Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Number 331

By our count 331 is how many styles are in the...

_Autodesk Civil 3D (Imperial) NCS Extended.dwt

How many styles are in your custom template?

Note: Our current KETIV Technologies drawing template contains approximately 540 styles.

Having custom styles that exactly represent Civil 3D objects and/or their annotation as they need to appear for final construction documents is likely the single most important factor that contributes to the positive satisfaction of users with Civil 3D.

Allow me the clarify what that means...

if appropriate, specific styles are available, they can generally be easily applied; and because of the dynamic nature of Civil 3D, user input can end with the modification of objects (such as an alignment). The annotation will update automatically and because of a custom style it will look correct.

So I ask the question again. How many styles are in your custom template?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Angel,
I noticed your comment on having the right styles for final construction docs. I agree completely and wanted to ask how you deal with all the tweaking needed to deal with profile matchlines. I have routines that draw "leader" callouts where the user picks the leader segments, then the prog adds the text based on the callout style. Its like a qleader, you determine the segments when you draw the callout. How do you deal with the fact that C3D styles force you into predetermined leader "shapes"? It seems to me this is a glaring deficiency in using C3D for final plans at this point.

Angel Espinoza said...

Hello James, It is true that all labels are initially determined by their assigned style. There are though other possibilities when it comes to the final appearance of a label.

One is to drag the label away from the default (defined by the style) location. This will introduce the "dragged state" version of the label. It can look exactly the same with a leader, look exactly the same without a leader, or it can look entirely differently as defined by the dragged state.

Another option is to change the label's assigned style to another style that looks more correct geometrically. This works well when some, not to many, labels need to be reassigned.

Of course, there is the challenge of creating styles that are specific enough for most conditions yet flexible enough for other needs.

As with anything customization always get one to desired results quicker. Custom styles accomplish this for many, many needs. Do styles address every possible need. No, But with a complete understanding of what is possible, many are often surprized by what they can do with the out-of-the-box stuff. I look forward to haering more.