Chapter 02 – AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 Essentials – The Essentials and Beyond

my name is Eric J Powell
author of autocad civil3d 2013
essentials and this is the additional
exercises for chapter 2 for the first
item you're asked to change the style
applied to one or more parcels to
display them as open space rather than
single family so to accomplish this you
can open the properties window there's
actually several ways to do this
properties wet a window is one way and
then I'm going to zoom in and click on a
parcel and the way I select a parcel
is to click on the area label for that
parcel and now it's just a matter of
going into the style and changing that
from single family to open space and
there's a slight change in the
appearance the outline is now green
instead of blue or black so if I wanted
to do another parcel would be the same
procedure with the properties window
open I would select it and choose open
space as the style I want to point out
that I could also have done that using
the parcel properties command up here on
the ribbon and on the information tab of
the parcel properties dialog I can also
change the style there all right so
either one of those will work for
changing the style of the parcel for
item two you are asked to change the
style assigned to one or more parcel
area labels to display more than just
the parcel number and as you can see
when i zoom into these different parcels
the only thing I'm seeing in the middle
of the parcel is the parcel number so to
change that I need to change the style
of the parcel area label again an easy
way to do that is through the properties
window which I already have open and let
me make this a little bigger so you can
see the names of the choices there's
parcel area label style and instead of
parcel number I can choose something
else like maybe named square foot and
acres now you can see the difference in
the label I can also accomplish this
using the parcel properties command so
click the label go to parcel properties
and on the composition tab I can change
the area selection label style as well
so there's two different places that I
can make that change for the third item
we are asked to use grip editing to
change the geometry of the road
centerline and observe what happens to
the geometry of the parcels and while
we're doing that we want to think about
the relationships that
that make this behavior possible so
first let's see what happens when we
change the center line geometry of the
road I'm going to change the radius of
this curve here and I'm going to zoom
out a little bit so you can see it all
happen and you can see what happens to
the parcel geometry it changes as well
as I change the center line of the road
the right-of-way also changes and since
the parcels are linked to that
right-of-way they change to let me
change it a little bit more you can see
everything updating so if we think about
the first two examples we looked at they
were the relationship of style to object
or style to label which a label is also
a kind of an object so we were able to
change the appearance of a parcel by
changing the parcel style we were also
able to change the appearance of the
label by assigning a different label
style now we're looking at a different
kind of relationship a geometrical a
relationship between alignments this
this centerline happens to be an
alignment this right-of-way happens to
be an alignment as well and these are
geometrically tied to the parcel lines
and it creates a system where everything
is tied together and things update the
way they're supposed to update so those
are the kinds of relationships that are
in play with this demonstration right
here next we are asked to use grip
editing to move several parcel lines
that are perpendicular to the road and
again we want to observe what happens
when we make these adjustments and think
about the relationships that are in play
to make this possible
so here's a good example of the kind of
parcel line we're talking about one
that's perpendicular to the road now
watch what happens when I click the
diamond-shaped grip and slide it around
first thing you'll notice is that it
stays perpendicular to the road frontage
you'll also notice when I click a new
location for it the label on the line
moves with it the the label at the
the parcel re-centers itself and we may
also have changes to the labels
referencing the geometry itself so this
length label got longer and the radius
that wouldn't have changed but the Delta
would have changed let's see it again
here notice how this parcel line when I
slide it along its going to tie it not
from this line but eventually to this
curve back here so you can see how it
changes the back line that it ties to so
there must be some relationships going
on there between these lines and the
lines around them and that's exactly
what's happening again these this is an
alignment right here and these are
parcel segments and they know that they
that the parcel segment is supposed to
stay perpendicular to the alignment
because when the parcels were laid out
this was called out as the frontage of
the parcel and you'll learn about that
later on in an upcoming chapter about
parcels at the back of the line it
recognizes these other parcel segments
and says I always want to tie to the
closest parcel segment and then the
labels are also tied back to these
parcels as well remember or actually you
will learn later in the book that when
you take parcel segments and form a
closed shape out of them it creates a
parcel and these labels refer to that
parcel in fact one thing I can show you
is if I change this area label style to
one that shows the acreage I can see
that number update as well
watch the 0.38 acres become 0.49 acres
0.33 acres so that label is updating as
well so here we see a great example of
the dynamic relationships built into
civil3d
because all of those text changes that I
would normally have to make manually are
all happening automatically and that
saves me a lot of time and quite frankly
it saves me from having to do a lot of
work that's not real fun to do who wants
to go around the drawing editing all the
acreage from 0.49 to 0.33 or whatever
the change happens to be
for the final relationship we're going
to take a look at the link between
objects in different drawings in our
example here we've got an alignment and
we want to show a profile along that
alignment and we need a surface to do
that the problem is that surface is in a
different drawing but luckily we have
published a data shortcut here of that
existing ground surface that we can make
reference to so I'm going to right click
and create a reference to that existing
ground surface I'm going to use a style
that uses one foot contours and there
you can see the surface in my drawing
now I can I've got the alignment in this
drawing I've got the surface that I just
referenced in so I've got enough
information to create a surface profile
so I'll add that here draw in profile
view I'm not going to worry about any of
the settings and just go ahead and
create that profile right in the drawing
so just like you did earlier in the
chapter you can do the same thing here
you can use this data shortcut that was
published to prospector to make a
reference to that surface pull it in
from a different drawing and then do
other things with it like cut a profile
or do a volume calculation or do lots of
other different design activities with
that referenced information so that
concludes the additional exercise for
Chapter two