PRODUCT FOCUS
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018
by: Jeff Frye
Productivity-Boosting CADD “Nuggets"
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s a Senior CADD Manager and roadway designer, I am always trying to find a faster, easier, more productive way to accomplish tasks in AutoCAD® and AutoCAD® Civil 3D®. And I enjoy sharing those things in the form of little tips and tricks I call CADD nuggets. This article spotlights some nuggets to boost productivity and highlight new uses for old commands. These are some of my favorites and I hope you learn something along the way.
ASSEMBLY NAME LABEL As a corridor model progresses, I end up with several assemblies in my file. As this list grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a specific assembly to edit. This nugget highlights the use of fields and large text to help quickly navigate to my desired assembly.
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Do the following: 1. Begin a large piece of center-justified text above your assembly. Any size that will be visible with zoom extents will work. 2. Instead of typing text, right-click and select “Insert Field.” 3. Select “Objects” in the Field category. 4. Under Field Names, select “Object.” 5. Under Object type, select the little marker symbol to the right and pick your assembly, select Name from the Property column. (Note the other options for properties you can select here.) 6. Change the Format to Uppercase to increase visibility (see Figure 1). When you create this label on your first assembly and copy them together, the copied text will be linked to the copied assembly, reducing the amount of work by not repeating this process (see Figure 2). March 2018