is there a way to bring symbols into a drawing when importing points that are not attached to the point...???...
in LDD they were two seperate entities, and if we wanted to send someone a drawing, but not necessarily our points we would freeze off the points and block out the drawing we wanted to send...
if I understand it correctly in Civil 3d you get your choice of using a point marker or a symbol, and either wai it is one entity...is that correct...???...
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by tcorey. Go to Solution.
See attached file. This is a initial process of field work. Civil 3D 2012.
All of your points layers are set to no plot. Change the layer setting so they do plot.
Turn off layer points. The labels will turn off and the symbols will stay on.
So what is the point of the description keys and the layer information in there?
I guess I meant to ask what is the point to set the Marker to one layer and the lebel to another if it doesn't recgonize them as seperate entities?
It does recognize them as separate, but it puts all of the labels on a single layer. You can use the DescKeys to decide what type of label to attach to each point, or have no label at all for some. I typically have no label for points that display symbols.
You can also set a layer within the point label style, although that's not my preferred method. If you do it that way then you can freeze the layer to hide all point labels using that style.
I am confused on the single layer for the points. If you have a point style created and the marker is designated as its own layer and you the lebel is designated as a seperate layer why will the marker dissapear when i freeze the points layer? Example is a gas meter is set to be on EX-GAS layer designated under the Marker component type and the Layer is Points-Utilities under the Label component type. If I freeze the Points-Utilities layer the "block" that I have designated to be on the EX-GAS layer dissapears. Is there a way to set it up to insert a block that is "not" a point marker? And by this I mean say a Tree that the block has attributes so we could apply a name and size, or is this a manual task? I could be creating a headache but I am just trying to understand where I am goig wrong.
I appreciate yours and Jeff Paulson's help on this.
It reacts just like a block or xref in AutoCAD. An xref can contain any number of layers. Those layers can be turned on and off as desired. The xref is inserted in the drawing on one layer. If that layer is frozen none of the layers within the xref display. I hope this helps.
Autodesk assumes that if you freeze an object's layer then you don't want to see it's labels either. You can do the same thing with an alignment or a surface. If you have several alignments with station labels in your drawing you can freeze the single layer which all of those labels are on and they all disappear, or you can freeze the layer of one alignment and only those labels with go away.
As far as editing the block attributes after inserting a point - no you unfortunately cannot edit the block. What you can do however is use the parameter controls in your DescKey to change the size or rotation of the block, and you can customize an individual point label to show field survey comments or other info. The Autodesk point tutorials have an example where they change the size of a tree symbol to reflect the surveyed diameter, and the label shows the species for each point.