Project Explorer: Constant Companion

RUSS NICLOY: Welcome, everybody, to Autodesk University and this presentation on Project Explorer-- Constant Companion. This session will center around the Project Explorer tool in Civil 3D and how it can help your design process.

My name is Russ Nicloy. I'm a Civil Solutions Specialist at MACER Technologies. And I've been a user of Civil 3D since its release in 2004. I have 10 years of production experience. And then, I spent 13 years with a reseller, which means that I spend a lot of time in a lot of different areas of the civil industry.

I've worked with all facets, including with surveyors in GIS, transportation design, site design, utilities, and many other areas. And I have also been an AU speaker in multiple years. And it's good to be back this year.

So a quick agenda on what you're going to see in this particular session-- first of all, we're going to do a quick guided tour and some best practices around the Project Explorer tool. Then we're going to go in and spend some time on looking at editing object data parameters inside the window. Then we'll also look at visibly confirming design features. I think this is a really important part of what Object Explorer provides. And so, we'll take a look at that quick as well.

Then we're going to look at how to set up the display parameters for the data grid. There's going to be a lot of information available about any given object. And you're going to want to be able to trim that down, or add or subtract data from that grid as needed.

And then, also, we're going to take that information into the next topic, which is the output to tables and reports. And we will finally end up by looking at how to export 2D drawing file information using Project Explorer.

So the first thing that we're going to look at here is a quick guided tour and some best practices. First of all, in the course of best practices, I'm going to recommend that you leave Project Explorer open all the time. That's where the Constant Companion part of the name of the session comes from.

It should always be there, available to you. It's easier if it's open to go quickly get information. You don't want to have to stop, open it, and then get the information. You're kind of losing the efficiency of the tool by having to do that.

I will also recommend that you leave it in a second monitor, open so that you can access it without cluttering up the screen where Civil 3D is sitting. The Project Explorer is an open window that you can work behind. But it does take up a lot of screen real estate. So if you move it to that second monitor, if that's available, that will give you the most efficient layout that you can have.

I also want to mention that whichever file is active is what's going to display in Project Explorer. So the information that you're seeing will be from the active drawing file. You could have multiple files open. And know that what you're seeing there is the most active file.

Also, you're going to see a series of tabs at the top that indicate the different objects that you have access to. Each object has a tab. And you'll have semi-unique access through those tabs. Now, some objects have similar things like elevations or northing and easting.

But some objects have very unique items. And so, you'll see those appear and different formats show up, depending on the object that you've selected-- the tab that you're in.

Also, the data grid columns from the tables-- we're going to be looking at tables and reports later on in kind of a format. What you can do is, you can reorder those, and set settings for those, so that they're providing just the information that you need to see.

Now, you can use those for tables and reports. But you don't have to. You can, first and foremost, use that as just a way of quickly accessing information in Project Explorer while you're working with it. Using it for tables and reports is kind of an extra benefit to that.

Then, some of the tabs that you're going to look at will have a thing called an interval readout. Now, not all tabs have this. But some of the tabs have alignments and profiles that are very station-based. Pipes is where I like to use this particular tool. The interval will tell you where you are along a certain object.

And so, you can kind of, in your mind, measure out where you are in terms of your project-- give you the context of where your objects are. Also, don't forget the right-click options. The right click is important to the base AutoCAD and Civil 3D tools that we use, but it's also important inside Project Explorer. And there are some tools that, I think, the easiest and best way to get the tools is the right-click menu.

So keep that in the back of your mind as you're working through-- especially as you're learning Project Explorer-- that the right-click menu is something you're going to want to employ as you go here. So with that, let's look at Civil 3D. I'm going to open up Project Explorer. In 2022, it is in the Home tab of the ribbon now.

And in here, first thing that I want to point out is, as I mentioned, the drawing file name will be at the top of the window so that you can confirm, first of all, which file is active, and also, which file are you dragging information from or seeing information from?

If I switch over to my park project here-- notice, now, it reads "Park Project" at the top. And you saw the screen kind of flicker as things changed to match that. I'm going to go back to the park road project there. Up towards the top of this will be those tabs. We're in the Alignment tab currently. Here's Assemblies, Corridors, Point Groups.

There's also, for AutoCAD blocks-- so not necessarily all of these being Civil 3D objects, you can access a lot of different things using these tabs here. And, as I mentioned, the whole area down below will change to meet the requirements of the object that you're in.

To the right, just below that, is the creation area. Now, there's going to be one or two icons, usually, in here. In this case, we're in the Alignment tab. So this is alignment creation tools and just different ways that you can create alignments.

And because profiles are similar, or very linked, to alignments, you can go to the Profile tab, and click that dropdown, and access those as well, creating objects immediately from Project Explorer.

Next to that is an area of filters. Now, if I'm working in these profiles down here, but I don't want to see the existing round profile-- I just want to see the proposed and want to filter those out-- I can click on a filter here. And that filters the existing out but leaves the proposed. And then, I'll turn that back on when I need to see that information.

So several filters that you have access to in this area here, next to that, is the Compare area. What this does is take whatever object you have selected and compares it to some other object that's in this file. Now, that's going to be things like a surface, or another alignment, or a profile-- some other object that you might need information on.

Now, whichever thing that you've selected, I'm going to come down here to the sub-object table. We'll describe that more in a second. But in the right-hand side of that, you'll see the compared columns. Now, not all of these will be filled with information-- just the appropriate ones will-- but it gives you that context of where your object is in context of some other object in your file.

So right below that information there is the preview window. Now, this is the one that I think is really important and has really helped me out in projects recently, in fact. This area gives you another view of the object like this.

I have Alignments selected. But if I select on Profiles, I can see the profile data that's related to that alignment. Even when I have the alignment selected, I can still see the profiles. They're just not highlighted.

The same is true with Assemblies and Corridors. I'm going to go over to Pipes so you can see those showing up in this area here. Right below that preview window are the settings for it like the vertical scale, the zoom tools, also some filters here that we'll filter out.

If I don't want the grid showing up here, I can turn that off. Or maybe I don't want the text. I can turn that off and clear out my view so I can see things more clearly. I can also turn them back on and use what I need to understand the information I'm looking at.

Down below that is the object data. And below that yet is the subobject data. Now, in the object data, you'll see if I click on an object-- first of all, the subobject data responds to that. But I can come in here and take a look at certain information about the overall object.

Then, down below, in the subobject, it kind of breaks it down into its parts. Now, alignments happen to have four tabs down here-- Calculated Stations, Alignment Entities, Alignment Pieces, and Superelevation Critical Stations. Not all objects have that many. Some have one tab. Others have just a couple. But what that does is breaks this information into areas that you can find. This line is from here to here. And this kind of data is available from it.

So that information can help you, again, further understand or access the objects that you're working with. Below that is the interval area. Now, that's if an object does have that. In this case, the Calculated Stations does have that. But the Alignment Entities does not have the interval area. The interval area just further takes it that you want this information at certain stations along the object.

In this case, I'm set to 25 feet. And you can see the stations there are 25. I'll set this to 10 feet. And now, that switches out to a 10-foot interval. And I see a little bit more granular detail in between there. So I'm going to set that back to 25 so we can use that again later.

Below that area is the Preference, Layout, and Reset area. Reset is just going to reset the user interface if you've made some changes to that. So I'm not going to touch that one right now.

But the Preferences button, if I go in there, I can turn on and off different aspects of my view of my user interface, changing colors. I can also go into different tabs here for specific settings for specific objects-- again, different colors, or whether it's on or off, that type of thing.

Importantly, there is a Save button. So you could save your preferences the way that you want them, either for you to reuse later on-- maybe you have a couple of different preferences for different workflows that you use. You can do that and just use the Open command to bring it back.

Or, if you're setting this up for an organization and there's lots of users that you want to have a specific custom view, you can set that up and share that with other users. Next to that is the Layout tab. And in here, up at the top, you'll see tabs so that these are the Layout tab settings for each of these different objects. They're actually controlling the columns of the data table for the subobject as well as the object data tables there. So each tab has its own things. And you can turn them on and off. You can make some quick adjustments to it.

Here, I think the Save button is even more important because these are things that you might change on a fairly regular basis. You might have a certain setup or certain data set up for a certain type of workflow. And then you want to call that up and then, very quickly, switch to another type of workflow that provides a different type of information.

Also, later on when we get there, what you've saved here will be available to the tables and reports as we've talked about a little bit earlier there. So with that, I'm going to close that out. And that is a look at a guided tour of this window here.

The next section that we're going to look at here is editing object data in parameters. And for that, again, I'm going to return to Civil 3D here. And for this, I'm going to go to the Park Road project.

And you can see I'm in the Park Road design. I'm going to go into the alignments, the tab I'm already in. And notice that there's some magenta text and some black text. The black text is informational.

Now, there's a lot of informational text in here-- things that you can't change here, but you can change in Civil 3D and would reflect itself in those fields. The magenta fields are editable here. This profile down here has a design profile style. I can double-click on that and get a dropdown menu of all the styles that are in this file.

Now, that's an important distinction. It's accessing the Settings tab of our tool space and bringing those profile styles over so you can change them from this dropdown menu. If I click in the description field there, currently says "none"-- I get a typing box, a box that I can just type whatever description I need in there. So different kind of information there.

If I go into the Assembly tab-- first of all, in the objects up above, you can see the different assemblies in this particular file. In the third assembly there, this is the subassembly information. And you can see it's all the way that I set it up earlier as I was setting up my assembly.

And in there, I can choose to go to the different subassembly parts and see the parameters on the side. Now, again, there's some magenta text in there that we can edit. I'm going to come over here and edit the width of this lane. I'll just double-click in that and then type in 15, or use the arrows to slide up to a number and click OK.

So, again, a slightly different way to access a field, but all of these have something in common. And that is that you double-click to access it and then make the change in a small dialog box.

Something else that I want to show here is in the Pipes area, I'm going to go to the Pipes subobject entity instead of the structures there.

And first of all, notice that there's some red text in here as well as the magenta text. The red text is indicating that there is a problem somewhere in here.

Now, the idea is, if you're scrolled over a little too far, you can't see the beginning row. But you can still tell that there's an error and actually read what that error is. A minimum pipe cover of 6 feet is violated.

If I scroll back over here, there are little markers that indicate that as well. But they are editable, just like the magenta text. So I'm going to come in here. And maybe I just need to adjust this pipe. I'm going to double-click in an elevation or in the slope field. And you would get all of this information here.

Basically, you can change your mind how you want to edit this by the different choices that you have here-- pipe elevation by crown, center line, or invert. Do you want to hold the start or do you want to hold the end-- notice it's closing fields off for me as I do that-- or hold both?

With this selected, I could type in an actual elevation or I could give it a relative elevation. I need to raise this up by 6 feet or drop it down by a foot and a half. I could type that number in. And it would adjust that way.

I could also enter in the pipe slope, remembering which direction I'm going-- hold the start or holding the end, that makes a difference to the slope-- or the pipe rise over run, if you prefer that kind of entry method.

Another thing I particularly like about this dialog box is, it has the start structure, and the end structure, and then the pipe length-- both 2D and 3D. So you get that context for what you're doing and how you're changing things, if that's going to help you out in the process.

So that's a look at how to edit here. But let's go in and take a look at how to visibly confirm design features. And for this, we're going to use the preview window to do this.

I am going to go over to my park project. And I've been doing some grading. So I'll go to the Feature Line tool there. And you'll notice here that I've got a couple of ponds. I got a pond top east and a pond top. And the feature line that I'm looking at here is in a kind of profile view.

Now, first of all, I really like that, because it helps me understand where the slopes are and where things are in relation to each other elevation-wise, not just the horizontal look of it. But as I'm going through these, generally I'm seeing a profile look to it.

When I get up to the berm, I notice, wait a second, something doesn't look right here. What has happened here is, somebody entered something incorrectly or tweaked something incorrectly-- maybe snapped to something that they didn't intend to.

And now, the profile view, the preview, is taller or deeper than it is wide. And I can't think of a better way to quickly let me know that there's a problem here that needs to be investigated. So for this, I'm going to go down into the subobject table, scroll through here and realize, oh, wait a second. I see, right here, somebody has entered this incorrectly or snapped something incorrectly.

I'm going to type in 837 and bring that in. I'm going to click off to the side and back on it so it brings that back up much closer to what I'm expecting to see. However, it's still communicating to me that there's something not quite right. There is still kind of a drop down over here.

And I know there's no drainage and no drop down in my berm. So I'm going to have to go in and fix that as well. If you'll notice, as I'm clicking along here, I'm getting a yellow marker in the preview window to tell me where I am along that feature line.

I come down here-- OK, point number six is the one that has the problem. I'm going to start off on point number five and Shift-select point number seven. Now, notice all three are highlighted. And this is where that right-click menu can come in. In this case, I'm right-clicking in the subobject menu.

And for feature lines in particular, you can control constant grade-- either holding the start, holding the end, or in my case, I like the beginning and the end. I just want to change everything in between. So I'm going to Hold Start and Hold End. And now, watch this area when I click that button. It doesn't take very long, and it fixes that to be a nice, smooth slope.

Now, you could of course come in and edit the elevation here, make some other changes. Maybe you didn't want it to be absolutely straight right there. But you can at least start with that information at that location there.

There are other things in here. Let me go to the Pipes tab here. Let me go to the road design here. That's where my pipe design is located. And in here, as far as visual confirmation goes, there's this kind of dark red shaded area down here.

What that is showing is the pipe rules for this particular network. The pipe rules have a minimum/maximum depth set. And so, it's highlighting that or shading that in this particular view. That way, I can check to see where my pipes are breaking my minimum-- or maximum, for that matter.

Now, that being said, there are plenty of spots in Civil 3D directly. You can go into the data grid view and see that there's an error saying that you're breaking a minimum rule.

In fact, we saw these rules earlier. If you hover over it here, it's going to tell you that the minimum cover of 6 feet is broken, and by how much. However, I don't know what the context of that is. Is it just one spot along the pipe, or is it a ditch at some point along here that maybe is causing that to go a little bit deeper than I expected, or is it along the entire length?

This preview I can zoom in and out of it and use that red shaded area to confirm and provide context to that error. So now, I know what I need to make adjustments to, to make sure that that pipe stays within the envelope of the depth that I need it to.

Another thing about the Pipes in particular-- and I like this with the preview window-- is that it provides a start structure and end structure option. So I'm going to come in here to Structure number 10, go to Structure number 7-- and that's one of the inlet drops to this network.

And here, you can see that ground has a bit of a drop there. We have a little bit of a ditch line there. And the pipe is broken because it's broken all along there. But you can see that that red shaded area is indicating where the actual depth is, not just some random 6-foot depth line there. So some good contextual information there.

Let's go in and take a look at the setup of the display parameters in the data grid. And if I come in here, I'm going to go over to the Alignment tool of this project.

And down here, I'm actually going to go to the Alignment PIs. I'm hoping to get some information about the alignment PIs. Notice, though, that there are quite a few columns. In fact, if I scroll, there are quite a few more columns. And some of the information I might need is actually-- I'd have to keep scrolling over to get to it.

Meanwhile, there's some other stuff that I don't need. I don't need the Direction In/Direction Out during this phase. So I can get rid of those columns and kind of clean this area up for myself.

I'm going to click on the Layout tab. And in here-- first of all, I'm on the Alignment tab-- I also want to make sure that the Column Chooser is set to alignment PIs.

This list will actually provide the object data table-- so up here, if I need to make changes there-- and also the other tabs that are available in the subobject area.

I am going to stick with the alignment PIs, though. And in this window here, I'm going to uncheck all of them and then come back in and just check the few that I want. I want to see the station, the easting, and the northing.

Actually, I like the Northing coming up first. So I'm going to click on Northing, and use the arrow to push that up above Easting there, then scroll down here and get the delta angle, and then the curve length and the chord length.

Notice that the text of these is magenta, which means that I can double-click and edit that information if I had to, if I needed to change the names to something that's better fitting my company's standards.

I can also come over here and click the Justify option. Right now, this is justified right. I'm going to double-click and set that to center. So that information will be centered in that column for me.

I do also have some other options down below that I can set here. Now, before I leave, I'm going to hit Save because I really like the setup that I have here. I'm going to call this the "Alignment PI Reports."

Now, technically, I'm using this for my display. But I'm planning on using this for my reports as well. You can use it as both or use them independently of each other. So I'll say OK to that.

And then, I'm going to come back into the Alignment PIs tab. And now, notice that all those columns are gone. And the order is the way that I want. I'm seeing the information the way that I need to. Chord length is centered, just like I'd like.

So all of that is set up and ready to go for my workflow.

That being said, let's take that over to the outputting the tables and reports.

So for this, I'm going to be in the Alignment tab here to do this. I'm going to right-click on the alignment that I'm working on and add to an object set. An object set is really just a package of things that you want to run an action on. You can add multiple objects to a set.

I'm just going to add this one alignment because that's really all I want-- just a report for it. I'm going to choose "New Object Set" in here. I'll name this the "Alignment PI Report."

And then I'll click on the "Object Set Action." The object set action really drives what goes on with the object set. So I'll click the dropdown. You can see several report functions with different formats, also some exports, including tables down below there.

I'm going to export this out to a CSV file. So I'll click on that. And then it sets that up for me. Down in the layout style, technically I already have the alignment PI table set the way that I want. And I could just use that.

Or, I could say, I want to make sure. Maybe that was three days ago. And I'm not sure where I'm at right now. I'll click on Use Specific Layout Style. Click Browse. Browse over to the alignment PI report. Click Open. And then, on the right-hand side, set some things up, including the naming template, the path to where this is located. I can browse over to my project and drop this in.

There is also a Report Style area here, very similar to Layout Style. But this has to do with the grid that's going to be involved, including font, and text height, and grid size, and so forth.

I like what I've got there. So I'm not going to changes. It's very similar to the Layout Style. I'll click OK there. And now, it says, "This now contains one object. If you want to work with it, you need to navigate to the Object Sets tab." And we will be doing that in a second.

However, now that I have that one object set created, I'm going to come over, right-click on the alignment again, Add to Object Set again.

Notice Alignment PI Reporter is there. I could add more things to that. But I actually want to create a new object set for the alignment PI tables. And then in there, I'm going to go to the Object Set Actions, come down here to the export.

Now, I was very happy to see that they've got an "Export to a Paper Space." location. The utility that I used to work at required all their tables to be on paper space. So we always had to kind of shift things around and make sure that they would go over there. This will export directly to a location in paper space. I'm going to use model space in this particular case, however.

I'm also going to make sure that this table is dynamic so that it will be dynamic to the alignment. Any changes that occur, we're going to see in that table right away. I am going to use the Layout Style even though it was for reports. I actually want the same kind of data here.

So I'll browse over and just make sure that my Alignment PI Reports is being used for that. Notice on this side, I now have an insertion point option. I'm going to click on that button to drop this in. I'll drop it in kind of on the side over here. And then, again, table style information here. I'm going to leave that alone. I'll click "OK."

And now, even though-- since I moved it off screen, it told me over there that it did finish and I need to go to the Object Set tab to work with it-- it did actually drop the table in there. I don't have to actually run this later on. It ran it for me right away.

But I'll say OK and then bring this back in.

Now that being said, the last tab here is the list of object sets that this file has. I'll click on Object Sets. And there, you see the reports and the tables. Notice that there's a lot of magenta text in here. So I could go in-- I'm going to go into the table. Double-click on any part of these. I'll double-click on the Dynamic there.

I still want it to be dynamic, but maybe I picked a bad spot for this to go. I'm going to click on Pick Insertion Point and click another point. When I click OK, it'll move it to that new location right there.

If I go up to the report, notice down below, there's object data and subobject data here as well, kind of providing a preview of what this report is going to look like. And with it lined up, everything is looking good here. I'm actually going to run the selected action.

So I'm going to run that report. It's successful. Do I want to open the file now? Yes. I'm going to click "Yes" to that. And I'll open it up in Excel for me. In here, there's some document information, but then there's the project data and the subobject data here.

Actually, I didn't want the object data in here. So I'm going to close that out and come down here to the object data row and say Object Table. I'm going to double-click and say, I want to turn that off.

Notice I'm leaving the subject table on. I'll click OK, click Run Selected Action, reopen that file, and now the object data is gone, leaving only the subobject data to be used there.

So with that, let me switch back over to Alignments, because I want to export out a 2D drawing file. Now, one of the options in the object set export was to make a drawing file. And we can do that. The dialog box is very similar to what we've already seen there.

But I do want to point out something in the right-click menu over here. And that is the Quick Reports and Quick Export. In fact, before I do the export, let me show you what a quick report looks like. It's actually very similar to what we did with the object set. It's just not permanent.

The objects that will be there tomorrow when I come back in and need it-- and maybe I need to run it again, or tweak something about it and run it-- this is going to be for now. It's not going to save it anywhere. We'll save the CSV file.

But it won't save the settings that I choose here. It's just going to fire this off quickly. I'll put a quick way that you can get to the reports here. Now we've already seen that. So I'm going to cancel out of that one. And I am going to right-click on the alignment again. Go to Quick Export to 2D AutoCAD Drawing File.

And in here, it's asked me where do I want to save it. I'll just click Save there. And then, Do you wish to open the exported drawing? Yes, I do.

And now, it takes a second here. But that's going to open it up. It opens it up in Civil 3D. But that very much looks like the alignment that I had in there. But you'll notice that it is not an alignment.

This is a 2D drawing file. That's an arc. We have lines, we have blocks, and text for the labels. And so, that is a 2D drawing file-- perfect if that is something that you need for your deliverable set. So that is something that you can do from Project Explorer in there.