Alignment Data Shortcut Scaling Issue Decimal Ft to Architectural Inches

[Anonymous]

Hi all! Generally our civil department creates alignments in drawings with insertion units set to Decimal Feet and our structural and architectural departments set their drawings with insertion units set to Architectural Inches. This seems to work great for referencing except when data short cutting civil alignments from decimal feet drawings into architectural inches drawings. If I copy paste an alignment data shortcut from a decimal ft cut sheet into a arch inch cut sheet, the alignment appears scaled by 1/12. If I add a data shortcut into a basemap that gets xref'ed into an arch inch cut sheet the alignment appears in the correct location but the station callouts are scaled by 12. What am I missing? Why don't alignments scale similar to normal linework? Is it possible to data shortcut civil decimal ft alignments into architectural inch cut sheets? Thanks for your help.

- AutoCAD CIVIL 3D 2016, 2018 with a reasonably powerful work computer.

[tcorey]

In the drawing that is in Feet, set INSUNITS to 2. In the drawing that is in Inches, set INSUNITS to 1.

[rl_jackson]

I deal with this constantly, with Carlson being a cover up of C3D/ACAD most likely this is the same issue your having.

as @tcorey  do the units change, but answer NO to the scaling part at the end.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. I checked back and confirmed that the insertion units for all the decimal feet drawings are in ft and the inches drawings are in inches. Still no luck. If I xref in a basemap with the alignments in decimal ft into a sheet dwg in architectural inches, then everything in the basemap appears in the correct location scaled properly in model space but in paper space the alignment labels are centered at the correct location geographically but scaled by 12. See below.

If I data shortcut the alignment directly into the arch inch sheet dwg, then the alignment ends up in the wrong location and is scaled by 1/12. Essentially everything works except for inserting the civil 3d alignment.

[Anonymous]

@rl_jackson See my response to tcorey. When I tried using the insunits command, the command prompt didn't ask about scaling at the end. Is that one of the check boxes available through the drawing settings window?

[rl_jackson · Accepted solution]

At the commandline -DWGUNITS

[Anonymous]

@rl_jackson Thanks that solved the viewport scaling issue! I didn't realize "dwgunits" was different from "units" or "editdrawingsettings". When I try to copy paste a data shortcut alignment into the sheet drawing it still appears in the wrong location. Do data shortcuts only work for drawings with the same units?

In case other people have this issue, here is the command and my responses to the prompts that solved the problem:

- Type "dwgunits" into the command line

- Set "unit for length" to "1"

- Set "scale objects from other drawings on insert" to "no"

- Set "match INSUNITS to drawing units" to "no"

- Set "scale objects in current drawing to reflect change in units" to "no"

[tcorey]

Data References come into a drawing in their own units. Civil 3D does not make provision for data referencing into architectural, inch-based drawings.

You can use XREF to be able to see your Alignment in place in relation to your architecture. It should have its labels placed in the xref source drawing. 

Or

You can Promote the Data Referenced Alignment, then Scale it at basepoint 0,0 with a scale factor of 12. Once you have it in place, you will need Expressions in order to scale your label values to the architectural units. I think it's way easier with Xref, but I'd like to hear others' opinions.

Lastly, are the architects not using Revit? If they are, you should know about the Autodesk Shared Reference Point utility (free with AEC Industry Collection subscription), meant for aligning Civil 3D drawings to Revit projects, and vice versa.

[Anonymous]

@tcorey Ah okay, that makes sense. Sounds like keeping the alignment within a decimal feet basemap is the way to go.

Thanks for the tip about the shared reference utility, I'll keep it in mind for the future. They do use revit but we typically work with them on non building type structures so they tend to just end up in AutoCAD.