Mastering AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2010

IT’S ALL ABOUT STYLE 17

7. Select the down arrow next to the Modify panel. Using the pin at the bottom-left corner of

the panel, pin the panel open.

8. Select the Properties command in the General Tools panel to open the AutoCAD Properties

palette. Notice that the Modify panel remains opened and pinned.

It’s All About Style

Before you get into the program itself, it’s important to understand one bit of vocabulary and how

it relates to Civil 3D: style. To put it simply, styles control the display properties of Civil 3D objects

and labels. Styles control everything from the color of your point markers to the interval of your

surface contours, and from your profile-view grid spacing to the text height in the Station-Offset

label of your road alignment. Styles truly are where the power lies in Civil 3D. Label styles and

object styles are the two major categories.

The difficult thing about styles is that it’s hard to talk about them without being specific. Later

chapters spend a fair amount of time talking about the specifics of the styles for each object, and

this chapter looks at the common aspects of style manipulation; but styles may remain a mystery

until you get your hands dirty later in the book.

Label Styles

To get started, look at the styles in the Spot Elevation branch by expanding the Surface branch and

then the Label Styles branch on the Settings tab, as shown in Figure 1.14.

Figure 1.14

Spot Elevation label

styles

There are two basic label styles in the Spot Elevation branch. Let’s create a new one and

explore the options for making labels. Remember, almost all of these options are present in other,

object-specific label styles.

1. Right-click the Spot Elevation folder, and select New in the pop-up menu to open the Label

Style Composer, as shown in Figure 1.15.

2. On the Information tab, change the style name to something appropriate. For this example,

use JW-EG.

18 CHAPTER 1 GETTING DIRTY: THE BASICS OF CIVIL 3D

Figure 1.15

The Label Style

Composer

Who Built That Style?

It’s a good idea to always put something in the style name to indicate it wasn’t in the box. Putting

your initials or firm name at the beginning of the style is one way to make it easy to differenti-

ate your styles from the prebuilt ones. Here, JW stands for James Wedding (EG stands for Existing

Ground).

3. Switch to the General tab. Change the layer to C-TOPO-TEXT by clicking the layer cell and

then the More button to the right of that cell.

There are a fair number of options here, so let’s pause the exercise, and look at them fur-

ther:

Text Style is the default style for text components that are created on the Layout tab. It’s

a good practice to use a zero-height text style with the appropriate font, because you’ll

set the plotted heights in the style anyway.

Layer is the layer on which the components of a label are inserted, not the layer on which

the label itself is inserted. Think of labels as nested blocks. The label (the block) gets

inserted on the layer on the basis of the object layers you saw earlier. The components

of the label get inserted on the layer that is set here. This means a change to the specified

layer can control or change the appearance of the components if you like.

Orientation Reference sets an object to act as the up direction in terms of readability.

Civil 3D understands viewpoint rotation and offers the option to rotate or flip labels to

keep them plan-readable. Most users set this to View to maintain the most plan-readable

labels with the smallest amount of editing later.