today I'm going to walk you through the steps needed to import your typical survey file with the goal of using those points to build a civil 3D surface if you're completely new to all AutoCAD products you might want to step back from this tutorial and start with some basic AutoCAD tutorials so here I've got a basic civil 3D drawing a blank drawing started with the Civil 3D template you definitely want to be sure that you've started with a civil 3D template if the drawing came from AutoCAD you're not going to have any of the Civil 3D styles that you need to correctly represent your objects a quick check of that is to just go to the settings tab on your tool space if you don't see this tool space palet on the left side of your screen it can be toggled on and off on the Home tab of the ribbon and there's a button right here the first button is for Tool space and that toggles it on and off now if you don't see any particular tab of the tool space there are toggles for those as well right next to the tool space button so if you go to the settings tab and you find your way into something like surface surface Styles the fact that I see all these surface Styles means that I did start with a civil 3D template If instead I only saw one style and it was called standard that's a good indication that I'm not working with a civil 3D template and I probably want to figure that out before I proceed so back to this blank drawing and what we want to do is we want to insert points that are surveyor gave us uh in a text file so to import points we're going to go to the insert tab on the ribbon import panel and we're going to say points from file we're going to navigate to our file and here it is now it's going to be important that you know the format your file came in we can usually tell by looking in the text file itself or alternatively it's information you would need from who did the survey so let's take a look at our file and see if we can figure out what it is all right so here's our file it's definitely comma delimited and you can see that the description is last and I'm going to guess that this is p n e z d for Point number northing easting elevation and description comma delimited so then I'll look through the specify Point file format section and there's P Nez D comma Del limited gives me a little sample of what my points are going to be imported as and that looks correct to me Point number norn easting elevation and description and while we're importing these I'm also going to add them to a point group we'll talk more about Point groups as we proceed uh and you'll see the importance of that A good rule of thumb when you're adding to a point group is to create a point group that corresponds with the name of the imported file we might just use the date of the survey 10 4 16 do a zoom extense and there's my points so we'll talk a little bit about why the points look the way they do why some of the points imported with symbols as trees and a little bit about how to manage these points through Point groups so if we look you can see that any point with a description of tree imported with a tree symbol and if we look at the properties of any of these points just the standard AutoCAD properties you'll see that on these sort of default points in the properties you'll see a style set to default and a point label style set to default on the tree point we see that the style is set to tree and that's the marker and the point label style is set to point number elevation and description you can think of the default settings kind of like you can think of by layer when it comes to the color of an object default means it's deferring to some other location for its settings as far as the marker and the label go the tree has hard-coded values for both the style and the point label style those hard-coded values came from the description key set if I go to the settings tab and go down under points and then description key sets the default civil 3D template has a description key set called civil 3D and if I right click on that and say edit keys I'll see there are just three keys in use here and one of them right here is what is applying those styles to the tree upon import what it does is it matches the code here with the Des description of the incoming points so you can see any code that starts with tr any description that starts with tr will have the tree Point style and the point number elevation and description label style applied to it just note that the code here is case sensitive and the star is a wild card so by TR star anything that starts with tr is going to be considered a tree we might want to take that into consideration when we might have points with a description of say track or train because the program is going to interpret those as trees a safer description key might be tree star and maybe we can have that anywhere in the description so we put another asterisk before the code and now if it finds tree anywhere in the description it's going to apply these styles to that point now these description keys are only applied when points are imported created or if you manually run the description Keys again so let's say I want to keep the tree symbol but I didn't want to use this point label Style I'll just uncheck the point label style so going back to these standard points with the default Styles in their properties where do they get their settings they come from the point group and you'll see in the properties of this point a little farther down that the primary Point group is 10416 so I'll go back to my prospector tab of toolspace go to point groups look at 10416 so this point group has properties if you right click go to properties and on the information tab here's the name name and these are the two Styles in use for this if I were to change the point label style for this point group to Elevation only I'll see all the points update except for the points that are tree labeled now points can belong to more than one point group and typically they do you see I've got another Point group here called All Points and as you can guess that contains all my points now if I go to All Points properties you can see that the point label style is none so they would show no labels now why do these points this point for instance why does it show the settings of 10416 Over All Points it's because the order in which these Point groups appear actually controls the display of the points if I right click on point groups and go to properties you can control the order of these Point groups if I move all points to the top now all points is controlling these points that are set to default we can use that to our advantage with the point group that I like to create that'll hide all the points points so I'll make another Point Group by right clicking on point groups say new I'll call this point group underscore no display give it Point style of none label style of none on the include tab I'll say that this point group includes all points now you can see that this point group wipes out all the points they're still in the drawing but I can't see them with the exception of the tree points and that's because the tree points again have hardcoded values for the style and the point label style however if I really want this point group no display to override the trees as well I can go back into the properties of no display and on the overrides tab I can say that I want this point group to even override hardcoded values in points by checking style and point label style then I just use the ordering of my point groups to control how I want to see my points the purpose of the no display Point group can be seen if we look for some points we might use for break lines to see those points I'm going to need to turn descriptions back on and you'll see that I have some Ridge points in the next exercise we'll build a surface out of these points and we'll need a brake line along the ridge so I'll make a new Point group to display just the ridge points on the include tab I'll say I want to include points with raw descriptions matching Ridge and then I can check on the points list to make sure that it's working and it is you see a slight change because I used a different point label style but what I'm really after is seeing just the ridge points just to clarify what's going on in my drawing so the way that I'll use this no display Point group is to move it just below Ridge so if I take take no display put it just below Ridge what's going to happen is for every point in my drawing it's going to go down through this list and find the first point group that it belongs to for the ridge points that's going to be the Ridge Point group and they're going to use those settings for every other point in this drawing they're not going to belong to the ridge group so they're going to find themselves in the no display Point group and they're going to disappear so that no display Point group is really useful to filter your points to show only certain descriptions Point range elevations anything that you can assign on the include tab in the next exercise we'll take these points and use them to build a civil 3D surface