From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2022 Essential Training

Getting to know the user interface - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2022 Essential Training

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Getting to know the user interface

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- [Instructor] As we begin our chapter on the Civil 3D User Interface let's start with a quick tour to learn the major components. Now Civil 3D is built on AutoCAD so it has many of the same basic components of AutoCAD, and then some. For example, it has this start tab where you can open, create new drawings, access recent drawings, even access your BIM 360 account and many other things. I'll go ahead and open a drawing. And now that we're in the drawing, we'll be able to talk about some of the other user interface components. Here at the top left corner you see the big blue C for Civil 3D. And if I click that it expands what's called the application menu. This area here is called the drawing area. And in this particular drawing, I have three view ports but all three of them together represent the drawing area. Down here at the bottom I've got the command line in the command line is kind of a chat window that you use to communicate back and forth with Civil 3D. At the top of the screen, I have the ribbon and the ribbon is where I'm going to launch most of the commands that I use in Civil 3D. On the left side of the screen I see the Toolspace, and you can see that the Toolspace is made up of multiple tabs, prospector, settings, survey, and toolbox. We'll talk in detail about the prospector tab in an upcoming video. Those are the main components of the Civil 3D User Interface but to finish the full list of components I'm going to call up a few kind of random tools. The first one is the Inquiry Tool. I'll go to the analyze tab of the ribbon and launch Inquiry Tool over here on the right. And the reason I brought this up is it's kind of its own user interface component. It's unique. With this tool you can query your drawing for information. Information about points, surfaces, alignments, and so on. These are all things you'll learn about in upcoming videos. Another kind of random user interface component is the Panorama. To see the Panorama I'll go to the home tab, expand here where it says palettes. And now click this icon for the event viewer. Now the Panorama can house a lot of different information. In this case, we're calling up the events information which are things that may happen in your drawing, errors and things like that that you may need to know about. You can see currently that my event viewer is blank but really what I'm talking about here is this Panorama window. And there's some unique behavior with the Panorama window. For example, I can collapse and expand it. I can control things like transparency and whether it's auto hidden, it's its own kind of palette. And it has some specific uses within Civil 3D. You'll learn more about it, just like some of the other things that I mentioned in upcoming videos. And then finally, we've got transparent commands. These are over on the right of my screen and these are a few unique toolbars that you'll only find in Civil 3D. In fact, I'm going to click this one and drag it out so that you can see the other toolbar that's kind of hidden beneath it. These are specific drafting commands that make use of some of the functionality in Civil 3D. So you've just learned the main parts of the Civil 3D User Interface. We'll dig a little deeper into each one of these in the upcoming videos.

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