Drawing Organization

[Anonymous]

I am curious to know how other people organize their drawings within projects. I work at a very small company where I do most of the design work, as well as just about all of the CAD work and I have yet to figure out the best way to set up my drawings. I have never had the benefit of working at a company with any kind of standards in place so I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error over that last couple years. I’ve reached a point where I realize that I need a more efficient structure to my drawings, so I’m turning to all of you.

What I want to know is how you split your drawings up (base survey in one file, grading plan in another, pipes in another, etc) and when to use xrefs. Right now, I typically xref the existing survey into some design drawings, but I think I could be making greater use of xrefs as a whole.

The thing that has driven me nuts with xrefs is when i have an xref in a drawing and need to turn some of its layers off since I don’t always remember what stuff was on which layer. Lets say that I have Drawing 1 xref-ed into Drawing 2: I find myself having to open up Drawing 1, clicking on things to find out their layer, writing this down, then going back into Drawing 2 and turning these layers off. It’s a hassle and it’s a reason that many times I try to avoid xrefs. Am I missing an easier way of doing things?

I know I touched on a lot of topics here, but I appreciate your insight on anything I brought up.

PS. in case this matters: we don’t use Vault (maybe someday when our company grows and we have more users…) but I use data shortcuts as needed.

[Civil3DReminders_com]

Try the Inspect to command to find what layer the object is on instead of opening the xref'd drawing. Just type Inspect at the command line then hover over the object.

Here in my office we have the potential for having lots of people working on a project so nearly everthing is broken down into seperate files (water, sewer, topo, finish grade, etc...) then xrefed or data shortcuted into the plan sheet drawings.

[Anonymous]

Wow, I can't believe I had never heard of the Inspect command before. That's extremely helpful. Thanks!

[lwreece]

Here is a link to a user group that creates some free toolbars. One of which can help with some of the layer control issues.

http://www.spaug.org

This toolbar won't work with individual elements of a civil 3D object in an xref but that's where data shortcuts and vault should come into play so you can just change the style of a referenced object instead of turning layers on and off.

You can run vault on just your machine for the moment. Later on you can either upgrade to a server or if its just one or two users they could possible just access it on your machine (make sure (but I believe you have to have IIS installed for more than one user to access vault.)

Currently the office I work in has design drawings (one for each task such as water, sewer, erosion, etc.), view drawings (xrefs of the needed design drawings and object references to produce the necessary annotation/information needed in each viewport), and a print drawing (this is done with sheet set manager for printing, publishing, and archiving purposes.)

lwreece

[lwreece]

I should note that we have a print drawing for each printed sheet.

This may seem overly complicated but it allows us to assign several people to a job in a crunch instead of overwhelming one person with all the redlines.

lwreece

[Civil3DReminders_com]

That's because its undocumented.

My current favortie undocumented command is AECPOLYGON.

http://civil-3d.blogspot.com/

[Anonymous]

Is your office pro-active when it comes to these types of issues?

Z

wrote in message news:5585648@discussion.autodesk.com...
Try the Inspect to command to find what layer the object is on instead of
opening the xref'd drawing. Just type Inspect at the command line then hover
over the object.

Here in my office we have the potential for having lots of people working on
a project so nearly everthing is broken down into seperate files (water,
sewer, topo, finish grade, etc...) then xrefed or data shortcuted into the
plan sheet drawings.

[lpkirsch]

We are trying to figure this out as well. Regarding where/how to store files, we have created sub-folders under the main project folder. The sub folders are Civil Dwgs and C3D Design Files.

In the Civil Dwgs folder we keep our base files and sheet files. We create base files consisting of existing improvements, utilities and topo as well as proposed improvements, utilities and topo. This allows multiple users to work on the same project. These base files get xref'd into the sheet files as well as into the design files.

The C3D Design Files folder contains folders for Surfaces, Parcels, Alignments & Profiles, Corridors, PIpes, etc. Each of these folders contains all the design inof and is broken out into respective Dwgs, DREF's and XML FIles folders. The Dwgs file is where the C3D design is created and is named with a *-DSNG.dwg suffix. We don't use Vault either so the DREF folder is where data shortcuts are kept and are named with a *-DREF.xml suffix. The XML folder is where we keep the xml files that are created upon export. Given the number of times I've had a drawing become corrupt and un-recoverable being able to import an xml has saved me a few times.

For a small company you will probably not need to go to the extent we have. However, if you will ever have multiple users of the design data, breaking things out as we have has made things flow smooth for us. So far at least.

Hope this helps. Looks like the other responses cover your layer questions.

[dvikse]

What do you mean by 'sheet files' ?
Base files are pretty self-explanitary.
Thx.

PS - does DREF stand for data shortcuts?

Message was edited by: dvikse

PSS - Confused now - aren't data shortcuts and xmls the same? Why two seperate folders.

I like the breakdown... i'm going to try and adopt it.
Thx.
Dallas Message was edited by: dvikse

[JulieT]

When someone responds to dvikse's comment, can you explain it like you are talking to a child? Not for him, but for me? I am a single user and don't have anyone else but me to screw things up, (and I am also very new to C3D). I need to learn all that I can, but I don't have a clue about some of this stuff and I am sure some if not all of the problems I am encountering are stemming from misunderstanding.

Thanks,
Julie