From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

Apply alignment styles - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

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Apply alignment styles

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- [LECTURER] In this chapter, we're going to study the use of styles and labels to handle the display and annotation of alignments. Let's start with alignment styles. Like nearly all things in civil 3D, alignments are objects, and the way that they look, what layers they appear on, what you see versus not see, it's all controlled with styles. To demonstrate this, let's apply some different styles to the alignments in this drawing. Let's first take a look at this Emerson road alignment. This is our existing road that runs along the North side of our project. I'll select Emerson road and launch the properties command up here in the ribbon. Where it says style, I'm going to change that style to see road center E, the E standing for existing. And we can see that the alignment immediately takes on a different appearance. I'll press my escape key to clear the selection and see that appearance a little more clearly. So we can see the line type that's been applied as well as the kind of light brown color that's been applied. If we select this alignment and go up to the ribbon and under alignment properties, select edit alignment style, we can get a clue as to what's unique about this style. You can see on the display tab that it's displaying the lines, curves, spirals, all on this C road center E layer. So this is all about what layer the alignment entities appear on. Now let's take a look at Jordan court, which is going to be a proposed alignment. We'll select the alignment and then change the style to C road center, no E this time. I'll press escape to clear the selection and you can see that it's a darker red color. But more importantly, if I look inside the style, by going up here again to the ribbon and picking edit alignment style, you'll see that the layering is different. These entities are displaying on C road center. And if you know anything about AutoCAD, you know that that can mean that they plot differently and that they're organized differently within the drawing. Layering is very important in the world of AutoCAD. Now let's take a look at these curves here and make another style change. I'll select the Jordan court alignment once again, and this time I'll pick C road center with markers. And if you zoom in a little more closely, you'll see that there are markers at the PC point of reverse curvature and PT of the curves. And if we come down here to this curve, we'll see the tangent markers, as well as the PI marker. That's all part of the style. So not only can we control what layer the alignment appears on, we can literally control what components you see and what you don't see. Let's take a look inside of this style. On the display tab, we noticed that line extensions are visible. And if we go to the markers tab, we see that there are certain markers applied at the point of intersection and certain curve points. Let's keep working. I'll press escape to clear the selection of Jordan court. And this time, we'll take a look at the Madison Lane alignment. Let's say that we're not quite finished with designing Madison Lane and we want to apply a style that we call layout, which maybe shows us some things that will be helpful to us as we're laying out the alignment. Here's a marker that shows the direction of the stationing, some different types of markers that show us the tangents and the PI points and the curve locations. Notice they have different colors and there are different colors for the tangents versus the curve. And these colors are all about the appearance on screen versus how they're going to plot in a final document. So if we look at the Jordan court alignment, we can see that it's got a certain center line line-type applied to it, and it's on a layer that's going to be appropriate for plotting. Whereas Madison Lane is not at all about plotting, it's just about how it appears on screen. Let's look at these two alignments here. They run the full length of Jordan court and parallel to it. These represent the right of way lines on either side of Jordan court. And they are actually alignments, they can be created as offsets of the center line alignment. For these alignments, we'll change the style to C road our way. And that's going to display those alignments on the right of way layer with no markers or anything like that. And then we've also got some edges of pavement. Again, these can be created as offsets of the center line alignments. I'm going to just select all of those. Notice that the arc alignments are separate from the rest of the alignments. And we'll change the style of these alignments to C road edge. And they'll take on a slightly different appearance. The entities in those alignments are appearing on the appropriate layer for the edge of a road. So as you can see, styles are a very powerful way to control what an alignment looks like and what components are visible in that alignment. And they also serve a very important role in driving the graphical standards for our drawings, because ultimately these drawings are going to be used to make PDFs or print onto paper, or in some way become official documents for this project.

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