Realizing the Value of Your Civil Infrastructure Models Using Property Set Styles

BILL NEUHAUSER: Class today-- Realizing the Value of Your Civil Infrastructure Models Using Property Sets and Styles. Let me go ahead here. A little bit on myself here. My name's Bill Neuhauser, registered engineer North Dakota and Minnesota. So I got to throw a little Minnesota in there for you guys. It was a long night last night, OK? Bear with me. My throat's kind of dry, like probably everybody else's here. I'm from Minnesota. The only place that's wetter is probably Seattle right now.

So up until a month ago I was working for US CAD. Now, I'm working in the real world again for a consulting firm here. And just to let you guys know from when I set this class up last summer to now, a lot of things have changed. One, I was supposed to have a co-speaker with me. The last 15, [? 20 minutes ?] of the class were supposed to be some third party software that works along with property sets. He pulled out on me about a month ago.

And then-- so I kind of lost access to that part of it. For one, I don't know how to run it that well, so I didn't want to demo it in front of all you guys. The software's called [? Builtera. ?] I don't know if you've heard of it or not. It's a company out of Canada. It's pretty cool stuff-- really, really cool stuff. It's kind of the-- it's our BIM software that Autodesk refuses to give us on the civil side.

But-- and then with changing from US CAD set also threw a wrench in those things, too, at the same time. So about three weeks ago. I've totally had to revamp my whole class here for you guys. But otherwise-- so, yeah, I worked for 14 years with Manage Design, which was bought out by US CAD back in February. And then before that, I taught college for three years-- civil techs up in Minnesota. And then before that, I spent about 10 years in the consulting realm as a CAD manager, CAD supervisor, surveyor, engineer, whatever you want me to do, boss.

So like most of you probably are, right? So that picture there is doing some drone surveying up in Alaska. So that was on the back of an ATV. It was-- we were probably standing in about a foot of water at the time here, too. So that was actually the most fun I've had in my professional career.

So Realizing the Value of Civil Infrastructure Models Using Property Sets. OK. So your Property Sets, Schedules and Quantities. Now, just to let you guys know here, I-- even myself, and I've been using Civil 3D since it came out, 2005. LAN Desktop before that. DCA before that. But I've always heard schedules is something like, you hear mechanicals creating schedules. Architects create schedules. Civils, we create tables.

And schedules? I always thought schedules were like a table or something that you just created to show a listing of stuff. Well, what I found out-- Well, [? schedules ?] is actually a command. It's buried, it's hidden, inside of Civil 3D. There's not a ribbon for it, not in our realm. I kind of stumbled across it. And it, along with property sets, will help us do our quantities.

And so what I'm going to show you here-- some real basic stuff. And just to let you know too, the handout-- 26 pages. You can download it out. I've got it more of an instructional-type handout, step by step by step in what to do. So when you guys get back, you can walk right through it. I guess this is being recorded too, so you can come back and watch this again.

So here, one of the biggest tasks of civil engineers and technicians is quantities. Up until now, anything that is not in cubic yards is pretty much very tedious and time-consuming manual. We all know that. From your corridor? You can get all the qualities you want, as long as it's cubic yards, right? No linear feet. No surface area. It's just pretty much cubic yards. And I've never paid for curb and gutter in cubic yards before. Or sidewalk, for that matter. Or asphalt, for that matter. So stuff like that is how we're going to use property sets to extract it out.

So continue on here. What are we going to talk about? What are property sets? The data reported in a schedule table is collected from property sets that you attach to the objects or object styles you are scheduling. And then what are automatic, manual, and calculated property sets? Automatic properties are built into the objects and styles when you create the object.

And just to let you know on that too is, I'm going to show you here, I've got a blank template with nothing in it. And then I've got a template that I've put in a corridor in it. And when we go bring up the property sets, you'll see there's a whole bunch of automated property sets that just pop up as soon as you build a corridor, without doing anything. But they won't be in your blank template until you've created a corridor. And so when you want to create property sets, there's some property that you can't create unless the objects are in the drawing to start off with. That's kind of a chicken and egg thing-- which one comes first? But I'll show you that here too.

So the automatic ones are stuff that's built in. Volume is one of them that's built into it. You'll see on the corridor stuff that we extract out, the 3D solids. There's a lot of information that they build into it. That's the kind of stuff we're going to extract out.

Manual is going to be stuff that we need to add into it manually-- stuff like spec and code, sheet number. Think of this-- we're going to be able to go in here and apply property sets to all of our objects in our drawing. But if you want to, you can go into those and actually specify what sheet that this object is going to be on. And so when you do your tallies, you can have it tallied by sheet.

Where it becomes interesting is, where's that match line at? And you'll have to cut out somehow. But we'll talk about that too.

And the calculated ones-- this is the interesting-- this is what I really like, is that I can take an automatic property set and a manual property set, and use that to do a formula to figure out surface area. Or one of things in the 3D solids that we extract out from the corridor, if you're going to look at them, they'll tell you the starting station and the ending station, but it's in text form. If you try to subtract that, it gives you weird numbers, because it's in text form. So we have to do some little fancy footwork here. I stumbled across something-- just pure accidental-- on how to get that converted over to an actual number.

The data's there, but nowhere does it tell you how long that chunk is. So if you've got curb and gutter going around a corner, or whatever, you don't know how long it is, but it'll tell you the starting station and the ending station. So we can do formulas there.

The other one too is resurface area, so we can calculate that. If you've got the volume of something and you know how deep or how thick it is, we can figure out what the surface area of it is. So again, we can automate that with a formula.

Come on, wake up. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

OK. So just what are property sets? The data reported in a schedule table is collected from property sets that you attach to the objects or object styles that you are scheduling. Properties contained in property sets are determined by the property set definition, which also specifies the object type, style, and definition to which the property set can be applied. Note-- Data is programmatically set, cannot be modified, and is protected, and therefore it's locked.

There's going to be some stuff that it just calculates for you-- like volume-- so you can't go in there and override that number. You'll see it. You'll see the number and it'll be grayed out. There's some stuff like that you can't touch. Oops, wrong way.

What are automatic and manual? Again, like I said earlier, automatic properties are built into them, and the styles that you create the object. Examples are width, length, height, data retrieved from other sources, such as a project or object's material. Manual-- again, that's the stuff that you can set. And the sky's the limit on what you want to put in there.

And something else too here is, spec and code-- I was thinking about this. We've got a spec and code list that's like that long, right? Especially if you're working with any kind of DOTs. They do give you the ability to create lookup tables. So you could go in there and create a lookup table for a lot of this stuff too. So instead of trying to remember what the spec and code number is for all these, you could create a lookup table.

And so you think about this-- And kind of go back, just for those that still don't know what a property set really is-- we all know what attributes are, right? You can set attributes on something like a sheet set. Think of that's kind of like what property assets are, except for we can automatically apply it to everything in the drawing.

I'll show you guys a command here. You can either go in here and set these manually-- I mean, [? window ?] them and apply the property sets to this window of items. Or there's a button that I'll show you guys later, or a command, that will automatically just apply them. Whether you like or not, it's just going to apply them.

So continue on. And schedules. Schedules are tables you can insert in a drawing to list information about selected objects in your building material. Now keep in mind here, I cut and paste a lot of this from the Help, coming from Autodesk. From the architectural side and the mechanical side-- because there is nothing in the Civil 3D Help that talks about this stuff. So you'll see the word "buildings," or some other mechanical phrases. That's why.

And in fact, in my handout here, the first couple pages is actually coming from, I think it was the architectural Help or knowledge section. And again, as civil people, we get no love, right? And prime example.

So schedule tags provide an efficient tool of collecting the property data attached to the objects for display in a schedule table. You can create schedules with varying levels of detail by defining and attaching sets of properties to objects, or to individual objects, and then extracting and displaying the data in a schedule table.

Key sentence here-- They can also be exported directly into Excel. I stop at that part in my-- just probably more time-wise. But what's going to happen here-- you're going to create a table. Now these tables kind of look ugly. You're probably not going to really use them for your design. Think of it as kind of an intermediate. You're going to show all the data here, export it to Excel, and then dress it up and bring it back in nice, pretty tables that you'll probably include in your drawings. So it's going to be a little bit of that round tripping there, so much it's going to become kind of semiautomatic. But the key is, we've got an easy way of getting this over to Excel.

Now, smile everybody. No more PowerPoint. I'm a true believer in bleeding for you. So I will run the software. I'm not going to sit there and talk about a video. How many people here are tired of seeing videos? How many people want to see somebody actually do something? OK, OK. Last day. Wish me luck. Put a timer and see the first time we get fatal errorred?

All right, let me kick out of here. OK, what I've got here is just a real simple drawing. I've got a surface, which I'm going to pretty much turn off anyway. I've got a corridor. Then I've got some simple objects here. Now I could have-- in real life, this probably should be underneath the corridor. Showing like the existing conditions here. So all this stuff is-- these are just polylines, polylines, polylines. We've got a hatch up here. We've got a boundary. Nothing special. So what I'm going to be working with is not just Civil 3D stuff. I'm working also with AutoCAD stuff.

I think the big key in this, especially on the existing items-- if you aren't already, and I'm assuming you are, being consistent on the layers you're putting them on-- and for simplicity, try to keep those layer names a little bit shorter, because you're going to see them-- they'll pop up over here. You don't want 120 characters popping up. You can't see it, right?

So if you're doing stuff, for quantity's sake, try to keep it short. It's going to be easier to see over here in the Properties window, because this is all going to pop up here. In the Properties, under Extended Data, they're going to start popping up here. Right now, if I pick on something, that's what it looks like. There's nothing here. If I go down the corridor, again, there's nothing here.

So what's going to happen here is, I'm going to take the corridor here, and I'm going to export it out-- or, I'm going export out 3D solids. And all that is-- [? so ?] grip onto here, and click on the Extract Corridor Solids. Hit Enter here, or All. Hit Enter. And we get-- this pops up.

First thing-- now box stock-- two things you're going to want to try to look at. Now for one, see where these colors are? I've spent three days trying to find what controls that. I went through the code sets. I went everywhere. I cannot find where it's getting those. Because you'll see in a minute, they're going to go in their own separate layer, but the color's going to be embedded in the object, which we all hate, right? We'd much prefer it by layer. So I have yet to find-- If, later, when you guys are playing with this, if you find out where that's at, please email me. Please let me know. I would love to know.

Now the layer naming template right here-- again, I'm trying to keep this simple. So I'm making it [? QTL_, ?] and it's going to be whatever the code is. For those that don't know what the code, that is what's embedded in the assembly. Or actually the sub assembly. So base, sub base, pavement one, pavement two, sidewalk, et cetera.

The only thing here that gets a little bit weird-- and I'll show you guys how we fix this-- is that if we have something that's only links. How many here use generic sub assemblies? They have no thickness, right? Since they have no thickness, there is no shape. The shape here is that base, pavement one-- that name you see there is coming from the shape name. So links don't have a shape name to them. I'll show you here, there's a command here that you'll have to do to convert those into a 3D solid. It's just a couple of steps, but something that the software doesn't do.

So when we think about-- The good news is, though, that with a couple commands here, we can convert those links into something with thickness, like topsoil. Think about topsoil [? being ?] placed. That type of stuff. So we can easily get quantities out of our topsoil now too. And think about how much time we've wasted just doing that on the [INAUDIBLE].

But let me show you where this is at first. So I'm going to cancel out of here. I'm going to go over to the tool space. Settings, Corridors, Commands, and down here we have an Export Corridor to Solids. Right click and go in here.

And under Styles, this code set right here-- this controls some of that coloring, I've found, but not all of it. It's weird. I was able to go in there and change it to [? by ?] layer in there, but it's still getting the color somewhere. I can't find where it's coming from.

So that's something you'll need to look at, is this here. But then down here in the default naming format, way down at the bottom here-- Layer Name Template. I came in here. And again, I changed it to [? QTL_. ?] That's because I wanted to put it at the bottom list, for one. [? Quantity ?] take off. And I used the code. Here's all the other stuff you could put in here.

Again, I want to keep this short and sweet, because one other thing we could do here in the property sets-- we can actually use that and have it show up i one of our property sets. So if you're trying to figure out where stuff is coming from, you can make a column here and it shows you what layer it's on. And so you can make a really big schedule with a whole bunch information on it. And I use it kind of as a paper trail, to make sure where things are at.

Just to let know, back to [? Builtera, ?] one of the cool things about that is that when you create one of te schedules with their software, if you go on, you can pick on one of the line items, and they will highlight in the drawing for you. So it's kind of like, boom, here they are. So if you click on it and you don't see something highlighted, it's like, OK, why? Well, it's on the wrong layer. Put it on the right layer-- boom, now it's going to highlight. So it's kind of one step past it. We all know third party software always does a couple extra steps.

So I set this up. Then I go back here again, grip on the corridor, and Extract Solids. And type in All, hit Enter. It comes up. Now you can page through here. What you're going to see here-- see this? This stuff here is automatically going to be created. I did not do this at all. This is the software working in the background here.

So if you look here-- and we'll see this in a little bit, in a minute here-- the names here. Corridor name, description, baseline name, horizontal baseline, vertical baseline, regional name. Then down here, you've got code, what side is it, pay item, if you're using the [? QTL ?] in Civil 3D classification code. Assembly start station and end station-- that's a big one. That's what I use to calculate the lengths of these solids. So I'll hit Next here.

And then this one here. This is the one where I haven't quite decided, and I haven't had a chance to test it enough. But you see here, we can turn around, insert everything into the current drawing-- which is what I'm going to do-- or we can add it to an existing drawing or to a whole new drawing. I'm not really positive how they maintain that-- if it's an [? Xref ?] type thing. So if I come back in here and change the corridor, is that a secondary drawing and an update too? I'm not sure what they're doing there. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to leave it in the current drawing here.

And then up here, they tell you what do you want to send out? What we care about is the 3D solids. Don't do 3D bodies. 3D bodies-- you'll find out, they don't work with property sets. You can't get the volumes and stuff out of them, at least not through here. So take that. Hit the Extract button. And then what I like to do at this stage-- First of all, let me close this. Let me minimize that. Dang it. I want some real estate back.

So what I'm going to do here, I'm going to go up. I've got a [? viewport ?] premade here. I thought I had one.

So for what I'm going to do here, I like to go into 3D here when I'm working on this-- just it's a little easier to grip on the solids in 3D here. But then what I'm going to do now-- I'm going to go turn off my objects. I'm going to turn off the corridor. I'm going to turn off the alignments here and surfaces here. So I'm just down and dirty here.

So if I come out here and look at this in 3D-- Remember those colors I was just telling you about? See, you've got yellow, green. I kind of like to have those different colors myself, just so I know what I'm picking on here.

Let's go up here. So now to define our property sets, I pick on this button right here. Now this brings up the Style Manager. Now that button there, it was-- so I'm under the Manage on the very far right, Define Property Sets. What you see here now, this is all the stuff that was automatically created when I built-- when I brought in the corridor.

This Drawing One, that's my standard stock template. If I open this up, you'll see there's nothing in here. But as soon as you create a corridor and bring in the solids, boom, you get all this automatically. And this is important, because I'm going to use some of this data here in my custom ones I'm going to create here. So what I'm going to do here, I'm going to right click here and say New. And I'll give it a name here. And I'll just call it Item, I'll call it Manual.

And we'll come over here. You can change the name again up here if you need to. That's kind of weird too, is you can't-- Well, you can rename it here, but you can come over to here and rename it in here also, and give it a little more description, if you want to.

And then here in Applies To. This is a fun one here, because if you're lazy, you can hit Select All. And then whatever we create here is going to be applied to every single object on that list, if you ever make one. Careful there. This sounds like you're adding a lot more to process all the time, right? And we don't want to have our drawings any more cluttered than we absolutely need to, right?

So when you first do this for the very first time, you've got to go through here, and pick and choose, what do I want to apply property sets to? And this list here is, oh, my god. So I'm going to go through here for right now. And let me see here. And see? You've even got stuff like arcs. So you have to think to yourself, OK, if I'm drawing this as a polyline, is that going to be-- If I don't have it a polyline and now it's an entity, now it's an arc, right? So I really probably should include stuff like that. So you have to kind of go through here and say, well, what do I need to choose?

And let me see here. And some of the corridor stuff here too. Feature lines. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not going to for what I'm going to do here, but you can see some of the stuff here that pops up. Hatch. Hatch is another one. Where is-- Line. And you go farther over here. We've got polylines. Where are you, baby? It's right there. 2D, 3D, and a polyline. I'm not really sure why they have just plain polyline in 2D, but anyway, it's there. And farther over is going to be solids, 2D and 3D, just to be safe.

Now good news here is that once I've kind of picked all these, later you're going to see here, when I get one of these created, I can right click on here and say Copy, and then right click and say Paste, and it'll paste it. So I'll make another callout. Then I can go in there and make my [? Civil ?] changes. But then I don't have to go through this whole list and pick all these again.

So I've got this picked now, so now I go to definition. On the far right, I use these top three the most. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't figured what to do with the rest of these. Now I'm not a programmer. I don't pretend to be. I wish I was, like probably most of you, right? Don't we all wish we knew how to program? The things we can make the software do if we did. Our boss would probably not like our timesheet, but it would sure be fun. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on here that you kind of go, ooh, yeah. It gets pretty in-depth.

In here there is two little bits of code that you want to go through and pick up on. There is a little command. Now I've got in here, I think it's called [? dump.lsp. ?] If you do a search on the web, you can find it out there. I think I come across-- we all know Lucy [? Khuns? ?] OK. A couple years ago, she had a class. In fact, I watched the whole thing here. She talked a little bit about this stuff too in there. But she had found this program. It's called [? dump.lsp. ?] It's actually a really cool program for anybody just programming, because you run it, you pick on an object, and it'll give you a list of all the stuff you can extract out of it. And it gives you all that funny coding that you need to know. I've got it listed in here.

And then there is also some more coding in there that you have to run inside of one of these in order to use that. So the bottom line is if you're try to extract something out of an object and it's not going to pop up the list over here, then you've got to run this code. And again, I've got it documented here. I should probably run it-- bring it up here. I'll bring up my handout here. Let's see here. I'll show you here. This is the actual handout that I have out here. If I could find that section here. Right here.

You can actually cut and paste this into a text file and create the program, the [? LISP ?] program yourself. And this is the kind of information that it will pop up, it will show you. And it's interesting, because you may be trying to extract something from an object that just doesn't exist. You're going, aw, darn it. Autodesk didn't put it in here. The stuff you're really kind of looking for here is layer, that's in here. The length, that's in here. And again, it depends on what it is. The elevation. So if you want to extract the elevation of an object, for whatever reason, it's in here.

And then down here, this code right here. Now this was a screen capture. I didn't put the text in here. But this code right here you also need to know. In an minute here, there's a spot where this will be inserted. Oh, it's right here, actually. Right here. So you cut and paste this in.

But again, it's all outlined in my paper here. So let's go back here. So one thing I would do here, since this is manual, two things I'm going to put in here. One is going to be spec and code. So I can manually put in what it is. And then two, it's going to be sheet number.

The third one here is kind of-- how should I say-- kind of a management thing here. We've all heard-- we all know that every object inside of a drawing has a handle. And that handle is a unique identifier to that particular object. So there's [? Wayne ?] here to actually put that in here. So when you export this out, that unique identifier goes with it.

And my thought there is somebody smarter than me could probably use that in getting this round trip back in. So if they wanted to go into Excel, do some editing in there of the data, turn around and push it back to here, they might be able to get this in here to react based upon what you've just created. But you've got to have it handle along with it, so it knows what object it needs to edit. Like I said, I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how to program that to have it occur. But in order to do it, I'm assuming this is something you'd have to do.

So I'm going to come up here. I'm going to first do the very first button there is-- Here. Slow down here. [? Add ?] Manual Property Definition. So we'll come in here, and I'll call this [? spec ?] code. And the default then--

Now this is something else. Sure, I could type an example in here-- 903-25, or whatever your spec and coding looks like. Everybody is different. Personally, I'm going to put a value in here that I know is not right. That way when I go through my drawing here, and I create a schedule, and I go down my code listing, and I see that weird number, I know, whoops, I haven't changed it yet. It's kind of my flag, saying, it still needs to be updated. So the default value here is going to be like 999.

Click in this again, and [? sheet ?] number. And again, some default number here. Now I could put sheet number one, and everything could be on sheet number one, and then just know that if it says one, I need to change it to something else. Because most of our plan and profile sheets aren't going to be sheet number one, right? They're going to sheet number [? 24, ?] and 25, and 26, or whatever. So I'm going to create that, and then I'm going to do this last one here. Whoops, right here.

Now this list you see here-- this listing here is based upon the objects I picked over here, in the Apply To.

If I had gone over to apply to, and said select all the objects, when I click on this button here, and this just popped up, it's going to come on a little warning. And say, hey, this would take a while to build. OK, you just literally told me you go out and do instead of five things, 5,000 things, this is going to take a little time to do. OK. This list will get really big.

Now, if I come over here to a click an alphabetical, you'll notice here it goes out in groups, those properties, and tells you where is it coming from. OK. So like in our case, I wanted to handle, so I come down here and there's one here it says handle. OK. And it automatically will highlight everything with handle in it then. I don't have to go through and click 10 times. I'm kind of amazed that worked. You think with some thing from Autodesk usually you have to click 10 times, right. OK. We got lucky. Thank you, guys.

So I'll click OK here. And now this is going to be an automatic, so you can't change it. OK, it's going to be one of those, and it's going to gray out on you, OK. So I'll do that, and then we go ahead and click OK.

And now, let me just show you how I can apply that one right now. You can either come out here and window everything, OK. But I'm going to show you something you got to watch out for. If I window everything, and I go to extend property data. OK, down here in the bottom these two little icons that are going, oh, I didn't know that was there.

OK, on the left one is the one I care about. Well you notice right now, I can't click on it. It doesn't do anything, OK. And I was like, well what's going on here? It took me about 20 minutes to find out I still had one entity out here still hiding on me. Remember I froze everything, right. A froze corridor, I froze surface. Well, no, I didn't. There's one little thing. See this little white line right here? That is actually the existing ground surface. OK, well, son of a gun. Why didn't that freeze?

So I've come in here, I do layer, freeze, just pick it.

OK, now, if I zoom back out and if I grip highlight these, extend [? data, ?] well, I guess I got to erase. But if i remove property sets-- oh, that's all the shape stuff. Let's go over here. OK, so there-- I click on the button there, and it's showing here-- right now, I've only got one property set out here. If I click OK right now, it's going apply that default stuff to these. If I had 10 properties sets up here, I can boom, apply them all at one time.

Now, what I'm doing here is manual. I'm just picking on the stuff and clicking manual. In the handout, there's a command, like the second to last page. It's one of these commands you go, oh, OK-- A-E-C-P-S-D-A-U-T-O attach. That's it. OK you got that memorized now? If I toggle out on, this step I just did I don't have to do. I never have to do it.

If you turn that on, whenever I create something here in Civil 3D, all these properties that are automatically be applied without doing anything. Once that happens, then I have to go back into each one of them and-- the custom ones, the manual ones, like the sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3-- I have to do that myself. I have to go in and change them from the default to something else.

But the point is I don't have to go out and select [? it. ?] So if I get five miles of road here, I don't have to go through and select every single curb and apply property sets. This will automatically apply them for you. So again, it's the second to last page, page 25. Now, you're forced to go out and download my handout. I'll show you here in the book, way down here in the bottom, second to last page. There is the command right there. A-E-C-P-S-- auto-- who comes up these names? I don't know. But anyway, how many characters long can you make one? I think Autodesk has competitions sometimes, who can make the longest command name.

So if I click on that and apply it, now you'll see these three items over here-- boom, I've got the property set data. And now I can come in here and pick on the [INAUDIBLE] one here and say, OK, this is going to be sheet number 1. And so is this and so is this, and so I can say, well, they're all on sheet number 1. And then I can pick on them, change the [INAUDIBLE] code numbers to whatever I want. So there's going to be some manual stuff you've got to do there.

Now, if I come over here-- now, what I wanted to show you here-- [INAUDIBLE] I'm going to go back into Property Sets here, and I'm now going to right-click here and say New. And I'm going to call this [INAUDIBLE]. And actually, let me back up. Do as I say, not as I do. I've got this manual one here. Remember I selected everything?

Really what I should do here-- let me cancel, go back in. I'm going to highlight this one, right-click, say copy, and then right-click and say paste. There it is. Now, I'm going to rename this and call it [? auto. ?] That way, I don't have to go through here and pick and choose the arc, and the line, and [INAUDIBLE], all the good stuff again.

Go to Definition here, and now what I'm going to do-- I'm going to remove these. I'll leave the handle one there, except for now this one's going to be auto. And I can come over and say, well, now what? Now, the weird part about this is that, OK, if I want my volume-- if I go look at a 3D solid, the volume's there. It's in properties. It's there.

But if I actually want to use it in a schedule, I've got to create an automatic property set that extracts that volume and puts in a property set. So I've got to go from the object to the property set, then to the schedule. The schedule won't take the volume from the object. It takes the volume from the property set. You follow me?

So in here, I've got to come down here-- again, I'll go alphabetical. And way down at the very bottom, pick on volume. And so this is going to be an automatic one. Not a big deal. Just take the defaults there. So now, it's going to extract out the volume. Other ones I can do here is-- show that in a second here.

Come down here. Length-- something real basic, but we've got to get it into the property sets. Another one I like here, just because I'd like to use it later, is layer. That's kind of my way to making sure I'm not having some weird layers. I'm not putting stuff on the wrong layers by accident too. This will show up, and when I do a schedule, I can create a column that says layers, and it'll show me all the layers these things are on. And it gets another way of making sure I'm putting stuff in the right place. So that's automatic.

Let me go ahead and click OK. I'm doing OK [? just ?] [INAUDIBLE] so I don't hit Cancel by accident, and go, whoops, I got to go do that again. And the last but not least here-- and how we doing on time here? Oh, better get moving. OK, last minute at least here, I am going to do [INAUDIBLE] hands quicker than the eyes. Right-click, Copy, right-click, Paste. I'll call this [? calculated. ?]

And go to Definitions. Again, turn all this stuff. Delete these. But now, the calculated is going to use in this third icon here. Now, this is where it gets a little interesting because-- and the order that you build stuff, you notice here that these other ones that we've created, the auto and the manual, they pop up down here. So I can grab something from this and use it in an equation, but I can't do it until it's a property set. So you've got to get the property from the object into a property set. Then I can use it in my equations.

So what I'm to do here is go to my [? corridor ?] shape information. And remember that start station and end station. If I click up here-- and I can throw a different value in here, just to [? kind ?] [? test ?] [? it ?] [? out. ?] Look at my result up there. Even if I come in here-- let's say 1 plus 25-- what's the result? 1 plus 25-- 26.

It's like, well, that's not what I'm looking for. I want to see 125, or 126. Now here, this is the interesting one. This one, I had to get on the phone with another-- with a real programmer, and we did a Zoom meeting here looking at this, trying to figure out how do we get this converted to an actual number? And just for the heck of it, we said, well, what happens we multiply this by 100?

Well, then we get 2,501. Well, that's not what we want. Well, what happens if we go-- we just stumbled across this by pure luck. What happens if you multiply by 100 before the value? Now, we get the result. Does that make any sense at all? We stumbled across that by pure accident. And it's like, hey, it worked. It's kind one of those things-- run, Forrest, run-- once you got it figured out.

So what I do here is I call this start station, and I'll click OK. And I'll do this again, and this is going to be end station. Going to be 100 times. And then come down here, and it's going to be the end station. And look at the value-- voila. Like I said, makes no sense. No sense whatsoever. It just works and you're happy, and so you run.

OK, so now we've got these values that have been calculated for us. And I found I have to do these individually to calculate that value property. I can't put anything else fancy in there. It doesn't like it. So next thing is to do another one, except we're going to call this solid length. And this is going to be now the end station minus the start station.

And the result's going to look [INAUDIBLE] funny over here. It does work though. And that will give us our solid length. I put that in there as solid length because some objects aren't solids. So if we do like a curb line, an existing curb line, that's [INAUDIBLE]. That's a length. It's not a 3D solid, so that's going to be a totally different length.

So do those, what you need to do is actually come out here and do a-- think about this for a sec-- automatic-- well, we did that already, didn't we, in the auto one here? Yeah, we got the length being extracted out here. So that's just some real simple ones here. What time we getting out of here? OK, perfect. My watch is going to start beeping at me. I set a timer to start beeping with about 15 minutes left, just to give me a warning. So if you wonder why my watch is going off, you'll know why.

So now, schedules-- if I go in here now, this is where, if I window everything-- come down here. Let me delete-- no, I don't do that. Let me pick these. Now, I'll tell you what here-- oh, what I need to do here-- these objects here-- in the manual here, we have-- let me find out what page it is here-- there's a command that you have to run to convert those to solids. And I'm trying to find a page here.

Where are you? Yeah, on page 21 of the manual here, convert to surface-- not solid, convert to surface-- C-O-N-V to surface. And I can pick on these-- [INAUDIBLE] a different color-- and they will look like that. Then what I have to do is convert them to-- I have to thicken them. Right now, they're flat. So I type in-- and actually, if I do this, select Similar, and I type in thicken and specify thickness-- now, if I do a positive number, you're going to have like grass being grown. If you do a negative number, you're going to have like topsoil being placed. It's going to go downward.

So I type in a negative 0.5, and now, they look like everything else. So now, if I come in here, pick on it, now you notice here-- see how I can actually add a property set? I couldn't do that before. If you do a windowing across a bunch of objects, and if that object is not in your property set list, it will basically not let you apply property sets to anything.

Like right now, there must be something else here that I selected-- oh, there goes my phone. It worked. so for simplicity's sake here, I'm going to pick on here, click this. I'm just going to say go ahead, apply property sets. And if I come over here now, pick on these, you'll see the property sets have been applied to-- let's see here-- been applied here. We get volume, assembly start, assembly end-- click on it. There we go.

OK, so here, you can see down here-- here's the sheet number, here's the spec number. So now, we can put on the sheet numbers here. We plug in 1, put in whatever spec number we want. So we start applying this stuff.

You look up here, here's all the calculated information. I don't have time here to do it, but if you wanted the surface area, what you do is you take the volume of the object, and I will-- actually, I would make another manual one here called thickness, and apply a thickness of 0.5, or 1, or whatever the thickness is. Then I'd create a formula that will take the volume divided by their thickness, and now we've got a surface area. And so we can have it automatically calculate that.