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Civil 3D Tips, Tricks, and Unnatural Acts: AU 2023 Edition

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Description

This session will be dedicated entirely to productivity techniques that will help improve your daily operations when working with Civil 3D software. These tips include automating regular tasks, using standard functions in new ways, exploring underutilized features, and even exploiting a handful of undocumented commands. We'll present the information using a real-world problem-solving context, rather than simply going feature by feature, so you can fully appreciate the "why" in addition to the "how." Come join us for this 90-minute session as we show you numerous ways to help you get the most from your Civil 3D investment.

Key Learnings

  • Learn how to automate several tasks.
  • Learn how to make more use of underused features.
  • Learn how to use several standard functions in new ways.
  • Discover several useful undocumented commands.

Speakers

  • Jerry Bartels
    Jerry is a Technical Sales Manager with Autodesk. For more than 30 years, Jerry has worked in all areas of civil engineering, surveying, and mapping. At Autodesk, Jerry leads a talented team of Territory Technical Solution Executives, helping customers accomplish their business objectives, address their business issues, and solve business problems.
  • Alan Gilbert
    Alan Gilbert is a Technical Solutions Executive supporting several Autodesk Named Accounts in the AEC space. In 2009, Alan joined Autodesk from Bentley Systems where he worked for eight years. For the first six years at Bentley, he worked as a civil support engineer, performed services for the civil group (training, consulting, and implementations), and also did technical pre-sales. During the last two years, Alan managed Bentley's civil and geospatial technical support team. Prior to Bentley, Alan worked for a municipal utility company in Alabama. There he worked as a water and natural gas distribution engineer. Alan is registered as a Professional Engineer and Professional Land Surveyor in Alabama. Alan is a co-contributor on the Civil Immersion Blog http://civilimmersion.typepad.com/ where he and his colleagues provide useful tips and tricks for the infrastructure product line at Autodesk.
  • Jeff Bartels
    For more than 25 years, Jeff has worked in the civil infrastructure industry. As a CAD Manager, he was one of the early adopters of Civil 3D, migrating his firm to a BIM methodology in 2008. He is also an award-winning trainer, helping thousands of users implement Autodesk's civil infrastructure applications worldwide. Jeff has worked with many DOT, Midmarket, and Territory customers in his ten years at Autodesk. He also contributes to a blog called Civil Immersion https://civilimmersion.typepad.com, where he regularly posts how-to videos to help customers take advantage of Autodesk's civil infrastructure applications.
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Transcript

JERRY BARTELS: Hi, everybody. On behalf of Alan Gilbert, Jeff Bartels, and myself, I would like to welcome you to today's presentation, Civil 3D Tips, Tricks, and Unnatural Acts. Before we get started, just want to touch base on the safe harbor statement. Basically, this is here in case when Jeff Allen and I get together and present, sometimes we have a tendency to get a little excited to say some things that may not necessarily be completely true. So please do not make any buying decisions solely off what you see in the presentation today.

A little bit about us, if you'd like to learn more about us and the things that we do, we operate a blog. It's called Civil Immersion. You can find it at civilimmersion.typepad.com. Going to the blog, we like to post things about the infrastructure space, specifically using Autodesk solutions. There, we share our knowledge and experience and best practices that we've picked up both here at Autodesk and our time in industry. So if you've been there before, welcome back. If you haven't, it's an opportunity to get an experience kind of an AU session at various times throughout the year.

So what's most important right now is this session and what we hope to achieve for you today. That's specifically to help you get the most from your Civil 3D investment. Now we're going to be looking at Civil 3D 2024 as we go through the software or go through our presentations. However, much of what we show may be applicable to other versions of Civil 3D as well. If we're going to be speaking to something that is specific to 2024, we'll make sure and point that out as we go.

All of our presentations, we like to say that we're in the PowerPoint-free zone. We'll only use PowerPoints for the purpose of maybe laying down some foundation of what it is we'll be covering. But for the most part, we like to be live in the application as we go, and that's what we'll be running things today. My name is Jerry Bartels. I'll be going first. I'll then be handing off to my colleague Alan Gilbert, and then he will be handing off to Jeff Bartels, who'll be closing things out for us. So let's go ahead and get started.

I'm going to begin by my portion of the presentation. I'm going to be working on what's called-- I'm calling it Maximizing PSD, or Property Set Data. If you've worked with property set data in the past, property set data can be used in ways that we'll look at today that are extremely powerful when working in Civil 3D.

So a few of these slides to lay down some foundation-- when we're working in Civil 3D, the Civil model itself lives in a DWG file. Now unless it's a very small model-- in most cases, they aren't-- we need to break the model up into multiple pieces or a group of smaller models that hold components that make up the overall model itself. These components could be surfaces, alignments, corridors, and more. And each one of these components will maintain information that Civil 3D knows about, things like length, area, elevation, name, other properties like that. It's also going to contain values maybe that you compute yourself or even custom values that we would add through property set data.

Now it'd be great to think that as we're working, we're only going to have to deal with 7 or 8 files. But as we work on a project and more people get involved and the project gets more complex, the number of files that make up the model continues to grow, connected together through a beautiful latticework of references and data shortcuts.

And as we work on the model, Civil 3D gives us tools that we can go through and begin to analyze different portions of the model. But when we do this, it's basically on a drawing by drawing basis. And this is good, but it's limiting. What we would prefer instead, or what would be even more helpful, is if we could do our analysis on all of the files that make up the overall model.

Doing design review-- now I would only have to check one area. Or if I'm computing quantities, I can pull information from multiple drawings. If I'm reviewing custom values, like maybe I'm doing construction, and I've added embodied carbon numbers or something like that to the different concrete components that make up my roadway, I could review that all of those have been added. I could ensure standards were used throughout design.

And while this is good, what would be even better or best yet would be to look at things as a collection of projects. So example, if this was project A, and I'm doing this for my client El Hefe, Ltd., I may be doing other projects for that client as well-- projects B and project C. And think for a moment how powerful it would be to perform that design review or computing those quantities or reviewing values or ensuring standards across all of the projects together.

All right, now when I first started to look at this, it made my head hurt a little bit because it's like, wow, that is anything like that even possible? And the short answer to that is yes, and actually much more using the Autodesk standardized data tool for Civil 3D.

Now to get started with this, you need to think about-- come to grips with some terms, some nomenclature, if you will, before I start my demo on how this works. First, the view that we're seeing with the magnifying glass is covering all of the files that make up three projects. That is considered a collection. If we look at the files that are part of a specific job, that is going to be considered a job itself. So all of the files that make up project A, those would be referred to as a job.

From here, what we're going to do is I need standardized information across all of the files for me to be able to analyze it. So I'm going to have a job standards file, which is basically a Civil 3D drawing or template that contains nothing more than property set data tables, tables that I can attach to various objects within my model-- alignments, gravity pipes, multiple objects. It doesn't have to be a single object-- could be multiple. This is going to maintain values that are not only computed by the software, but maybe custom values that I've added myself.

So what I can do is with that standard group of property set data, I can then push, using the tool, all of those standard property set data tables out to all of my files so that when I analyze them later, it's a consistent view of the information across all of my data. When it comes time to analyze it, we're going to analyze it in a job data file, which is basically an Excel spreadsheet. It's Excel because we're engineers, and that's just how we like to analyze stuff.

Through the tool, what I'll be able to do is sync all of the data that's been stored in those property set data tables across all of my files into an Excel spreadsheet. I can then review those, make decisions, perform analysis, create a Power BI dashboard, and then I can also make changes to some of the data and push it back to the drawing files automatically-- extremely powerful tool.

So now that we've laid down a little foundation. Let me hop into the application, and we'll take a look at a little bit of how that works. So I'm going to bring up Civil 3D here quickly. And to get started, I'm going to come up to the top. The model files that I'm working with are models A, B, and C. I've got it in a folder-- they're just three files-- contains some civil information. We'll look at the contents in a moment.

But to get started with this process, I'm going to access the Standardized Data Tool up here in the ribbon. Now when I highlight that, you may immediately be thinking, I've never seen that in Civil 3D before. Where do I get something like that? Well, if I come out to my browser here, if you go out to manage.autodesk.com-- basically, log in to your account. You go under all products and services. You look under Civil 3D and View Details. You will see Extensions. And if we scroll down, we'll see the option that I can download and install the Standardized Data Tool. And you'll see that it's good for versions of Civil 3D from 2021 to 2024. Also, while I'm here, Alan will be speaking on the Grading Optimization Tool a little later. That's the same place you'll access the file here. So let me get back to Civil.

Once that's been installed and I have the ribbon, the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a job. Basically, I'm going to group together the files that make up my project model. So I'm going to come in. We'll make a new job. I'm going to call this job AU2023. And the location for the metadata about this project or that this tool will use is going to be stored in a folder of my choice. By default, it's in Documents. I could place it in a shared location. All of that would work fine. It does not impact the location of any of my model files. It instead is going to be the place that's going to maintain the Excel spreadsheet, my standards information, and then maybe some other data about the job itself. We'll say Next.

Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with a template. This is the drawing file that has the raw property set data tables in there that we can work with. So that's fine. Last thing, it's going to build for me the Excel spreadsheet for my job file. We'll say that's good. The last thing that I need to do is I need to tell it what drawings will make up this job.

So I'm going to select the ellipsis here. We'll go to my Civil folder. I'm going to go to Civil Models. That's where they live. I'm going to select that folder. And you see the same files we looked at before. It's not an all or nothing thing. I could click on the plus and start adding those to my job. So we can pick and choose depending on what's in there. I'm going to go ahead and we will grab everything using just standard Windows keys. I'll say Finish and close.

When I click to expand, I see all of the files that are part of my project, the project name's AU2023. I'm going to click on Apply, and it's going to save that information to that folder we looked at. It's going to build the standards file. It's specific now to this project or this job, and it's also going to build the job data file or the Excel spreadsheet that we'll use in a moment.

We'll know that process is done because the icons will change from yellow to green. We'll be ready to go. Essentially, what it's doing in the background, it's also opening those files using the AC Core console, or like the headless version of AutoCAD or Civil 3D. And it is applying a value in there so it knows from the drawing where to go find information about the job. We'll go ahead and close out of that.

Next thing I want to do is I want to open the job standards file. This is the property set data tables that we're going to be able to utilize within our job. So when I open that up, it says we talked about before an empty drawing. Starts with the project name and then a unique identifier. I could come up here and look at property set data information, and I can look and see all of the data that has been created for us automatically.

There are a number of property data formats that have been built. There are also a number of property set definitions or tables that we have. Some we can tie to objects. So for example, if I were to look at tying something to gravity pipe, I could click on this table, and I've now got values that it's going to capture for start point, end point, up station, down station, slope, material, thickness, cover. All types of information is available for us.

I could also do it with AutoCAD objects that I'd like to attach to. I've even got some values here that are kind of-- could be attached to multiple things, like this COBie component. If I'm doing construction, I may want to assign values for installation date or serial number or warranty, start date. The beautiful thing about property set data is it can be applied to anything, and it can maintain any type of information.

I can also create some new tables. Maybe I'll make a new table here called AU2023. Once the table is built, I'm going to tell it that this is going to be applied to just alignments. I could say Select All, but we'll just do it for alignments for right now. I'll define just a single value. I'm going to call it custom. Once again, it could be anything. It could be source information, where it came from. It could be like a [INAUDIBLE] value for quality of the data. It's anything we want it to be. I can control what kind of values in there, or an integer, or real, true/false.

All of that's good. I'm going to say OK. I'm going to go ahead and close out of my standards file, and we'll Save Changes. So now I've got a standards file that maintains information a custom table that I will use with this particular job.

Next thing I need to do is-- remember from my graphic, I took and pushed that standard out to all of the drawing files that were in the job. That I'm going to do through the tool here through Batch Update Standards. I'm going to come down in the list. I can push it out to one or all of the files within the job. We'll do it with all three. I'll say update. It's going to tell me that, hey, that might take a couple minutes to do. That's all right. It's going to be much faster than if I were to try and do it manually. So it's going to push those standards into the models.

And from there, what we're going to need to do next is I'm going to need to associate those tables with objects in the file. So if you think about it-- I'm going to close out of this now-- all three of those files now have a full set of all the tables available in them that can maintain all of those values. They're also set up that they can be attached to multiple object types, but they've not been attached to any objects yet. I could open files individually and add them, but I could also do it globally or through a batch utility.

I'm going to come up here and say Batch Attach Extended Data. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my job. I'm going to select those files that make up the job itself. And I'm going to say Next. And now that it has property set data tables in that file of my standards, I'm going to go ahead and tell it what to automatically attach to. I'd like you to attach to alignments. I'd like you to attach to corridors, pipes, structures, parcels, maybe surface information, and I'm going to say Apply and Close.

All right, so in the background, the system is now using AC Core console or the headless version of AutoCAD. And it's quietly opening and going into each one of the files, looking at all the properties set data, seeing what objects they're applicable to, and it's automatically associating that data with all of those objects. What it is-- it's a way for me to quickly prepopulate all of those objects with the relevant tables.

With that done, let's take a look at some of that data. So I'm going to click on Open. We'll open up model B. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. If we open this guy up and we take a quick look at it, I'm going to select on my alignment here. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go to Properties, and then I'm going to look at Extended Data. When I look at Extended Data, I see now that I have access to all of these tables have been applied to this object. So for example, from a construction standpoint, I could put in an installation date.

You know what, we built a custom table. Let's see if it's here. It is-- AU2023. I'm going to put in a value in that custom one for a two-lane highway. And we'll hit Enter for that. That information is in there. I'm going to scroll down and look a little bit further. There is a table here that is set up for alignments specifically. However, none of the data is populated.

One thing to remember with this tool-- I'm going to close out of Properties. When it's assigning this information using the headless version of Civil 3D or AutoCAD, those values are populated at runtime. So it's not until I open the file and then save it do I get those values filled out for me. So I'm going to go ahead and save this file. We'll see on the bottom-- we see updating sister property definitions. It's updating all of those values. So once that's complete, I'm going to go ahead and select for the alignment here. We'll go back into properties. I'm going to look at our extended data. If I scroll down now, there is my custom value here. And here, we see the information for the alignment has been populated.

Let's take a look at one more object that's in here. I've got a structure. I'm going to look at properties. As I look at properties, if I'm a contractor, I'd maybe like to start filling out some of this information, the COBie data. We'll say that this was installed on 10/23/23. That information is available. I can continue to fill in other values for barcode information, serial number, description, the other stuff down here regarding warranty information and whatnot. I could fill in all of those values. And if I come down here to the bottom, here is all of the data now that's been captured as the fact that it's a structure.

Now if I begin to fill some of that out, once this is in here, it's a process of continuing to populate the rest of the data. I don't want to have to maybe fill that out again for the other structures that were installed on that date or may share those values. So if I go to standardized data tool, there is a other options in here that I can say copy data.

So I'm going to say copy data from this structure that I did. And I'm going to have it populate that information on these couple of other structures here, this one and another one down here. We'll right-click, and if I look at Properties for that, we see that the 10/23 is there, and then the other Civil properties are populated as well.

All right, I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to open up the other two files because just as I mentioned, it was the headless version AC Core console that applied those values and attached them to the objects. So to ensure that they're actually all populated and ready to go, I need to open those files and then save them. Let's go ahead, and we'll say save this guy. Let that save. I'm going to open up A one more time here because I thought I could close that and it would have it, but it was not. We'll close out of C. We'll close out of B, save changes to him. I had A open, but I did not save. I closed it figuring that it would save automatically. It did not. It just went ahead and closed. So let me open that and then save it. Let's go ahead and open model A.

All right, now the main reason I need to be meticulous about this is because I'm doing this in a demonstration standpoint. We've pushed the information out, and now I want to start extracting data. If I was in a real-world environment, like you would be in your office, you wouldn't necessarily have to go through this process because people would be opening files and then updating or adding information as they went and then saving them when they were finished. So it would kind of take care of itself.

I now have models as part of my job that have standardized data tables pushed out to them that have been updated now with values. I'm going to now batch sync that information. I'm going to pull that out to Excel. I'm going to select the files that I would like to sync. I'll say Next. I have two options. I can go from Excel to the model or I can go from the model to Excel. Well, we've not pulled anything out yet, so we'll go from the model to Excel. I'll overwrite all data. I can select particular tables, or even particular values that I would like to sync. But for right now, we'll just go ahead and sync that.

It gave me a warning, as it always does, that hey, this can take some time to accomplish. That's all right because it is certainly much faster than if I was to try and do it manually. So I'm going to let that run for a moment. It is going through and performing that other operation from my graphic now, where it is extracting all of that property set data and bringing it into a single Excel spreadsheet that I can then go through and review.

So I'm going to click here on Open Job Data File. I've got Excel installed on my machine already. I come in and look. Any data that we see-- basically, we're going to have a workbook at the bottom that was automatically created for every property set data table we had. Any column in there that is black and gray at the top, those are populated data within the software. We can't change those. We've got these values here that are maybe white. Those are ones that we can fill in and then ultimately push back.

So let's look at AU2023, our custom table. If I come up here and I expand the column widths, we see that I've got a two-lane highway in model B. I could come to model A, and I could see Second Street. Yeah, that's going to be four-lane highway-- all right, just putting another value. I can start to tweak those numbers.

I can come down and look at the COBie components. When I review that, from more of a construction standpoint, it's not just tied to alignments, but it's tied to multiple objects. So we see there's parcels in here. There's structures. There's tin surfaces. I'm going to come down. Here are the values that I entered on the structures. I'm going to go ahead and put in a value here. Maybe these were installed on 11/27/23.

And let's copy some of these. We'll say copy, drag those down, and paste. I'm going to do one more just so we can change one more value here. I'm going to give it a serial number just for something else to search for. I'll give it something random, something like 8675309. If you know, you know. So I'm going to copy that, bring it down here, paste some of those. So I was able to update some of those values as well.

From here, there are tons of things that I can do with the data. Here's a table that had property set table or data tables that were associated with alignments. I can come in here and see the design speed that was attached to every one in its name-- starting and ending station. I can see whether or not design check set was used.

Design criteria-- I can see superelevation on the end. I can peruse all of these tables. The idea is I have a window into the entire project, looking at all of the data across all of the files. We think about Excel as engineers-- we can do tons of things with that. We can count. We can sort. We can use conditional formatting. I can bring in a Power BI dashboard. There are amazing things we can do with the data, including push it back.

So what I'm going to do is let's save this. I'm going to close out of Excel. I'm going to close out of Batch Sync. And I'm going to say Close. I will come back up and we will sync again. But this time we will sync the opposite direction. So I'm going to select the three files. We'll say Next. This time, we are going to go from the data file, Excel, back to my model-- we'll overwrite all data.

I'll go ahead and say Sync. Says it's going to take perhaps a few minutes to do. Once again, small model, not a lot of files-- doesn't take a lot of time. The system is set up that I could minimize this and continue to work in Civil 3D while it's processing if it was taking a long time. So we can get around that. It doesn't basically prevent us from working.

I'm getting an error message here for every one of the files. The way that it knows how to take the data from the Excel spreadsheet back to the drawing and then to the specific object is through the entity handle. Through my testing with this file, I've attached these same models to multiple jobs over and over again. Somewhere along the line, I think I've damaged one of the entity handles. However, it's not had an impact on my being able to use this, so you should not experience the same error.

Let's go ahead and open up now model B. So I'll go ahead and open up that one file of the many that are in my job. And if I come down here, we'll grab a structure that I did not touch before. I'm going to right-click on that, go to Properties, and if I look at Extended Data, we see that now it has the serial number that I put in as well as the updated installation date.

All right, so going through what we did, I built a job file that contains the drawings that make up my model. I pushed a standards file out to all of those files. We went and attached those standards through a batch utility to the objects. I extracted those objects, made some updates, and I was successfully able to put that back.

All right, so the Autodesk Standardized Data Tool-- very powerful tool, something that it's free. You can download it from the website, and it's something to consider when you're working on your projects. So with that, I am going to turn the floor over to my colleague Alan Gilbert to move to the next step.

ALAN GILBERT: Thank you, Jerry. For my section of the presentation, I'm going to be covering garden-variety grading optimization. In case you're not familiar, grading optimization is one of those extensions for Civil 3D. Jerry just showed another one and how to get there. Grading Optimization was released for the 2022 version cycle, I do believe, and if you're not familiar with the tool, it is a tool that is based on algorithms to help you find the best solution for your grading situation. So it's interactive. You put in some constraints and parameters, and it'll work through iterations to help find a solution.

While it has been released for a few years, it's one of those that we've seen to be a little less understood and underutilized. With that in mind, I wanted to take some time to do a small walkthrough and a tip and trick walkthrough of the more common workflow-- what I call the more common-- mass and rough grading for [INAUDIBLE] and I call the common or garden-variety-- that's where the title comes from.

And the two can assist with much more difficult or advanced grading situations than mass and rough grading, but I feel like this is a great way to start to learn the tool, to ease into it. But just keep in mind that it will do very advanced residential subdivisions and commercial land development and so forth.

So why rough grading or mass grading? We just talked about some reasons, but it's a very common task across multiple industries, whether you're energy, land development, transportation, you name it. It's a great way to compare numbers because we're just looking at surfaces and volumetrics. So I can compare what did I get when I did my traditional techniques to what did the optimizer give me. I've still got to do detailed grading in general after this. So I think that's a great way-- I'm still going to be checking a lot of numbers downstream. So that gives me a little security.

And then, really, the last two are very similar. I think this is a nice, phased approach to ease into the grading optimizer. I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks of this, again, garden-variety workflow to get you started. And then you can take this basics and then move up through the additional objects that you'll see in the list. So with that said, let's get into Civil 3D.

So here we are in Civil 3D, and I currently have a Civil 3D surface object in the file. I have a few COGO points, and I have an alignment, which I will not be using. The great thing about the gradient optimization is that I can really start with any 2D data. I don't even have to have 3D data to begin with. So after the tool is installed, as Jerry mentioned earlier, you're going to go to the Analyze tab. And near the end here, you'll see a ribbon for the Grading Objects and the Optimizer. So these are the two buttons you're going to primarily be in.

I'm going to go to the Grading Objects first. And two things pop up-- so the list of all the different objects that I can create based out of my geometry, as well as a prospector-style browser so that I can manage all of my grading objects in one place here. So today, we're going to be only looking at four of these-- remember, we're going to keep it simple-- four of these particular grading objects. And they're really two teams, in a way. So the grading limit and the zone, which a grading limit is nothing more than a special zone. And we're going to look at the drain line and the low point. And they are very much related, as they control how the drainage flows towards them when you put them in the file.

So we're going to start by creating a little bit of geometry, just some basic 2D information. I'm going to go to the Rectangle command. And I'm going to sketch out roughly my catch point. So this is roughly the edge or catch point of my new grading. And so at this site, this is about a 20-acre site. So again, this is where I'm going to tie to my existing ground surface. Then I'm going to create another rectangle, which illustrates my-- you could call it a pad or my planar surface that I want to control the grading on. So I may do something like here inside. And believe it or not, that's really all we need. We just assign what these are here on the objects and go to the optimizer, so nothing to it.

So I'm going to start with the grading limit. This is the outside edge, or my catch point. Click it, Enter, and we get a Properties button that pops up. A little tip here-- hold your Control button so this doesn't dock. Holding Control down while you drag these around keeps them from docking. Most of you know that, but just a reminder.

So before I put in some slope constraints, I just want to mention the global slope constraints. If I had a ton of zones out and I was doing a lot of advanced grading optimization across a ton of zones and I wanted them all to have the same min and max slope, control, or constraint, I could set this to use global and, when I get to the optimizer, set a constraint for min and max for the whole project.

In this case, I want to control based on the various objects. So I'm going to say Customize here. My minimum drain slope is going to be 0 in this case. That means don't use it. Ignore it. I'm going to come back to what that is in a minute. For my maximum slope, I'm going to set this to 2 to 1 or 50% slope. And what this is going to basically show, because I'm going to have this zone inside, the 50% is going to be between these two or along the edge because I'm going to put a tighter constraint on the planar surface insider grading area. So this is really just my slope or my catch points. I don't need to set anything else, close, and that one is finished.

One little tip and trick here-- if I select this polyline here, this pops back up. So that grading property is now routing with that polyline from now on. If I ever need to remove that, I can left-click to select, right-click, and remove the grading limit properties.

So now we're going to set the next, which is a standard zone. Click on Zone, and we're going to select the polyline and hit Enter. We can name it, of course. We're going to use Customized Slope. And the minimum drain slope here is going to be 0.5%. I'm going to come back to that. That's the coup de gras in just a second. But we're going to set a 10% max slope. So that means, across this plane, I don't want to exceed a 10% maximum slope. Maybe that's the criteria for my solar farm. That's a very common one. But it could vary based on project, of course.

Now what about the min drain slope? So if don't select any low point or drain line or set any other parameters, this minimum drainage slope-- it will try to determine where it should drain by itself, and it will use that minimum 0.5% on this inside shape. And that's just the way it works.

What I want to do is I want to control that, and I want to tell it either a direction or tell it to point towards a drain line or a low point. And that controls the direction of my drainage. So really three ways-- I can set it here with a manual minimum drainage inclination, or I can create drain lines and low points, and it will automatically go towards those.

So let's start with the manual method. I'm going to click the little pencil. You can see 0 degrees is due east. I'm going to move this up and around the 50 degree. And because I'm a geek, I'm going to change that to an even 50. And so our drainage is set to move back this way. One last setting before we move on is aligned surfaces-- very important for us in this case because right now, it's going to do a 10% max slope, but that's overall, and it'll be very bumpy. So I want this to be a flat plane. I want to force it to be. Done.

So that's all we really need before we go to the optimizer. I go back to Analyze and click the Optimize. And that'll take us-- as soon as I click on the existing ground, it asks me that-- it'll take us into that Optimize workspace. Here we go.

So the first thing-- and this is my tip and trick here right off the bat-- is always go to Top View here immediately and turn on direction vectors and zoom in. So immediately, I want to know is the direction-- did I mess up anything on my direction of my drainage? And so you can see that's roughly that 50 degrees that I selected based off of CAD east.

There's a button down here at the bottom. It's called Reset. This is going to be your other friend. So remember this tip and trick. If I go and change some settings over here, staying in this window, Reset will reset and show me what the direction vectors-- how they changed based on what I changed over here. So there's a lot of other theming you can experiment with up here that's really cool.

But over on the side, this is that same Object Browser that we saw back in the Civil 3D standard window. Some things you can do here is I can just get to that Properties. Just like I saw before, it's the same Properties. Or what if I wanted to tell Gradient Optimizer to ignore this zone? So I could click this button here to make it inactive if I would like. So that's what I can do here.

Last setting before we have the fun here and run the optimizer is the button at the bottom called Optimization Options. Remember I talked about those global constraints-- if don't send any of those local constraints and lock down the shapes themselves, and I just want everybody to use these three settings, that's what I can do. The iteration is how many times this will iterate through the algorithm. The default's 100,000. I'm doing 50,000 for this because it's very simple. You can experiment with that.

The last thing that's very important here are the objective weights. So everything we put in so far are constraints-- hard-line rules. This is the last thing the optimizer looks at are these weights. And this is preferences. So I have to decide what's important to me and think about these as percentages. So is balancing the cut and feel to a net zero, as you can see here, is that of high importance? Yes.

Is having a smooth surface between the transition between existing ground and this new grading of high interest to me? Yes, it is. What about minimizing earthwork-- how much cut and feel and keeping the surface as close to where it started to begin with? Not at all, not on this big site. That is lowest priority. So I'm going to set it all the way down to 0 in this example.

So now we're ready to run, so we're going to click the Play button at the bottom. It automatically takes us into a visualization called Violations. And if I click on this little button here to maximize this convergence area, this graph will tell me, am I converging towards the solution as it gets closer to zero? If this stays red or yellow, that's going to mean that I probably need to go back and relax some constraints. I constrained it down or locked it down too much. It also shows me my running net cut field that, remember, I put that as a very desirable thing to have is a net zero cut field. And it is doing its best to accomplish that.

Here at the bottom, you can see the progress and the different stages that it's at. I have no blue or red here. I have no min/max violation shown. So I'm to go ahead and turn off that even while it's running. I'm going to go ahead and spin this up into 3D before it finishes, and I'm going to set the exaggeration slider-- that's what this is on the left-- where I can really see what that slope is doing. So you can see that's tilted back to the north-facing. In those direction, this is a plane surface in that direction that I selected at around 50 degrees.

Now that's complete and we're good to go. If I was happy with this, I can update and send this back to Civil 3D with a new surface. It will be the existing ground combined with this new proposed here. It'll be one big surface. Or I can update an existing one. I'm not going to do that yet because we haven't talked about the other two items.

I'm going to close the optimizer-- doesn't hurt anything. All those properties are still there. And we're going to create a drain line. So the only thing you need to know about a drain line-- it can come from a feature line, a polyline, it doesn't matter. I'm going to do a polyline. The only thing that matters is the direction you draw it because the upstream will be the start and downstream will be the end.

So I'm going to go from upstream, the high point here, and draw that down to the downstream. And we're going to tell it what it. That is a drain line-- I pick the toolbar. Select, Enter-- happy with that. And now we're ready to go back to the optimizer.

So you start having fun with this, and notice, it just remembers my EG, so just right-click. I don't even have to select it this time. All right, remember-- tip and trick. I'm going to set this to Top and turn on my direction vectors. OK, wait a minute, Alan. You told me that my direction would go towards the drain line if it was in the drawing, and it's not doing it. So you're lying to us here.

Not exactly. The constraints are just wrong because that automatic inclination direction I set is overriding and making it ignore this drain line. Remember, I don't have to go back to the product to correct this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say this zone here-- 8. I want to eliminate that manual direction of the drainage. As soon as I make that change, I'm going to hit Escape, and I'm going to hit my fancy Reset button to see if it works, even before I'm optimizing. Now check out my direction vectors.

There's great visuals in the Help document to help you understand how these triangles go and drain towards the drain line and the low points. There are some very distinct rules on how they go about going to the endpoints or the midway perpendicular to the mid-- or along the line. So some great visuals-- especially, it's important if had multiple drain lines because what if I had two here? Well, the closest triangles to that drain line would go to it. The closest ones to this one would go there.

So let's hit Optimize. Immediately, I've got minimum slope violation. It just doesn't know how to handle this because I'm telling it to drain in the middle on this flat plane. It doesn't make sense. You can see I'm in yellow here. It's all confused. So I'm just going to stop it. I'm like, I don't want to do that. That's just not working.

I'm going to close the optimizer, and I'm going to do something that's a little more realistic. And I'm going to select that same drain line with its properties, and I'm going to move it even outside of the catch point or the grading limit way out here. Let's move it even a little further down. Properties are still there-- no big deal. Go back to Optimize and hit Enter. And same thing-- Top, direction vectors. Before we start, is this doing what we expect? Looks like it is, right? Click the Run button there. It's going down towards that drain line. So that drain line doesn't have to be in the zone or any zone, to be honest.

So now let's click Optimize. Yeah, this is looking good. We do have some area down here in blue, and it's going to stay blue, I'll just tell you. So I'm going to stop it. But what's happening is those rules that I was talking about is there's some great visuals in the Help document-- there's some rules on how it gets to the drain line, how the direction vector points to it. And what's happening is there's a conflict between hitting my minimum slope and maintaining that strange direction towards the endpoint.

So we thought of that for you, and we put in a setting called Relaxed Direction here, if I click that. What that does is that gives freedom on these little direction vectors in the corner to go a little bit flatter, and it gives me a little more room to get rid of that blue, as you can see there. And I can continue. I'm just going to stop it just for speed, but I'll turn off that, and let's view that. Now you can see my grade is totally going the opposite way, which really wouldn't make sense with the contours. But hey, I wanted this to be south-facing grade, and there I have it.

OK, we're not saving yet. One last thing before we do that is the low point. So I have a COGO point. You have to have a COGO point in the drawing. And so I'm going to click on Low Point, and I'm going to select this COGO point down at the low spot on this job. There is one little setting I won't go into detail on, but the default, the way it drains to this low point is in a circular format, so a circular contour at the low point.

You can turn on Diamond Shape, which is basically a perpendicular cross, and it will basically run along four perpendicular streams into the low point. That's what the diamond shape means. And you can set an angle and all that. So really cool, but we're not going to do that-- don't need that here. And so we're happy. So let's go to Optimize. Hit Enter. Again-- Top, direction vectors every time. I hit reset because I'm weird that way.

So notice now. So the triangles closest to this drain line are going this way, but up here, they're closer to the low point, and they're going this way. So you can see, I can really control this with drain lines and low points. But that's not really what I wanted. That doesn't make sense for a flat plane. But there's an easy way to overcome this without going back to Civil and making a change.

Very similar as before, I want to go into the drain line and say, you know what, optimizer? Ignore that. Make it inactive. So I'm going to click here to say, you know what, drain line, you are now inactive. I'm going to hit reset to see if it works. Now we're talking, right? The entire plane is going back towards this low point.

So let's run the optimizer. See, we're going green here very quickly. I'm just going to go ahead and go out of the Violations mode. As this starts to complete, turn the exaggeration up. This is looking really nice. Again, could have a drain line all the way down the side. I just did a low point just to show something different. OK, that looks good. Here are some of the other themes you can see with slope and aspect. We're waiting on that to finish. I can also look at triangle faces. And you can see, we're here at a great solution.

So now, this time, I'm going to update our drawing. So we'll click on Update Drawing, and I'm going to create our new surface, which we'll call it GO. I'm going to set a different style than my existing ground just so we can see it easier. I want to turn off points-- don't want to send the points back, just the feature lines for the two shapes and the drain line even though-- or not the drain line in this case, but the two rectangles. Let's turn off the grading objects, and I'll select our original existing ground, and we'll set this to no display.

So now we have our new, optimized rough grading surface. And you see its existing combined surface into the new grading area. You can see the catch point that we designed. So from here, I can go to my traditional grading group and feature line tools if I would like for detailed grading. Or maybe I want it to get to this point because it's a 500-acre site, and I really wanted to start with a clean slate.

And now maybe I want to do more optimization inside here. So I can start drawing shapes and zones and drain lines inside the middle maybe, go back to Grading Optimization, and this time, when I pick my existing ground, I pick this surface. This is now my existing ground for Grading Optimization. And you may say, well, what about all this other stuff that's in there? Well, if I don't need them, I can get rid of them. But just as easy, in the Grading Optimization, you saw where I can make them inactive. And they will not participate in the Grading Optimization.

So that is all for me. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Jeff Bartels now to bring us home.

JEFF BARTELS: Thank you, Alan. In my part of the presentation, I'm going to be looking at a collection of tips and tricks as well as a couple of quick workflows. We're going to start out by looking at some-- we're going to be taking a shotgun approach, looking at several quick tips. These are going to be, like, system variables and small commands that you may not be aware of that you can use to help save time in your everyday workflows.

I will then be sharing a couple of other time-saving things that you can take advantage of. We'll be looking at how we can convert raster logo, like a company logo, into vector geometry. This is going to be kind of an unnatural act, and we'll see why when we get there. I'm also going to be showing you how we can carry Civil 3D designs out into the field such that we can view them on a mobile device and be able to walk around an empty site, for instance, and see where we are geospatially within our design.

With that, I am going to jump right into the demonstration. As you can see, I'm starting out here in Civil 3D, and I'm working in Civil 3D 2024. Having said that, everything that we look at today is going to work for you regardless of the version of Civil 3D that you may be using.

On my screen, I have a drawing that represents a portion of a proposed intersection design. If I zoom in, we can see that I have started placing some of my symbology for the turn lanes. Currently, I have a right turn lane and a pair of left turn lanes. I'm going to zoom in, and you can see that I've got a right turn lane that I've inserted here. I'm going to copy this. We'll kind of assume that I'm entering symbols. Now I'll copy that from nearest to this edge, perpendicular to here, perpendicular to here. There we go. So I've just populated my lanes.

Now they're incorrect, in this case. They should be going the other direction. I had to create something incorrect so I can show you a possible solution. Before I fix this, let me bring up my block menu. I'm going to type "insert." And this is where I can choose the blocks in my file. I just want to show you what I have going on in the background. If I go to Current Drawing, that tab, and type "arrow," this will show me my symbology for my lanes.

And you can see that, in the case of a directional symbol, all of these face to the right. So you may be wondering, where are the ones that I have going to the left? And I'm here to say maybe we don't need those. If I select these symbols, these right-handed symbols, and go to the Properties palette, notice they have a x, y, and z-scale of 1. If I change the y-scale to a negative 1 and hit Enter, you'll see how that mirrors that block symbol.

Let me flip that back to one, and I'm going to change the x-scale to negative 1. Press Enter-- you can see how that mirrors it in the other direction. Once again, we'll go back to 1, and we'll set these-- since they're left turn lanes, I'll set the y to negative 1. So by simply setting a negative scale, you can mirror your blocks. This works after the block has been inserted, or you can do it prior to insertion. Here, on the Insert tab, I can change my y-scale to negative 1. And then, if I click that right turn lane, it becomes way left turn lane. So by using that tip, you can maybe cut down on some of your directional symbology.

Let's pan the drawing over. Here, I've got an area that represents a painted island. And I would like to create some striping in here, much like the hatch pattern that we see down below. To hatch this, I'm going to come up to the Draw panel, and I'll launch the Hatch command, and I'll click inside that shape. And by default, it's hatching this with a solid fill. I'm going to choose ANSI 31, and then I'll choose, maybe, a scale of 15. I'll press Tab, and we can see that on screen. I can then drag my angle to an angle that I like. This looks pretty good. When I'm finished, I'll click the check to finalize the command.

So this looks OK, but let's say that we have a requirement that the striping needs to be 5 feet apart. Let's find out how far apart these stripes are. I'm going to type "distance," and then I will find the distance nearest to, and as I wave around this hatch, notice that Civil 3D doesn't recognize hatch when it comes to object snaps. Normally, you want that. So that's really the way it is set by default.

You can actually change this, though. If I press Escape, I'm going to right-click and come down to options. And on the Drafting tab, I'm going to remove this check that says Ignore Hatch Objects. This will allow Civil 3D to see those now. Let me click OK, and let's take a measurement again. I'm going to type "dist." What's the distance from nearest to here perpendicular to here? And if we look at the command line, we can see the current distance is 1.875 feet. I'm going to drag across that, and I'll hit Control-C to copy that to my clipboard.

Let's rescale this hatch now. I will select the hatch, and here, in the ribbon, I can see the current scale is 15. Did you know that in most places, virtually every place in Civil 3D where you can enter a number, you can enter a calculation. I'm going to put a calculation in here. I'll type equals and then an open parentheses, 5, which is what I want, divided by Control-V 1.875, which is what it is, closed parentheses, and I'll multiply this by the scale, 15. At this point, I will hit Alt-Enter. And remember, when I said that this works in virtually every location? Unfortunately, when I hit Alt-Enter, this is one of those situations where it doesn't work. Here, it's showing me some of the shortcuts for the other tabs in the ribbon

No problem. I know that was anticlimactic. Let me drag across this and copy it. I'll hit Control-C to copy that to my clipboard. When we're dealing with hatch, if I go to the Options panel and click this arrow in the lower right corner, it will bring up the classic dialog box for hatch. And from here, I can click in the scale box, and I can paste that formula. And from here, I can hit Alt-Enter and calculate that, and it's a scale of 40. When I click OK, you can see how that hatch updates. Now if I run the distance command, I can find the distance from nearest to here perpendicular to here. And if we look at the command line, we can see that's exactly 5 feet.

Now I'm going to practice good form. I'm going to right-click and go back to Options. In most cases, you probably want your hatch ignored when it comes to object snaps, so I'm going to turn that back on. Let's click OK. And I'm going to close out of this drawing. We won't Save Changes. We'll flip over to another drawing.

Now this file represents a proposed plan for a fast food restaurant. This happens to be our Chicken and Waffles dataset that we've used frequently. This file is geolocated. I can see that by the icon here. So if I was to turn on the aerial image, we can see that come up. This is geospatially located. It's based on state plane coordinates. When I'm waving my cursor around in this file, you can see down at the coordinates area here, the x and y-coordinates of my cursor location. It is possible, if maybe I would like to know a lat/long. Maybe I'd like to identify a lat/long on this site I'd like to provide somebody. Maybe they're going to be using their phone to locate that. Lat/long is a good universal coordinate.

If I come down to this Coordinates area, I can right-click. And from here, I can choose geographic. Now as I move my cursor, I'm seeing the coordinates in lat/long to four decimal spaces. I can even take this a little bit farther. If I type "geolatlong" format, currently, that's turned off. I'm going to set that to 1 to turn it on. And when I press Enter, now, as I wave my cursor, I'm seeing the lat/longs in degrees, minutes, seconds.

Now if I'd like to turn this back off again, I'm going to show you another shortcut. If you right-click in model space, you will find an option in the menu called Recent Input. From here, you will see the last 20 commands that you've used. I'm going to select geolatlong format so I don't have to type that in. I'll set that back to 0. And then I'm going to come back down to my coordinates. I'll right-click, and we'll set that back to Absolute to see x's and y's.

I don't need to see the aerial image anymore. I'm going to go ahead and turn that off. And then I am going to flip over to my layout. Let's take a look at that. On my layout, I have a pair of viewports. In my Plan View here, I can see my site at a scale of 1 inch equals 20 feet. Over to the right, I have a detail of the storage area here on the east side of the building. And we're viewing that at 1 inch equals 5 feet.

The viewport edge, if I hover over this, I can see it's sitting on layer 0. Usually, I like to hide the viewport edges. I put them on a layer called viewport that's frozen. This is obviously on an incorrect layer. If I wanted to switch this layer, really quick way to do that is to select it. And then I'm going to open up my layer list. When your layer list is open, if you tap the first letter of the layer name-- for instance, I'll tap V-- it will take you to the first layer that starts with that letter. Every subsequent time that you tap the V key, it will take you to the next layer that starts with that letter. As soon as I get to viewports, I'm going to hit Enter, which will put the object on that layer, which is frozen. And it is now no longer visible on screen.

Let's zoom in. Maybe I would like to add some text. I'd like to label this drive-thru lane. Since I'm not labeling Civil 3D data, I'm going to use an annotative text object for this. If you remember, this viewport happens to be set to 1 inch equals 20 feet. Let's jump to model space. And in model space, my current annotative scale is set to 1 inch equals 20 feet, which is perfect. I'm going to choose the Annotate ribbon tab, and I have a text style that's Annotative that's already current. That's what I want to use. I am going to create single-line text.

I will then zoom in, and I'll click in the drive-thru lane. I'll Shift-right-click and I'll hover over this edge because I'd like my text to be parallel to that line work. And then I will type Drive Thru Lane-- Enter, Enter. The text that I created is annotative. If I hover over this, we can see the icon that shows us that it's annotative to 20 scale. That means that if I go back to my layout, this text only shows up in this viewport. It does not show up at 5 scale. You can't do this with a Civil 3D label, not without playing with layer settings and things like that.

Now what if I wanted this label to appear in this view? All I have to do is add the 1 inch equals 5 feet scale to that object. Let me go back to model space. I will select this text object. I'll come over to Properties, and then right here, for annotative scale, I can see it's 1 inch equals 20. I'll click the dialog box, and I'll say I would like to add a scale to this. I'll choose 1 inch equals 5, and I'll click OK. And then I'll click OK. When I hover over this text, now you can see multiple icons that shows me it supports multiple scales. If I select this label, we can see the smaller scale there.

Did you know that the individual sizes of our annotative scales can be moved independently of each other? As an example, if I click the grip, I am moving the larger label. Why? Because the 20 scale setting is current. I'll drag this over. I will then press Escape to deselect. Let's set the annotative scale to 1 inch equals 5. If I want to move the smaller label, I can now click the grip, and I'm moving that one. I'm going to pull it up over here. Once again, we'll return to our layout, and now we can see that text is appearing appropriately sized in both views.

Last thing I want to do is show you that you can have independent rotation scales on each of these variations. If I double-click in this viewport, I'm going to draw a line segment that kind of represents the angle I would like that text to read. And then I will select that line, and we'll come over to the Properties palette so I can get an idea of what the angle is. I can see that's 31. I'm going to press Delete to remove that. I don't need it anymore. I will then select this label.

Since I'm in the 5-scale viewport, I'll be adjusting this one. I'll come over to the Properties palette. And if I change the rotation here to 31, you can see I can rotate this independently. Once again-- can't do that with a Civil 3D label. And even though these are individual objects with individual locations and independent rotations, they still represent the same label. So if I spell this out, use the full word "through," for instance, you can see how that updates in both places.

All right, let's talk for a second about company logos. Sometimes, firms will use an image or a JPEG image, something like that, for their logos that they display on their title blocks. And that works well. However, when you use images, the images are not physically embedded in the DWG file. So depending on where you save that file, sometimes, the reference gets lost, and then the image disappears, and all you have is the path to where the image was. Wouldn't it be nice if we could convert a JPEG image into CAD geometry? Then it could live in the CAD file.

We can do that, and this is kind of an unnatural act, and it's because I'm going to use Adobe Illustrator to do this. A lot of firms have access to the Adobe Creative Suite. If you have access to Illustrator, you don't have to be a guru with this application to use it. You just have to know a couple of commands. Let me show you how we can convert a JPEG image into CAD geometry.

I'm going to come up and choose File, Open. And then I will select my company logo. This is a JPEG image. I'll click Open to open that in the interface. When this comes up, I'll come over to the Tool palette here, and I'll choose the Zoom command. And then I will click a couple times to zoom in on this logo. And then I want to make sure that we have a particular tool on screen. So I'm going to go to the Windows pulldown, and I will select Image Trace. That's the tool we'll be using to do our work. I will then come over and choose the Select tool so I can select my image.

And here, on the Image Trace palette for the preset, I'm going to select High Fidelity Photo. And you'll see that it's going through and scanning that, and it's finding all of the edges. Then I'll switch the view from Tracing Result to Tracing Result with Outlines. And here, you can see the geometry that it found.

If we come down a little bit further, you can there's an option here for Colors. It has identified 85 different colors, which is a little high for this logo. If I start dragging this to the left, I can start optimizing my geometry. Currently, it's 661 paths, it says. If I drag this to use fewer colors-- 60, for instance-- we can see there's virtually no change to the appearance on screen, and we're down to 307 paths. As I drag this to the left, I can further optimize this. I'm going to drag it down to 17 just to show you what happens if you go a little too far. If you drag too low, you'll see that some items start dropping out. I have found with this image, 30 happens to be the sweet spot for this.

So once you find that optimized level, you can come over and click Expand to convert that into geometry. And then I can right-click on this and choose Ungroup. That will convert it into a bunch of individual entities. If you're an Illustrator guru, you can get in and start making modifications to this stuff if you want to. It's actually perfect, in this case, with the exception-- if you remember, it had a white boundary around the outside. I'm going to click to select that boundary, and I'll press Delete to remove it. I don't need that entity.

So now that I've got my logo converted into vector, I'm going to save this as a DWG file. I'll come up and open the File menu. And from here, I'll choose Export. And then I'll choose Export As. And I'm going to save this in the same directory where my image is located, and under Save As Type, I can choose Autodesk RealDWG. And I'll choose Export.

In the dialog box, you can see the version here. I'm going to choose 2018. I'm going to keep the current scale. I'm going to keep the true color setting. Basically, what it's going to do is all these shapes will have a true color hatch pattern to them. So regardless of the pen table that you're using for your plots, this logo will still appear correct. I will then keep the rest of the defaults, Preserve Appearance, and you can see the others here. I'll click OK. That just exported that geometry to DWG. I'm going to close out of Illustrator. I'm not going to save changes in this case.

And here, in Civil 3D, we'll open up that DWG file and take a look at it. I'll go to Open, Images. Here's that logo. Now before I open it, if I drag this over, you can see this file is only 292k. So if I was to convert this into a block, and I was to share this block on several title block sheets, it'll be very lightweight in my project. I'm going to select that, and I will click Open to open that on screen. So there, we can see the geometry as it came out of Illustrator here in model space. As I zoom in, do a quick regen, you can see that looks very good.

I'd like to turn this into a block. I'm going to type "block" because I'm old-fashioned. And in the dialog box, I will call this Logo. I will then choose Pick Point, and I'm just going to free-pick a point here to define the insertion point. Select Objects. I will window all of these, and I'll press Enter, and you can see, it's going to convert this geometry into a block. So there we go. I'll click OK.

Now I would like to drag this onto my other title block, really nice way we can do that-- if I go to the View menu and come down to Interface, there's an option here called Tile Vertically. This allows us to see our drawings side by side. When I choose that, the Start tab says, hey, I want to participate in that. I don't need the Start tab in this case, so I'm going to I'm going to minimize that. And then I'll come back and I'll click Tile Vertically again. There we go.

If you want to drag contents of one file into another, I can select my block, for instance, or select your object, and then click and hold on it, which kind of copies it to your cursor. I can then drag it over into this other environment. I can then close this drawing. We won't save changes. And I will maximize this one.

And if I zoom in, you can see I've got a really nice, lightweight block that replicates my JPEG image, and I don't have to worry about this getting lost due to a reference or saving the file in the wrong place.

OK, one more thing-- let's go to model space. Let's say I would like to carry this design out in the field, such that I could have it on a smartphone or a tablet and be able to see my design while I'm walking in an empty site and know where I am geospatially within the design. I can do that using a combination of Civil 3D, Autodesk Docs, and Google Earth.

All right, let me you how to do that. From a high level, since I'm going to be viewing this, ultimately, in Google Earth, I have to dumb this drawing down for Google Earth. Google Earth really likes just vanilla AutoCAD objects. So since I'm going to be dumbing this down, I'm going to do a quick Save As, and I am just going to append the word temp here to the end, so that way, I don't end up damaging the original file.

Once I create my temp file here, I'll ask myself, what don't I want to see in the field? I don't want to see my existing ground surface. I also don't want to see the proposed surface. So I'm going to select these, and in the properties palette, I'm going to change their style to no display. This drawing also includes an external reference, so I'll select that xref and right-click. In the menu, I'll choose Bind. This will convert that external reference into a block. And then now that I have that block, I'm going to click the Explode button, and I will explode that block down to individual entities. If I hover, you can see that what was once a corridor is now a bunch of feature lines.

Now remember, Google Earth really likes vanilla AutoCAD entities. What I'm going to do next is export this file to AutoCAD. I'll type export to AutoCAD. And I'm going to save this. I'll just keep the default name. It's going to put the prefix ACAD on the front of this. Let me click Save. Perfect.

Once that file is saved as AutoCAD entities, we'll take a look at that file. I'll come up and click Open. And then we'll open that file I just saved. And it needs just a little bit of work. You can see that it is still showing me the boundary of my proposed surface. Not a problem-- I'm going to select that it's a polyline now. I'll right-click on that and choose Select Similar, and I'll hit Delete. So you may have to do just a touch a bit of a clean up there.

So here's my geometry. Before I export this, I want to do one last thing. I'm going to select all of these entities, and in the Properties palette, I'm going to assign them a line weight of 0.05 millimeters. I do that because Google Earth will honor this pen weight, and by having the pen weight be a little bit larger, it'll show up much nicer when it's on top of that aerial photo in Google Earth.

All right, we're ready to export. At this point, I'll go to the toolbox, and under Miscellaneous Utilities, there is a tool here called Export KML. I'll double-click to launch that command. Here's my file name-- I'm not going to change it. I'm not going to adjust the description or the hyperlink. Let's click Next. What do I want to export? I want to export selected objects. Let me click this button, and I will drag across these I don't want to export any text or object information or materials. Let's click Next. I do want to export this using the current geospatial coordinate system. Let's click Next.

Nudge-- here's where I can kind of adjust things a little bit. I can kind of tweak the elevation if I want. I really don't know the surface in Google Earth. I know that the surface and the geometry here is perfect elevation-wise because it's based on survey. But in Google Earth, I really don't know. So I'm going to say, you know what, just drape the objects on the ground in Google Earth. Let me click Next.

Finally, here's my file that I'm saving. Where do I want to save that? I'm going to click the ellipsis button, and I'm going to save this in my Autodesk Docs project. I happen to have desktop connector loaded on this machine where I can access Autodesk Docs, so I'll grab my account. And then I'm going to jump into my Chicken and Waffles site plan project, and I'll navigate into this folder called Field Files. And when I save this, this command is called Export KML, but I'm actually going to be saving this as a KMZ file. So I'll choose that option, and I'll click Save. I will then choose Export.

And once the file is exported, if you want to, if you have Google Earth on your desktop, you can view it from here just by clicking the View button. And I wish I could say when this comes up that it would take me right to that location. It actually does, but unfortunately, I'm floating out in the atmosphere. If we look on the left side of the screen, you can see the KMZ file that I exported.

All I have to do is expand this and Expand Model, so I can see some of the geometry. And I'll double-click on one of these entities. That will allow me to fly in and see that in the Google Earth environment. From here, I'll roll my mouse wheel forward, and then I'll hold the mouse wheel down to orbit this up. There, you can see my design within Google Earth. So now this is perfect position. Here's where I could go out into the field and I could view this using my mobile device.

Unfortunately, I can't show you that live because I'm not out at this site currently. So we're going to simulate that. Let me show you this. I'm going to close this. And I'm going to bring back my PowerPoint. This is what it looks like out at the site. I carried a GoPro out there with me along with my phone so I could record both of these things in context.

Once again, I'm using a smartphone, but you can do this with a tablet as well. In the lower right corner, you can see the Autodesk Construction Cloud app. I've got that loaded on my device. I'll tap to open it up. From here, I can see my projects. I'll tap to open the Chicken and Waffle site plan project, the one we were just in. I will then navigate the directories into Field Files until I get to that KMZ file.

And then I'll tap to open it. And when I do, Docs says, hey, I don't understand what that file is. But you can-- tap on screen, you can pick another app if you want to to open it, which is perfect. I'll tap on screen, and then I'll swipe over and click More. And then I can select a different app. I'll choose Google Earth. And you'll find that Google Earth is the same here as it is on the desktop. We're kind of out in the atmosphere. So if I tap on the upper left corner, I can choose Projects. I can then Expand Model, and I can tap on one of those entities, such that it'll Zoom me in and take me to that site so I don't have to zoom in manually and find it.

When this comes up I can see my site in the context of Google Earth. I can pinch out and zoom in. I can also swipe down to close the menu at the bottom of the screen. And then I'll click the locate button. This will identify my location in the real world. This is all real-time, so it's really quick. You can see it found me. I happen to be standing next to my car. I'm parked at the end of that frontage road. Just to make things a little bit easier, I'm going to zoom in on my phone.

And then I can start walking. And as I'm walking, you'll see my icon moving within that environment. I'm going to start out by walking to the first entrance of the proposed parking lot. And rather than having you watch me walk at my normal pace, I've kind of speeded things up here a little bit so you can imagine I'm jogging, if you want to.

As I walk, looking at the phone, I know exactly where I am within the design, and I can see how that relates to the real world-- a phenomenal technology. It gives you a great ability out in the field. I've worked on a project once where we had some things that were missed, like a utility pole was missed during the collection of data. And we were getting close to the construction phase, and we actually had a utility pole that conflicted with one of our parking lot entrances.

Here, I'm walking to the pickup area of the drive-thru window. So I was able to very easily navigate to that location and see where that is-- how that relates to the real world. And then one more thing, since I was out there, I was wondering myself, how well is it tracking me? If you look on the phone, in the northwest corner, there is an existing sidewalk that terminates there. So I decided I'm going to walk over to that sidewalk and see just how close my icon is on the phone versus where I am standing on the site.

And you can see, as I approach that corner, it is pretty much right on the money. If it's off, it's only off by about a foot. So if you have a Civil 3D project that you'd like to carry out in the field, you can simply dumb that down, export it to KMZ, upload that to Autodesk Docs, and then you can access it in the field using Google Earth.

OK, we have looked at a ton of things today. We looked at the Autodesk Standardized Data Tool for managing property set data. Historically, we managed property set data one file at a time. Using that tool, we can standardize all of our property set data tables. We can push those to a multitude of drawings, where we can add our rich attribution. We can then use the tool to extract all of that attribution into an Excel file, where we can do further edits or analysis. And then we could push the data back into those drawings as well.

We saw how we could use the Grading Optimizer to do rough grading on a proposed site. We looked at how we could convert raster geometry into vector for the purpose of converting a company logo into a block. I also showed you how we could georeference ourselves out in the field within a design using Autodesk Docs and Google Earth. And we also touched on several little quick tips and tricks along the way.

If you're interested in more content like this, please visit our blog. The URL is at the bottom of the screen. If you visit the blog, you'll find more than 500 how to videos that cover many of the civil infrastructure applications that Autodesk offers.

On behalf of Jerry Bartels, Alan Gilbert, and myself, I want to say thank you so much for attending today's session. We hope you found value in the content, and we look forward to seeing you guys again at our next presentation.

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We use VK to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by VK. Ads are based on both VK data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that VK has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to VK to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. VK Privacy Policy
Adobe Target
We use Adobe Target to test new features on our sites and customize your experience of these features. To do this, we collect behavioral data while you’re on our sites. This data may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, your IP address or device ID, your Autodesk ID, and others. You may experience a different version of our sites based on feature testing, or view personalized content based on your visitor attributes. Adobe Target Privacy Policy
Google Analytics (Advertising)
We use Google Analytics (Advertising) to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Google Analytics (Advertising). Ads are based on both Google Analytics (Advertising) data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Google Analytics (Advertising) has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Google Analytics (Advertising) to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Google Analytics (Advertising) Privacy Policy
Trendkite
We use Trendkite to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Trendkite. Ads are based on both Trendkite data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Trendkite has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Trendkite to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Trendkite Privacy Policy
Hotjar
We use Hotjar to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Hotjar. Ads are based on both Hotjar data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Hotjar has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Hotjar to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Hotjar Privacy Policy
6 Sense
We use 6 Sense to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by 6 Sense. Ads are based on both 6 Sense data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that 6 Sense has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to 6 Sense to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. 6 Sense Privacy Policy
Terminus
We use Terminus to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by Terminus. Ads are based on both Terminus data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that Terminus has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to Terminus to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. Terminus Privacy Policy
StackAdapt
We use StackAdapt to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by StackAdapt. Ads are based on both StackAdapt data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that StackAdapt has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to StackAdapt to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. StackAdapt Privacy Policy
The Trade Desk
We use The Trade Desk to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by The Trade Desk. Ads are based on both The Trade Desk data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that The Trade Desk has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to The Trade Desk to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. The Trade Desk Privacy Policy
RollWorks
We use RollWorks to deploy digital advertising on sites supported by RollWorks. Ads are based on both RollWorks data and behavioral data that we collect while you’re on our sites. The data we collect may include pages you’ve visited, trials you’ve initiated, videos you’ve played, purchases you’ve made, and your IP address or device ID. This information may be combined with data that RollWorks has collected from you. We use the data that we provide to RollWorks to better customize your digital advertising experience and present you with more relevant ads. RollWorks Privacy Policy

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We care about your privacy. The data we collect helps us understand how you use our products, what information you might be interested in, and what we can improve to make your engagement with Autodesk more rewarding.

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