A Practical Guide to GIS in AutoCAD Civil 3D (Part 1)

RICK ELLIS: Good morning. Thank you. It's 8:30, so we're going to go ahead and get started. I know we've got a few people funneling in here still.

But like I said before, if you have an empty seat beside you, flag someone down, let them grab that empty seat because I know there'll be a few stragglers that still come in. But if I don't get started here on time, we will probably not make it through everything we want to get through. So I want to get going with that.

So this is a practical guide to GIS in Civil 3D. So hopefully, you're in the right room for that if you've come looking for Revit or something along those lines-- and I just went on the screen. There we go, we'll try that. We're back, good. So hopefully, this class is what you're here for. With that, we will just jump right in.

My name's Rick Ellis. I am a trainer, author, consultant, do a lot of things, wear a lot of hats with that. I'm based out of Portland, Oregon. So it is very cold and rainy at home right now for me.

So I'm still cold and dry here in Vegas, I guess. Is that clapping for Vegas or clapping for Portland? You're from Las Vegas?

Well, you had a long commute then, I'm sorry, this morning. What's that? Took you 10 minutes. So I was originally a CAD manager, civil designer, worked at a firm there in Portland. And I just I tell you that because my background is really not that of a programmer. I don't pretend to be as smart of these guys as these guys who know everything that goes on behind the scenes of the program, makes it do what it does.

My background is a lot more practical and probably a lot more like yours is that my job was to get drawings done and out the door by whatever means we had to do it and whatever combination of software that took. Since the mid-'90s, which I don't really want to do the math on how many years that has been, I've been mainly doing training and consulting work for Autodesk reseller for a while doing that, started my own company in 2002 just doing just technical services around that as well. I have also written a number of books on Civil 3D, AutoCAD Map, AutoCAD and other software.

With that, this is going to be year 13 for me teaching at AU doing a number of different classes here. So that's been a lot of fun. And I am also a member of the Autodesk University Advisory Council, which is a group of non-Autodesk employees that a team got together as a group to get feedback on how the conference goes, suggestions that we have, thoughts that we have about future plans that they have, those types of things. So it's been a lot of fun to be part of.

But also, certainly, if you have strong thoughts or opinions about something, grab myself or one of the other council members while you're here. We're happy to try to pass that info along as well.

And just briefly, back home, I'm married. I've got three kids and a fourth that is a son-in-law that we have adopted through that process. And then when I'm not doing things with them and work, I coach baseball there too for little guys up through high school.

I've done high school for a number of years with that. So enough about me there. We also have three lab assistants to help you guys out in the back, and they are going to be really your first line of defense as we go through things today.

If you have questions, problems you've got a step or two behind, you need help. Raise your hand. One of them will come around and help you out. Because if we think about it, there's about hundreds of you in here.

And if I stop every time somebody had a question, we would not get very far, probably. So lean on those lab assistants for technical help like that. We've got Tony in the back. You can wave to everybody, Tony.

Tony's a civil infrastructure design consultant, expert elite. He's on Twitter and social media all the time. He's a good follow there. He's a great guy. I met him at AU a number of years ago. So we've got Tony there. Sam is in the back.

Any of you who remember AU from several years ago, Sam had his big giant picture hanging in the halls. And I was proud to say-- and I thought that was awesome-- and he is so he gets so embarrassed about it that I can't let it go on things. And you can see he's embarrassed now, which makes me happy. So Sam is our camp manager, civil designer for Haley and Aldrich, and again, a great resource here.

And then finally, the guy with the best name in the back, Rick, is back here. And I did not update this. He's not with ADG anymore, but he is an expert in AutoCAD math, Civil 3D, all those types of things there. So those three guys are there to help you.

And just real briefly on that since we're talking about them, these are three people I've met at AU over the years. And that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg. Obviously, I've been at a conference for a long time, but I think one of the greatest things about AU is the people that you meet there and the community that this does become. I mean, everybody comes for the classes, and the classes are super important. But the thing that often surprises people about AU and the huge benefit there is the people that you meet.

So I would encourage you guys throughout the conference when you sit down next to someone in a class. Don't just sit down and look at your phone. Introduce yourself, exchange business cards.

You may be sitting next to someone who might have the answer to one of the questions that you've had. But it isn't not just us up on stage for that. It also might just be somebody that you meet and becomes a good friend out of this.

I mean, who all has happened to me. And I would really encourage you guys even if you're not a real extroverted person, make the effort. There are a lot of nice. Very cool people here and do that networking thing.

So if you guys don't walk out of the class today with at least two business cards, you have failed test number one for the class. So just try to do that. I really encourage you to because it can be great.

So as far as you guys are, helps me a little bit to get a little bit of a feel for who we have in the room. So how many of you first-timers do we have? Wow, that is like 2/3 of the class.

So welcome if this is your first AU. If somebody hasn't welcomed you, let me make sure I do that. How many of you have never been to AU before? It's a different group, which is interesting.

Anyway, if you're in either one of those groups, welcome to AU. We'll move right on from that. Hopefully, things only get harder from here, guys. Do we have anybody here has been to five AUs or more?

All right, we'll jump it up here. We'll say 7, 10, 10 or more? OK, 15? It's just you and me. We have the luggage set at home from all the different AUs. You remember back when we got printed handouts and roller luggage. We were at Disney World-- imagine that.

So whether you're new or a veteran-- we won't say an older user like us. I will say veteran users-- great to have you here and hope you have a great week. One thing that you're going to be told over and over again this week is about class surveys. They're on your AU app.

Did everybody download your AU app? No, OK, you're going to want the AU app probably if for no other reason your schedule or that type of thing. But the surveys are on the AU app that you can also get to them on your AU account on your laptop or something like that if you want to. But they are super easy to fill out now because they're on the app.

You can just go down and pick things. It used to be that-- you and I probably remember the paper hand ones that you had to fill out. But it used to be that you had to go out to this bank of computers and stand in line to fill out surveys. It's was a real pain.

It's on the app. It's super easy to do. You can do it before you leave the class here. It is important.

AU does value your feedback for that. So we're not just saying that because of that to say it or because I was told to. But I know that the AU team really does use that as far as what topics you like, what speakers you like, that type of thing.

Also, we have speakers get to see that information. We do get awards based on that. So it gets a little bit competitive and things, which is all good and fun.

But I can also just say as far as myself-- and I know this goes for the lab assistants back here too-- I mean, we've put a lot of time into this and hope this is a good glass for you. We want this to be a five-star type of class. If it's not for you because you've got a question or something, make sure you ask one of us before you leave.

We want to have a chance to make it that best experience that it can be for you. I will give you a guarantee that you cannot get any other time from any other instructor at AU is that this will be the best class that you have had at AU so far because we're the first one. And nobody else will be able to say that this week.

So you might as well just get on the app right now, put down all five stars, say, type in, this was the best class I have had so far. And you'll be good to go. So enough of that. The class we're doing here actually is a chunk out of a book that I have written.

I do have a copy here with us that we'll give away at some point. They probably handed out business cards to you guys as you came in. That was not just simply shameless self-promotion. That is part of the giveaway that we're going to do.

So hang onto those because somebody is going to win something. And that way, at least one of the hundreds of us will win something in Vegas, which again you can't say very often. So we'll do that at the end of class. If you don't happen to win, you can see my website there if you wanted to get a copy because there's a lot more stuff than we are going to could be able to cover in an hour and a half here.

So as far as our agenda goes, we're going to go over a quick introduction to what we're calling GIS in Civil 3D, mainly to get us all on the same page as far as terminology goes because, like a lot of Autodesk software, terminology is half the battle. If you understand what they're asking for, you can probably figure it out. If they use some term that you don't know what it means, good luck knowing what button to pick when you go from there. So we're going to get on the same page. Then we're going to talk about importing GIS data into Civil 3D from a number of different formats.

So how do we get data in? And we're going to bring it in to begin with as AutoCAD objects, poly lines, tags, that type of thing, stuff you guys are all familiar with. Then we're going to look at some commands to label that. We're going to use what they're going to call an annotation template to do that. We'll talk about the details there.

Then we're going to import some GSM data as civil 3D objects because there are a couple of commands that will let us make surfaces and pipe networks and things like that on the civil side, which is pretty cool, because if we're talking about a sanitary sewer, I'd rather have a pipe network than a polyline. So we're going to be able to do that.

And then the last thing we're going to look at is connecting to GIS data, which is a little bit different than importing. Connecting will be more of a real-time connection, more like an xref rather than an insert. So that's the topics we're going to get through from there. As far as goals for the class go, I kind of threw this in as well.

Certainly, I could apply this to any class that you would go to at AU. You want to learn some new skills. We're going to talk about a lot of picks and clicks in this type of class. I want to make you think.

If I can make you think a little bit different about a problem that you've had, a process that you use, something like that. If you walk out of a class today and it's made you think, that's a really good thing. That's an important thing here.

And we want to have a little bit of fun along the way. What I found from doing a lot of training is if we have fun doing it, you're going to learn more. You're going to retain more.

The time is going to go by quick for that. So if we can do those three things, we had a good class in here. That would be my hope for you guys at AU in general, that AU would you'd learn some stuff.

It would make you think, and it should have some fun this week. And I'm pretty sure you've got a good chance of making that happen with what we've got here. Questions are going to come up during the class.

Like I said, the lab assistants are here to help you guys with technical stuff, you got behind by a step, or something like that. I will, depending on how fast we're going through things and where I am within the presentation, I'll take questions at the end of each topic or as we go. I also may have to cut things off to keep us on track.

So don't be offended if I don't get to you. I will hang around, and we can get to those questions later. But I do want to get through what we promised we would get through. I will be here after this session for a short amount of time.

You guys have got the keynote right after this session. Some of you might have a class scheduled. I'm actually working in another lab right after this in about half an hour after we're done. So I'll have to get to that as well.

But I'm going to be around for a while. So feel free to come up. My email address, I have given to you. It's in the handout there as well.

And there's a new thing at AU this year called meet ups, which is a very vague term. But in the expo, there is going to be an area they call a quad. And within that, there are going to be different meet ups at different times throughout the week.

I am going to make sure that I'm at the one on Thursday at 1 o'clock in the AUC quad. That fit into my schedule. I've signed up. That's technically an AutoCAD community thing. I was booked during the Civil 3D meetup, but I will be at this one.

So certainly, if any of you want to stop by and talk about any of this stuff or anything else, feel free. And if you run into me at the halls or any place, just feel free to stop me. I'm happy to talk about things. And Kurt, I know you're a big dog guy. Which way does your dog wear his pants?

AUDIENCE: My dog actually wears his pants on the right hand.

RICK ELLIS: The right-hand side?

AUDIENCE: But he has [INAUDIBLE] pair of pants.

RICK ELLIS: I figured you would be able to answer that for me. So anyway, getting into what we were talking about here as far as the concepts of this. Civil 3D is really three programs bound together into one, and it may not look like it anymore because you install it as one install.

And it's one icon on your desktop and all of those things. But Civil 3D is really made up of AutoCAD, AutoCAD Map, and the civil survey tools in Civil 3D. And there are a few places where it's important to kind of know where those dividing lines are because not all commands will work on all objects.

And it's not real apparent which one of those are which. And we're going to talk about that as we go through things. But if we just take the bottom and the top here of that graph, and AutoCAD makes standard AutoCAD objects like it has for years, polylines, lines, arcs, circles, text, all that common AutoCAD stuff that we're used to. But Civil 3D we know makes alignments and surfaces and points and parcels and all these ADC objects.

And I'm sure is civil 3D users, you've all run into the issue where you took your Civil 3D drawing. You handed it off to somebody who got AutoCAD, and they couldn't see anything. Or they got all the rectangle's width all the proxy data and stuff.

And you probably told them well install the object enabler, and you'll be able to see things. And they said, I don't want to do that. And you did export AutoCAD and all those other things.

But you're familiar with the concept. Well, AutoCAD Map between there as well. And AutoCAD Map creates some unique stuff as. Well AutoCAD Map creates object data and topologies and connected features and other things like that, that AutoCAD Map needs to do.

It's GIS stuff. And those things by themselves aren't going to be visible or usable by just plain AutoCAD. So we'll talk about that.

But also AutoCAD Map has its own set of commands. For instance, we're going to look at some of the AutoCAD Map import commands, but there's also AutoCAD Map export commands. And, for instance, the map export command will not export of Civil 3D pipe network because that's an object that comes from the list up above it here. So it's kind of above its pay grade because AutoCAD Maps says, I don't know what an AECC pipe or structure is, and it does know how to export it.

So there are some ways around that, but you've got to know which commands to use and when. And those dividing lines in between the software here-- even though they're more and more hidden, as a user, it can be very valuable to know those. So I'm just kind of pointing that out with that.

As far as importing data, there's really three different ways to import data into Civil 3D. And it's not that one is better than the other and, it isn't that newer is necessarily better. They all have their attributes, and it's a matter of understanding all of them and deciding which one is best for your particular use at this particular time.

So if you understand the tools that are in the toolbox, on your project, you'll know which one to pull out and use. That's the idea here. So we've got importing GSM data as AutoCAD objects. So any sort of shape file, anything like that you would bring in and you want to make polylines, lines, arcs, circles, text, blocks, those types of things. That's what it would do.

Importing GIS data as Civil 3D objects-- I mentioned that before we can create surfaces and pipe networks out of that currently-- hopefully, more in the future. And then we can connect to GSM data with the FDO connection, and that is going to be more real time. It's going to be fast and easy to connect.

But what you're making is not AutoCAD objects. They're map bulk features. So you would have to have AutoCAD Map or Civil 3D to be able to see these. And not all of your AutoCAD tools, like in a trim, extend, copy, those types of things, are going to work with them-- so a little bit different there.

Now last on this slide and really an important idea is this idea of feature classes. And how many people in the room do we have that would consider themselves your GIS people or have used GIS software? So we've got a couple of you. And it's OK. You're among friends. You can admit it here that last year, we had this big coming together, Autodesk and ESRI, big happy people, family, all this stuff.

Now so it's all good. Dogs and cats are living together in harmony, all that stuff, those of you that just raised your hand would be familiar with what feature classes are. Those of us who you are in the AutoCAD side that didn't, it's a different concept because we're used to I work in AutoCAD. I have DWG.

And if I want to put everything in my entire project in that one DWG, I can. I can put parcels, sewer lines, water lines, valves, structures, you name it can all go in the same file. That's all cool.

You could break it up in different files if you want. But it all could go in the same file. Feature classes on the GIS end of things are very strict definitions of a particular object or feature.

So a feature class would define a sewer line, and there would be a different feature class for a sewer structure and a different feature class for a water line and a different feature class for a water valve and so on and so forth. And those feature classes are set up by whoever defined the feature class in that particular GIS system. So it knows what type of object it is, line, polygon, point, those types of things. It also knows whatever data should be attached to that. So you've got this very strict defined outline of what that features should be.

And most GIS projects are then a project that connects to all of these different feature classes in different ways-- kind of like to simplify it on the AutoCAD side, if you had a blank drawing and then you attached an xref for every layer there was going to come into the drawing. You can envision kind of how that might work. So the reason that's important to us is on the import side of things, if you're going to bring in GIS data and you go to your local city or county GIS department and say here's where my project is.

Can you give me all the GIS data in that area? You're not going to get one file. You're going to get a whole list of files-- one for the sewer lines, one for the water lines, one for the valve, one for the parcels, one for the structures, on and on and on. So we're going to have to bring those all in together.

So just know what you're going to be getting. And if you ever get into exporting data back to a GIS system or department, you can't take your one drawing that has everything in it, push the magic button, and say export to GIS. It won't work, first of all, which is a good thing because if it did, it would just take all of that data and cram it together into one file. And you would hand it off.

And it would be kind of like when somebody gave you a drawing file where everything was on layer zero. And you all and laugh because you probably got a file from somebody like that at one point. And you know what you said about the people who gave it to you? I mean, our goal would be that you would not be that guy that makes the drawing with everything on layer zero-- same thing here.

So on the export, you would have to export the sewer lines and then the sewer structures and then the water lines and the water valves and this road center lines and the parcels and so on. You'd have to do multiple exports to make that happen. So there is our terminology to get us all on the same page.

Now as AutoCAD objects, we can import a whole list of different file formats. I'm not going to read through those. You can certainly see them, but you can see a lot of real common stuff on there.

And that's what we're going to do in our first exercise. So if you haven't started Civil 3D on your machines there, you probably have a folder on your desktop called programs. Everybody see that?

If you open that up, there will be one for Civil 3D 2019 imperial. Go ahead and click on that and open it up. I'll do the same here so that we get on the same page. Look how much faster I was than you guys.

Also hopefully, everyone brought their handouts either printed out or on your tablet or something along those lines. If you didn't, there is a data set on your machine that we're going to use, and there's a copy of the PDF in that folder. So if you can get it there.

And just so where our data set is, on your desktop, there should be a folder called data sets. And then there's our class name, which is a practical guide to GIS in Civil 3D. So you can see those. And I'll give everybody just a moment to make sure things are opened up.

Civil 3D coming up for everybody? Are we still waiting on it a little bit? Good. I've seen a few thumbs up-- really good. All right.

First step that we need to take is we need to change workspaces in Civil 3D. This is page four in your handout. Your Civil 3D probably came up on the Civil 3D workspace. If you click on the workspace chooser or if you go to the status bar at the bottom and click on the gear to get the workspaces, you will see a workspace

area called planning and analysis. That is the AutoCAD Map workspace. Why we didn't call it AutoCAD Map is a good question, one that I do not have a good answer for. But planning and analysis will change our workspace over to basically the same tools that you would have in AutoCAD Map since this is where they came from.

And you'll get a different ribbon up there and so on. We're also going to just start a new drawing so that we have a new blank empty drawing. And we're going to start it from the A CAD template, again, so that we don't have anything in it. It is just blank.

So if you go to the application menu at the top of your screen, the big blue A, tick new, you'll get a list of templates. There should be a folder that says AutoCAD templates. And inside that, you'll see that a CAD DWT. And really, the reason for that is that's a blank empty drawing, no layers, no nothing in it. So this is the nothing up my sleeves portion of the program.

So I'm not cheating up for you. Then go to the Insert tab on the ribbon, go to the Import panel, and pick the map import command. So insert, import, map, import. And you'll see that, again, we're still on page 4.

Now it's going to ask you to browse to whatever files we want to import, and this is where we're going to go to our data set. So you should be able to browse probably, in your case, out to the desktop. And at the desktop, there should be a folder called data sets.

Are you guys finding that there? Is that where they've got it in that. So go to Browse to desktop, data sets, and then inside of that would be the class name, again, a practical guide to GIS In Civil 3D. Now what you're going to see is your folders probably looks like it's empty because of the file type at the bottom. Change the file type to E, S, or I-shaped file. And then you should see a list of shape files that are in that folder.

Now this command will actually let allow you to pick multiple files at the same time. This is going back to that feature class thing that we talked about earlier. Because Autodesk knows that you probably want to import multiple files because you're going to have a whole bunch of data from the same area. You can pick one or many files at this point. We are going to select the parcels and the streets file, so you can use your Control key to just pick them both, parcels and streets, and then OK.

So we picked two files. OK, to open it up and that takes you to the import window. There's a lot going on here. The main thing is this table in the middle of the dialog box. This table is where most of the magic happens.

The first column is the input layer, and that is the name of the file we just picked. That one, if you change your mind to say, no, I really don't want the streets, you could just check that off or uncheck that box. And it wouldn't come in. The next column is drawing layer. That's the layer in AutoCAD that we're going to put all the stuff we're importing onto.

And if I was to click one of these fields, like the partial field, you'll get the little ellipses or the More button right beside it. And if you click on that, it gives you three options. You have the option here to create on an existing layer.

So if you used your company template when you started, it already had all your layers defined, you could just pick one of your predefined layers. So that's a great way to go. We didn't. We're blank.

You also have the option to create on a new layer. So any name that you want to type in, it'll make that layer for you. It's going to be white and continuous, but you can go fix that. The third option, which is not the one we're going to use. We're going to stick with the middle one.

But the third option is pretty interesting. And I want to just point it out. This says use a data field for the layer name. Now when I click this, this shows me all of the fields that were part of the feature class in the shapefile that we're importing. So this list of fields is going to vary based on the file that you got.

But this is all of the available data. And if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see that there's an option there for a layer called zoning or a field called zoning. So what would happen if I use this is if we use this option, it would make a new layer for each unique zoning value and then sort the polygons and put them on different layers according to their zoning value that's in the database.

So if you use this option, you could then change a color of a few layers. And you did some really simple quick and dirty thematic mapping by just learning one command. So it's a real basic way to do that.

Now are there are better ways to do it in AutoCAD Map? Absolutely, but this is the easy one, and it's low-hanging fruit if you want them. So we're going to go back, and we'll just to create a new layer.

We'll make it a layer called EX parcels, we'll say. I'll pick OK for that. We'll go to streets and do the exact same thing, pick the layer, pick the More button and then make a layer called EX streets. Actually, we'll do that, and we'll move on. We'll talk about that in a minute.

Next column here that we want to move to is object class. We don't really have time to get into that in this class, but it's the ability for you to create feature classes in AutoCAD. So you could define some very strict criteria for this object and set those up. And then you could map them here.

The next column over, though, is a really important one I want to talk about, which is input coordinate system. Now notice that is grayed out currently. The reason it's grayed out is because it's not going to be used because at the top of the dialog box, I don't have a coordinate system assigned to my drawing.

Now we just never assigned one. We started from the A CAD template. It didn't have a coordinate system assigned so that's where we're at.

You could assign your coordinate system in Civil 3D if you're used to doing that, or you can just click the button here. And it does the exact same thing. It takes you to a list of coordinate systems. And what you would do is you would assign the system that you want your drawing to be using. All right, right now, the drawing is blank.

So it really is just anything. If you said this is a state plane NAD 83-- pick your zone-- coordinate system and that was different than the coordinate system here, during the airport, it's going to convert from the source to the destination. And these don't even have to be the same. You could have one file that was NAD27, another one that's a NAD83, another one that's a UTM, another one's lat and long. And they're all different than what the drawing is, and they would all come together and overlay properly from that.

Now, this column for me is filled out, because that data was part of the shape file. There was a PRJ file along with it. That's not a required part of the shape file. So if that was blank, I could pick one of those fields and assign it if I knew what that was.

Now, again, this is all up to you knowing what the correct coordinate system is, because it will allow you to pick any coordinate system anywhere in the world. If I pick one-- now, this stuff happens to be in Oregon. If I pick a corner system from Australia and try to do a conversion, all hell's going to break loose on the drawing, it'll probably have an error with something that bad. But it's garbage in, garbage out. So just know that that's a great tool, though.

The next column over after that is the data column. This is the really important one. Right now, data says none. And if you leave it that way, what happens is all of that intelligence, all the data that was attached to those shape files, is left behind when we do the important, and you get geometry only. So if you only want geometry, that's cool. Leave it as none.

But most likely, you want the data. And this is where the GIS people all look at-- they stick their nose up at CAD and say, oh, it doesn't have any intelligence to it, and that type of thing. And if you strip out the data, yes. That's the same thing as if we brought in a DXF file. So I'm going to click on None. And we can see the options that I have here are Do Not Import Attribute Data.

Now, just a quick aside-- the word "attribute" here is used different than it is typically in AutoCAD. In AutoCAD, when I say attributes, most of us AutoCAD people think blocks, right? Not the case. A block attribute is an attribute, but this-- an attribute here is any sort of textual data information that is attached to an object. So it doesn't have to be a block.

If I say Create Object Data, what it will do-- and that's what we are going to do, so go ahead and pick that-- is it's going to create an object data table that is saved in the DWG file. It has this name. And you can change the name, if you like. And it, by default, takes all the data associated with that file and populates that table with them.

So it's going to bring along all of my partial data-- zoning, property value, owner name, address-- whatever happens to be in there. It's all coming with him. There's a third option that's grayed out. If you have a connected database-- be it an ODBC connection or any other connection that you can establish for a link template-- it would show up here. And we could attach and populate that database.

We're going to do object data, because it's a quick and easy one. I'll pick OK. We'll go do the same thing for streets. Pick Data, pick the button, pick Object Data. And this time, pick Select Fields. This is not an all or nothing scenario. Here's a list of all the fields of data that go along with this. You can be selective. You can go down the list and say, I don't need this, I do need that.

When in doubt, leave it in, because if you don't import it, the only way to actually get it is to go back and re-import it again. So if you're not sure, leave it in there. What we're going to do, in this particular case, is only bring in the owner name-- all right, or the Name Full category. I'm sorry. Name Full, Speed, and Type.

Yeah. Now, you might notice there is no Select All, Clear All option. Our Shift and Control don't work like normal Windows stuff does in this dialog box. It's a one at a time deal. Kind of a bummer. But you can get through it.

So those three attributes are all I care about-- Name Full, Speed, and Type. We'll pick OK off of that. And OK again to get back to the original dialog box. Now, last here is the Points column. And that Points column really doesn't apply to any of the data we're bringing in, because the data we're bringing in is lines and polygons.

If you had points-- like maybe you had sewer structures that were coming in-- you could assign a block to that. So that's where the points column would come into play. In the upper right corner, there is a Spatial Filter option by default. We have it set to none. You could say, only import data within this area, because what if somebody gave you all the parcels for the entire county? I probably don't need all that information, and I know it's going to take a long time and make a very large drawing file.

If you draw a window on the area and say, only import what's in this area, it's going to make this import a lot faster and your drawing much smaller-- much easier to deal with. One great thing to combine with this is-- have any of you used the online maps-- the Bing stuff that can be connected to through your Autodesk account? If you haven't done that, it is super simple. You just log in the upper right corner here to your Autodesk 360 account. And then there's a button that says Show Online Map. And it shows up.

Now the great thing with that is, that would orient me to where I'm at. So I could say, oh, here's my project. Now just draw a window around it and import the data by it. Or if you have any other geometry in your drawing, just to give you a reference so you knew where to make that spatial filter.

In our case, I've given you a pretty small data set, so it'll go fast. We don't have to worry about it. So let's just pick OK to run this import. Once it finishes, you can Zoom Extents.

And I'm going to turn off the grid, just because I don't like seeing the grid. But there is all the data we just brought in. Now, you might be a little bit surprised when you look at this, because all of my parcels are filled, or hatched. That's because these are not polylines. I left the setting so they would come in as polygon objects, or mpolygons, if you were to list those.

What the mpolygon does is-- the main reason for it is it understands complex polys lines-- or polygon shapes. If you just have a regular polyline, and it has another polyline inside of it, kind of like a donut, if you were to list the area of the outer polyline, it doesn't know to subtract the one inside, right?

Well, here the mpolygon understands that. It understands holes and islands and those types of things for more complex polygon shapes. It also has the option of this Area Fill, which by default is turned on. If you want to turn that off and only see the boundaries, which is what I typically do, you have to type in the command. There's no button for it, but it's called Poly Display. And that's in your handout on page 10. But it's Poly Display.

And then, at the command line, you have the option of Edges Only, Fill Only, or Both. Well, we want E, for Edges Only. And you do that, and nothing happens, right? Not the first time that this has happened in Civil 3D. You need to regen. Remember, regen is your friend.

So we'll do a regen, and now we see borders. They both happen to be white, because we made these new layers. I'm going to go back to the Home tab and my layer dialog box. Go to Layer Properties. And I'm just going to make the parcels yellow and the streets red, just so we can see the difference between them easily. And yellow and red should show up on the screen here fairly well for you.

So we have streets and parcels that we brought in. And we see the geometry, but if you want to see some of the data that goes along with this, go ahead and pick any one-- any parcel. Doesn't matter, any parcel. Right click, and then go to the Properties command. Standard AutoCAD Properties.

And you'll see all the normal stuff. You'll also see, at the very top, that the object is mpolygon, like I talked to you about. But down below, we have a header that says OD, which is object data, and the table name-- Parcels. Under that, you'll see all of the different data values that we just brought in.