From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2019 Essential Training

What is the point? Styles - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2019 Essential Training

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What is the point? Styles

- [Instructor] Working with Civil 3D and establishing existing conditions really starts with understanding how Civil 3D handles points. Really, working with points in Civil 3D requires us to step back and go back to geometry, and think about what a point really is. One definition of a point is that they're zero dimensional. They don't have volume, area, length, or really any other dimensional analog. So if they're zero dimensional, how do you define a point, or show a coordinate in space? How do you visually display it? Well, points in Survey and Civil usually fall into two different categories. You have points that identify features, features such as curb lines, buildings, and so forth. And then you have points identifying objects, trees, mailboxes, fire hydrants, and the like. So for the points that identify objects, the coordinate or the point really should resemble or symbolize the object. Whereas the points that identify the features, they're not as crucial for having an identifier that is special. So since we're talking about how to display something visually in Civil 3D, we're talking about styles. A point style controls the look and feel of the coordinate marker. Let's go in and create points. We're going to open up from within our exercise files, Chapter 3, our point styles drawing. In our point styles drawing, we simply have a line drawn that we will add or create points on each end. So from the home ribbon, create ground data panel, we're going to choose points, and I'm going to just choose the point creation tools. This opens up a toolbar, and that provides us everything that we saw in this dropdown, but also gives us the ability to change command settings. So we're starting to see those command settings come to the fore again. Command settings such as what is the default layer, default styles, as well as point creation controls. So notice that within the point creation, I have said to not prompt me for a description, create the point with a default description of fire hydrant. If we change this to manual, it will prompt me for a description for that point, every single point I create. Same thing with elevation, I have chosen not to be prompted for the elevations, and there will be a default elevation when I create the point. So we're just going to choose to manually create a point here and I'm going to add a point using my object snaps at each end. Now as we add these points, notice we're really working with two different types of visual data. The point itself, as well as the label. So if we select this Civil 3D object, notice our contextual ribbon opens up and we choose properties, notice it will provide information to us. COGO Point, then it will provide or tell us the style, and we can set that style to whatever style we want. So we're going to come and choose V-util-water-hydrant and notice now the coordinate changes the style. But the label still looks the same, so whenever we're working with coordinate definition, whether it's a surface spot elevation, or in this case an actual point object, we're always going to be dealing with two styles. One for the actual coordinate, and then notice here another style for the label. So we're just going to change that style to just description. And notice now just the description is shown. And so this really gives a lot of control because now we can have fewer styles with more different looks by combining the two different styles together. You notice this point also has some grips. The grip toward the middle, or the actual coordinate itself, gives us the ability to move the point or even rotate the marker. The marker is the style used visually for the coordinate. So we're going to rotate that marker. We can even move the label. Notice the second grip here is the label. So we can move the label, we can also choose to, notice that we can rotate the label. Now, since we moved the label, we're going to just choose to reset that label back. Reset all, and everything gets set back to the way it was. So there's a lot of different controls floating over the grips of points as well. We also see that within our points, we have controls with our style and not just the style of the marker, but also the style of the label.

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