AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

I have a township wide contour surface that we received with our LiDAR point clouds.  I would like to add our homemade template to these drawings to make them more useful.  These surfaces are georeferenced in our county coordinate system but the .dwg has ZERO bells and whistles relative to what our template would have to offer.

Can I impliment a dwt into the existing LiDAR surface dwg?

[#2]

It's better to do that the other way around. Start a new file with your DWT and insert the LiDAR info into it.

Styles and settings can be transferred from one DWG to another - Manage ribbon tab, way on the right is Styles. This method doesn't get EVERYTHING though.

[#3]

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jeremy.2012 wrote:

Can I impliment a dwt into the existing LiDAR surface dwg?

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No. You would have to insert the LiDAR drawing into a new drawing created from your template.

[edited] Yeah. What Matt said!

[#4]

You can't insert a .dwt, but you can save it as a .dwg and insert that into the drawing.  It is generally better to start with the .dwt and bring in the data you need, but there are times when I prefer to insert my template into an existing drawing. For example, if there are blocks or layers with the same name in both, and I don't want to override these settings in the drawing with my template settings.

So, if you go this route, you will get all bells and whistles except for any with the same name in the existing drawing.

[#5]

How do you go about inserting a dwg into another dwg?

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Use the Insert command and pick the Browse button.

Another option would be to have the surface file open, then use Civil 3D Styles Manager to import styles and settings from your template.

And yet another option would be to make a data shortcut of the surface and then reference that surface into a drawing created from the template. This lets you keep the surface drawing stripped down, but have all your settings available when you reference the surface.