I right click on the feature itself I can go to the feature settings notice how this looks just like the ambient settings except it has these additional categories specific to the feature so if I want to set the default style for a surface when I create it I would do it right here notice how this too is being overridden somewhere down the line by a command setting which we'll get into in a second here but as you can see you can change for instance let's say for a surface I want to see three decimal places well as soon as I do that notice how this toggles on and it tells you hey I'm overriding the drawing setting all right that's how this works let's cancel out of that then the last setting which overrides all settings is the command settings so if I expand down to the command these are the true commands for the surface type so if I typed in add surface Contours a add s-u-r-f this actually would then start the command here now of course you're not going to do that you're going to find the command that you pick in the interface because the commands are rather large so if I want to override a specific command from the feature setting or the drawing setting what I do is I right click on the command and go to the command settings here you'll notice there are some additional icons right here which are specific to the command so if I look at the surface creation here's where I can tell it what the default name template is but if I want to override this specific command style I can by simply clicking on it over here and choosing a different style to use to override the ones above you'll now notice this is now overriding the feature setting and that's kind of how this works let's press cancel here so as far as the Styles and other things that are used by civil 3D entities you want to understand them there are two types of styles you have object styles for instance this surface is using an object style called Contours major five minor one nothing magical happened I created that style so that style is there for me to use however if I want to see something different about the components within that object type for instance let's say I want to see this thing how it flows I have one here called company underscore arrows well what that does is it shuts off the Contours of the entity surface and turns on other things such as the surface arrows and the border right so this is a really nice option because it lets me see my Surface to make sure that everything is draining properly that's a really awesome feature of civil 3D is again this is a dynamic modeling system so the style is controlling how this entity gets displayed so if I change it back to Contours five and one it is now showing the Contours okay so that's an object style now a label style is the other type of style that is used by civil 3D so this labeling of these Contours is being controlled by this label line group here this surface Contour label group if I go to the properties palette these are the label styles that are being used proposed major and proposed minor okay and so this is how it's controlling the way this looks it's the same thing for any entity within civil 3D for instance this alignment it says PT station whatever and then I have these ticks and this major station and these minor stations these are label Styles because this is a group of labels you will see this is an alignment station label group okay however if I wanted to label let's say the surface elevation at a specific location I could select the surface go to the contextual ribbon and pick the spot elevations and then I'll just zoom in and click here this is the elevation at this location now of course again the cool thing about civil 3D is it's a dynamic modeling system if I move this label around you will see the elevation changes automatically if I copy regular AutoCAD copy command and if I copy this label around it will update to show the elevation of that location now because this is an individual label I can select it and this is just one label that I would be editing compared to this one here which is a group label because it's specific to the group of the alignment just like this one here is specific to the group of the labeling of the Contours if I wanted to change an object or label style you have to think about how you would do it it's not that hard it's organ very nicely so for instance let's say I wanted to change this surface style there are a couple ways to do it you could simply select it and then when you right click in space you get a context sensitive menu however if you wanted to know where that actual surface style is you simply expand the surface category and here are your surface Styles this shortcut right here is telling you it's being used somewhere in the drawing or with another setting somewhere else so I would simply right click on here and choose edit and this is the object style dialog box this will be different for an alignment for a profile per profile view Etc so as you can see I can turn on and off different components of the object itself for instance I could turn the triangles on for this one click OK and now I'm seeing the triangles if I undo that with the undo command it undoes it just like a regular AutoCAD command now label styles are also stored in the settings tab and you just have to think about how they work so I want to change this label style for this Contour so if I expand label Styles here's the Contour category and this was proposed minor so I'll go ahead and double click it I want to get rid of that decimal place because I don't need the additional decimal I'll click over here in the contents category and I'll click here and notice how it's showing your Precision of 0.1 so I'll simply click here and change this to that click the arrow click ok ok the great thing about civil 3D any label style using that will automatically update with that style that's the cool thing about civil 3D the entire engine is completely Dynamic if we go to the survey tab here we're not going to talk about this in great detail but I'll just drag this in here so this opens up a survey database if you deal with survey there's full-blown survey functionality in civil 3D if I drag this survey database entry in here you'll notice that what this autumn Mates is points Line work you name it can be completely automated in the survey tab with the survey tool space as you can see if I zoom in all this line work just got created automatically I have utility pose with descriptions automatically so civil 3D has full-blown survey functionality that could automate pretty much everything lastly here the toolbox is used for reporting on entities as well as miscellaneous tools that may be added with a service pack and so on for instance to export to a KML file you simply expand export KML you double click it and then you can go through the wizard here to export to KML which will open up your design in Google Earth which is fantastic functionality it allows you to see your job in the real world with real context this ends part one I look forward to seeing you in part two [Music]