From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2022 Essential Training

Understand objects and styles - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2022 Essential Training

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Understand objects and styles

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- [Instructor] The dynamic environment of civil 3D is all about relationships. Let's begin our understanding of this by studying the relationship between Objects and Styles. Now, if you remember, from earlier in last chapter we talked about the fact that civil 3D is built on AutoCAD. So it contains lines, arcs and circles. But because of the civil 3D part, there are special objects like alignments pipes, corridors, and surfaces. Let me show you where those are in the drawing. The white object here is an Alignment and you can see when I click on it, it brings up a Contextual Alignment tab. And if I were to launch the Properties command, you would see that this is an Alignment Object. So it's not a standard AutoCAD line, arc, or circle, it's an alignment object, unique to civil 3D. And as I mentioned, we've got pipes. We've got a pipe here. We've got surfaces represented by the contours here. We've got corridors represented by this magenta framework which builds out our road design and many many other types of objects. Now the appearance and behavior of these objects is controlled by Styles. Within a civil 3D drawing, there can be many variations of a style that controls a given object. For example, I'm going to click this surface object, and let's just take a look at it in 3D, so you can see that this is in fact one single object. I'll just simply select one of the contours, right-click and pick Object Viewer. We default to 2D view in Object Viewer, but if I click this and rotate it, you'll see that I'm able to view the three-dimensional aspects of this object. Even though what we see appears to be individual contours in the drawing, actually is one single object called a surface object. And as I mentioned, that object is controlled by a style. The fact that we see contours is a function of the style that's currently assigned to this object. Going to click the surface, right-click and bring up the Properties command. And I'll slide this over to the side so that we can see what happens when we change the assignment of the Style. So what I'm going to do is take the surface and assign a different style to it. Right now, the style's called C Existing Contours one foot. Let's change this to Elevation Banding 2D. And you can see that the appearance of the surface changes dramatically. Let's change it again to Contours and Triangles. And once again, it changes dramatically. Now, something a little more practical, let's say we want to see design contours for the surface. I'll change it to Contours one foot and five foot design. And we can see that the contours display in certain colors, and that's because the Style is controlling what layers those contours appear on. But let's say these aren't designed contours, they're existing contours. So I'll change that to Contours one foot and five foot Background. And again, we see the colors change again but more importantly, what's happening is that these contours are appearing on different layers. Another way I can affect this object or any other objects in the drawing is by actually editing the Style. Now in this drawing, I only have one surface. But if I had two or five or 20 and they all had this style applied to them, they would all change if I made an edit to that style. So let's make a change to this style and see what happens. With the surface selected, I'll go up here to surface properties and pick Edit Surface Style. I'll go to the Display tab, and I'm just going to make a simple change. Going to change the color of the major contour to something that's going to be obvious I'll change it to red. I'll click Okay, and I'll click Okay, again. And I immediately see the change to the contour. Now because I had it selected, the color seemed a bit off, but you can see that when I press the Escape key and clear the selection that the contours do appear in red. So what I just did is different than the first few changes that I made. I didn't change what style was assigned to the surface, I actually edited the style that was currently assigned. And if there had been more surfaces in the drawing, they all would have changed to match the change that I just made to the style. So each object in civil 3D, contains certain information. Like the elevations in the surface we were just looking at. And with Styles, you can quickly change, how that information is conveyed to the people looking at it. Styles also make it possible to predefine the graphical standards that make your civil 3D drawing look the way it's supposed to. A Surface Style, for example, can establish that the contours are displayed on the correct layer and at the correct interval. And this same type of establishing graphical standards can happen with every single style in your civil 3D drawing. And those can be stored in a template, establishing an overall company standard, for how your drawings are handled graphically. So that's how Objects and Styles work together in civil 3D to make your life easier.

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