IT Management for the AutoCAD Civil 3D CAD Manager

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: All right. I think we'll get started then. How's that volume out there? A little too loud? Can you hear me? OK.

This class-- hopefully, you're in the right one-- IT Management for the AutoCAD Civil 3D CAD Manager. I'm Brian Levendowski. I work for an Autodesk reseller out of Minneapolis I support civil engineering firms, surveying firms, have done it for a lot of years. Prior to that, I worked for a number of different firms. TKDA, did a lot of airport design with them using Civil 3D. And then I did a lot of construction staking and surveying for a small firm out of Bloomington, Minnesota.

So I've been doing this now as an Application Engineer for about seven years. And it's just I live, eat, and breathe Civil 3D, just figuring out what it can do. Probably a lot like you guys in the room, just trying to make it work, right?

Oh, a question. Did everyone get the email about the handout uploaded? Everyone get access to that? Sorry I was a little late, but just last minute stuff to get in there.

So before we get started, I was walking here and I was thinking about CAD Management for Civil 3D what is this like? What it is Civil 3D like? And I think a lot of you guys can probably relate to this. And well, just tell me. Show of hands in the room, how many people are like your Civil CAD manager at your company? Maybe that's not your title, but like it's all your fault, right? It's always your responsibility, right?

And so, I'm thinking about Civil 3D. And like, what does it take to make Civil 3D sing? And I'm like, OK. It's like riding a bike, but you're riding the bike backwards, and you're blindfolded, and you're on a balance beam, right? So when you do it, it's like really impressive. When you see someone really use Civil 3D well, it's really impressive, it's really cool.

But then there's the other side of Civil 3D that we're going to talk about today, which is well, what about when you just get Civil 3D? What about when you just get that bike, right? With Civil 3D it's like the bike is missing a pedal, right? The front wheel is missing. You've got to special order the chain from somewhere, right? Like it's not ready to go out of the box.

So to make Civil 3D really sing it takes a lot of work, right? Teaching people, that's one thing. The other thing is all this background setup stuff, so that's our big focus today.

So some of the main stuff we're going to go through here. Kind of three main categories. This first one is to suggest understand all the CAD content that it takes to get Civil 3D working. And I'm going to go through a number of things here. Some of you might not need these things, because you don't do corridors or something like that. But we're going to cover it at a fairly high level. I'm not going to jump into a template, and talk about styles, configuration, and that kind of stuff. I'll give a few tips and tricks on configuration of some of this content. But mostly, it's about bringing it all together.

So first, we get to understand, what is that stuff? OK? And then we're going to talk about, how do we take all that and configure what I'm calling a mobile-friendly local setup from scratch? So we're going to do this today in 90 minutes, OK? So hang on to your seats. We're going to set up a whole profile, set up everything from scratch, so you guys can see just what it takes and really how easy it is to do it.

And I underline local. So if you guys read the description closely, what we're actually talking about doing is we're going to configure Civil 3D so that everything I need-- my pipe networks, my templates, my everything else-- is all local. The scenario is that we do that for every user at your office. And it might sound a little scary, because you've got 50 versions of the same template, you've got 50 versions of the same pipe catalog. But we're going to utilize some windows scripting to make this all work, OK? And it will behave as though we have one template on a server, and everyone's pointing to that one catalog that's on the server. And everyone's pointing to that.

What's the whole point of putting all this stuff locally? It's so that you can disconnect from the network at any point and you've got all your stuff there, right?

So a Civil 3D setup, what does this consist of? There's so many different file types, right? I came up with 30 plus different file types. I mean, you've got thousands of files, but how many different types? 30 plus different types. And dozens of file paths to set at all these different places, right? It's not just about the Files tab and Options, it's all these hidden places. And then there's places where you set stuff that saves in your profile, and you don't even realize it's saved there, right? So all these different places to set these paths.

You're dealing with Civil 3D content, right? Pipe catalogs, pressure catalogs, sub-assemblies. And they're deal with AutoCAD content, line type files, all this stuff, right?

And so, how do we make this all work together? How many people are comfortable with the setup they have for their company, right? Everything it points to-- when it comes time to deployment, to roll it out to everyone? It's just as smooth as ever, right? It's great. You just love it, right? It's not it's not that easy, OK?

So hopefully, what I can teach you today is a few tips at least, and how to make it a little easier for you. And my big point today is to show you how to do this all locally, so at any point, someone can disconnect.

I've taken all these file types, and I've broken them into what I'm going to call 10 different categories. The main one is the AutoCAD profile, OK? And this points to nine other categories. And we're going to dive into these. And actually open up that file there, that little mind map.

Whether you guys realize it or not, absolutely everything in Civil 3D, AutoCAD for that matter, can be controlled by a profile, absolutely everything can, OK? There isn't like, we'll import the profile, and then they got to do these nine steps to make their Civil 3D work. Absolutely everything can be saved in the profile. And we can boil it down to two clicks, really even one click, to get someone going on your custom setup. It's install the software, run a script.

And I want to make one other point about setting this up locally. Why would we do this? Why would we set things up locally? It's because we can't connect to the network. We have a bad connection or I need to work from a truck or I need to work from home, and VPN stinks, right? That's the main reason for this, OK? So the content is the content. Where are we putting it? We're going to put it on the c-drive now.

Like I said, [INAUDIBLE] office, the VPN connection doesn't cut it. And I see a lot of firms. I work with a lot of firms. And they often have this in office setup. And it's like, oh, Sarah is going to go work from home for this next week or the weekend. And I've got to set her up, and get her set up from working from home. And then you've got like two profiles or the user just has to figure it out on their own. And it's kind of a big pain in the butt.

And another little bonus. If you put all this stuff on your c-drive, and you have nice fast SSDs, it's actually going to be faster. Loading tool palettes, loading everything will be faster in most cases, depending on your network speed.

All right. We're going to work through this little mind map here, OK? And we're going to go through all the content pretty briefly. We're not going to dive into every little file type, but just so we know, OK, I need that if I'm to be setting up Civil 3D for my company, OK? And so, nine categories. So I'm just going to start diving in here.

What am I calling basics? These are AutoCAD basics. These are line types. Do you have any custom ones? Do your fonts, shape files, hatches, a custom PGP file, OK? That's all pretty clear to everyone, right? These are the basics, right? We need that stuff, OK?

As we go through this, I'm going to be setting up a profile. Let me get another show of hands. How many people routinely make an AutoCAD profile? If you don't know what that is, then you're not doing it. If you make a profile, and you push that out to everyone in some way or another, how many people routinely do that? OK. So maybe about half, OK?

What I'm advocating for in this class is everyone does that for everyone at their company. Maybe there's multiple profiles from multiple disciplines, something like that. But a profile is like the puppet master of all your stuff in Civil 3D.

So we're going to go through this. And as we kind of go through that content, I'm going to jump into Civil 3D. I'm going to show you where that stuff is, where you path to it. And then we're going to keep moving on, so you guys can understand, OK?

We're going to go through a lot of stuff today, OK? Don't attempt to write it all down. Have a handout that goes through it. We're recording this stuff. I want you guys to leave today just knowing, wow, that's all possible, OK? I can do this. And then, go get the handout, go get the video, and make it happen at your office.

So we're going to start. This is Civil 3D 2017 Imperial. And the first thing right off the bat before you do anything is you've got to make a profile. So I'm going to call this Civil 3D-CTC.

I'm going to set that current. And when I do an add to the list from Civil 3D Imperial, it's just taking the out of the box one with all of those paths and so forth, OK?

And right off the bat, where do we point to things like line types and that? We do it in the support file search path. And the way I like to do this is before you set up your profile, you have to put that content in the right place. So I'm going to give you another recommendation on a file structure for this content.

I'm placing this right on my c-drive, CTC CAD, OK? 2017. Your set of content may vary from version to version. And then I've got all the different platforms under 2017. 3ds, maybe I have it in my office. Navisworks, Map 3D, and so forth. We're in Civil 3D, OK? And here's those 10 categories that I have over here, OK? So that's what we're working from.

And right off, we're starting out with basics. So this path right here has to be in here, OK? And a lot of you guys know this-- if I'm pathing to a PGP in there or a line type file, and I want it to pick up that before the out of the box definition, I got to put that path first, OK? That's it. That's your AutoCAD basics. Throw them in one folder. Path to them in one path. Throw them at the top, OK?

I'm not going to get into creating all this stuff. But once you have it there, that's what it looks like.

Interface. Your CUI. Your .CUIX file, right? This controls things like the appearance of the ribbon, what buttons are on the ribbon, the toolbars, the right click menus. Everything except for where you position, like the Properties window or the command line, where you position that stuff. Basically, all the toolbars, all the buttons, and everything, that's all stored in CUI.

I'm not normally a big advocate of customizing that. But if you're doing that at your company, at your firm, you want to set that up and point to that obviously. If you have some just content or custom tools in a CUI, I encourage you to move that over to tool palettes. Way more flexible in tool palettes. And once you understand how they work, it's fairly easy to manage those.

So the CUI customization files, right in there. Interface, right there. Come in here, paste that path in here. And you have to actually spell out the name of the CUI file. That was C3D. You might have a different name, something like that, OK?

There's arguments for using enterprise customization files. I don't want to get into all that. But CUI, basically not your windows over here, but all your toolbars, your ribbons, that kind of stuff. That's what that guy controls.

Sheets. All right. We're getting a little more messy now.

Everything it takes to create sheets. You have PC3 files potentially. I'm a big advocate of everyone plotting to PDF, especially if you've got 10 offices and 10 different printer types, right? It's hard to get that plot appearance the same. Might be a little pain in the butt. You got to go PDF, and then you want to print it to paper. But if that piece of paper is to look like a final product, go through the PDF. You can get your STBs, or your CTBs, your plot styles down to just one if you're using only one plotter. Or at least maybe a few.

How many people have like 50 plot styles, right? And like every person's got their preference. OK, that's your guys' challenge. If you can get them to come together, you can get this down to just a couple of plot styles, right? So that's another class.

Someone else is preaching about how to convince people and how to agree on one standard. I don't know if he's in here. Guy who taught a class this morning, he said standards is about one thing. He says, it's about speed. You standardize the way you're doing things and the way things look for speed, not because someone prefers a double spline leader, right? You do it because of speed, right? And there's maybe some secondary artistic reasons there. But the main thing was about speed, right? So maybe you can drop it from 50 to 25 plot styles.

You've got a sheet template. I'm going to show you what this is, because a lot of people may not realize quite how this sets up and how to really make this easy for your users. You've got title blocks. Title blocks are going to be relatively XREFed into this title sheet or the sheet template. And then you have a sheet set template, OK? If you're not using Sheet Set Manager yet, you should get on board. And you need to make one of these to create sheets from. All right.

Let's go like this. How many of you guys are using Windows 10? This window like docking, you can grab this stuff and put it in the corner, and then it does a quarter like then. Kind of does what you don't want half the time. But when you figure it out, it's not too bad. All right.

We're going to have sheets. What do we got to set up there? These are in a variety of different places.

As I said, I advocate plotting to PDF. So I'm actually going to back away from even setting that, because I'm going to say use the DWG to PDF plotter, or perhaps a blue beam one, or whatever PDF editor you have. That stuff will just show up in there.

But if you were to set it, you'd be selling it in that location right there. I'm going to leave that out of the box actually, so it just picks up all the system plotters and everything.

The plot styles, that needs to be set down here. Again, when I do this, I like to just browse to it out here. Sheets. It's going to be the same path. So I've got all those files in the same location.

And as I'm doing some of this, you know, it's all in the same location. Well, why don't you have a plotters folder? And why don't you have a plot style folder? Well, first of all, we're trying to trim down. We don't want 50 plots styles.

But even so, what if I had 40 files in here? I'm not going to have 40 files of the same type. Maybe I have 10 plot styles, maybe I've got 10 title blocks. The idea with a fully complete AutoCAD setup is that no one is browsing to this. This is just there working in the background. Your profile set-up is what dictates all this. So only when I'm looking in the plot window at plots styles, only then will I see that small list of plot styles.

All right. Sheets. The sheet template, that needs to be set under your template settings. And this isn't what we're making are base drawings, our design drawings from. But it is where we would want to path to our sheet template, which is this one right here, C3D sheets. This is going to be a pain in the rear. That path.

You have to tell it what actual template to use. And it barks at you if you didn't set the template, OK? So I'm setting this in here for the default template for sheet creation and page setup overrides. This is where you have your plan production template.

The DST, that's what you make a sheet set from. That's right in here. Set that same path, OK?

All right. I want to take a quick look at a sheet templates just so you can kind of see what this is and what this looks like. I'm going to go ahead and open a DWT. Go to my c-drive. CTC CAD. There's that folder structure again. And going into sheets. We're going to open up that sheets template. OK.

You want to set up-- I've got something off in there. You'll get the gist of it.

You want to set up a sheet template with all the layout tabs for sheets that you might possibly make. You've got cover pages. You've got plan and profile sheets. You've got plan-only sheets, right? Within reason, set it up for all those different sheets you would have, OK?

And so, what we do in here is we put in a title block, and we make it a relative XREF. Right down here, there's no path to it, right? So what it means is when I make a sheet from this template, and I throw it in my projects sheet folder, it's going to look for a title block and that exact same folder location.

Then the other stuff I have in here is a viewport that's poorly centered. But you can see down here, I've got 22 by 34, 50 scale, 20 scale. There's my location map. And I've got some other text in here that might be linked to a Sheet Set Manager. I've got a cover page, OK? Some of this you just set up. Not the finest looking cover page, I know. But set up just so you can get the idea of what this would look like.

So let me close out of here once. And let me just give you a taste of how you use this then. I mean, just what I've learned from a lot of different firms is they're not fully using Sheet Set Manager and a sheet template in this way.

And so, when you start a project before you make any sheet drawings, come here to Sheet Set Manager. Make a new sheet set. Because I set that path, I'm now pointing to that Civil sheet set, that CTC one. I'll name my project, new project. And I'll put it just on my desktop.

And it gives me an empty DST, OK? This thing is sitting on my desktop. When you make sheets, this is the cleanest fastest workflow for this, right? What do you need in a sheet? You need a title block. You need text. You might need an attributed block. All these kinds of things.

If I have a template setup, I can run new sheet command. And I can path to-- that's not quite set up. We'll get there in a second. I can go to that sheet's template. And remember those four tabs I had in there? Those show up here. And I can say, yep, I'm making a 22 by 34, 50 scale. And this is C5 grading, right? Open in Drawing Editor. That just means open it in AutoCAD.

An error comes in. And so, now that relative x ref thing, right? And my x ref is gone. My title block is gone.

So the way this would work is you'd go to your standard folder, you'd copy out your title block, and then you go to your project. I just dropped it right here, right on my desktop. Say that was my project. I'd drop it in here. And I come back here. And if I reload, it's going to now find that. Everything's set up, ready to go, OK?

So put your sheet drawings in the same location as your title blocks. Or if you don't like that, the location you set up in your standards folder here, the one you set up here, if you don't want those in the same location, then maybe you put a subfolder in here. And it's called title blocks or something like that. The relative location between the sheet template and the title block has to be the same in the standards folder and in the project folder.

How many people do this routinely ? OK. Cool. So wasn't a total waste of time.

What do you guys think of that? Does that seem like a pretty cool workflow? Maybe some of you guys are saying, eh, Sheet Set Manager, not working for us. Come here instead from template. CTC CAD. Sheets. Get this same interface, 22 by 34, 50 scale.

Comes in here all ready to go. It's finding that title block, because that's in the same location. Really, really streamlined workflow. User shouldn't have to be x referencing title blocks and inserting all that stuff. All right. Moving along.

We're going to skip over tool palettes for the moment, because that's kind of a big can of worms. We need some easy ones.

Base templates! I'm a big advocate of separating at least survey and design. Perhaps design is split a couple more times. A few major different design disciplines. It's rail and municipal, or whatever you might have, right? Combine this stuff as much as you can. But in a Civil 3D workflow, most commonly almost any project, you should separate your existing stuff from your design. So we've got two templates there.

Base templates. Surveying the design. And then I throw in the empty ACAD one as well. So this path needs to be thrown in some locations in Civil 3D as well.

So I go into my Options, Template Settings, OK? There's two locations here we care about. The first one, we're going to throw that path in there. The second one, default template for Q new, this is the drawing that opens when you open Civil 3D. What template does that come from? And it's also when you hit this button up here. And it just, boom, it opens a drawing. It's grabbing that one.

If you have multiple templates, it can be nice to leave that blank. And what it will do-- because otherwise you've got to specify a single template. If you leave it blank and you run this command, that says, hey, what template do you want? Instead of just giving me the design one when I thought I wanted the survey one, right?

And so, then you've got that surveyor whose been out in the field for eight months, and he's coming in. And I'm going to do my stuff. And he doesn't know anything from Adam. And he starts bringing points into design templates, right? Force them to choose, you know? So leave Q new empty.

Where am I going? Utilities. Pipe networks, pressure networks, fairly simple. Just two simple paths to set here, OK? We could we could spend a month on building these catalogs and customizing them, right? We're not doing that.

If nothing else, maybe I want some customisations, maybe I don't. I'm not sure. Just go grab the out of the box catalog, and throw it in your standards. Utility. There's my pipes catalog and my pressure catalog, right? And then you can tweak that stuff as you go forward. Oh, we need another part, or another size, or I want the material to read out this way or that way. That kind of stuff is catalog edits.

But if you haven't got there and you're just trying to get somewhat of a start in standard and place that everyone works from, then you can build on it. Just go grab that stuff.

So pipes catalog, these are hidden in a different place, OK? A lot of times we think, well, here's my profile, right? Civil 3D CTC, this is my profile. There's all these background tendrils that extend to other parts of how you configure this.

These settings right here, set pipe network catalog, those save in your profile. So go there. Go to your Utility. Set your pipe catalog. OK.

Same for your pressure network catalog. Everyone's using these, right? Love pressure networks. Awesome. Same thing, you've got a path to set to.

2017. they give you some more catalogs to work with. Definitely better than what we had out of the box. Still need some work on it to make it sing, but there it is, OK?

OK, everything so far, everything still so far is under my profile, right? And as we're going through this, think about this. Everything I'm setting is saved in that thing right there. That thing right there can export to a single ARG-- we're going to do that in a bit. That single file will dictate my entire setup.

By the way, this thing, I don't have the data set uploaded. But I'll give you guys this thing. This is an x mind file. It's a free utility you can download. I'll give you this thing. You can work with it, add to it, whatever that does to help you with your setup.

Survey. How many people use survey databases? Automatic line work. Awesome, right? There's background stuff there, right? Why can't it just all go in a template? It's such a pain in the butt. All these files are everywhere, right?

I hear this a lot. A lot of people throw the terms like, well, just put it in my template. And it's like a line type file. I'm like, well, that doesn't it go in the temp layer. Put it in My Template, and it's a title block.

And you know, it's not about your template. Template is one file. Your profile is the overarching like puppet master, like I was saying. And it points to all these things. Your template is just some of the biggest, most important stuff, right?

So this is what makes the survey databases work the way you want. And you basically have options for survey databases right here. More paths to set. Exciting, right?

OK, there's four key ones to set here. Figure prefix database. This is basically an Excel type table that dictates what layers your survey figures will land on, simple as that.

Line work code set. When I want to begin a line for automatic line work, do they use B? Do they use BEG, right? That's a line work code set.

SDB settings, these are a little more nuanced. When I start a database, do I want it to default to international foot or US foot? How many of you guys have been bit by that one, right? Pretty easy. The survey database default settings file dictates how your database starts. Start it in this state plane with US foot. That saves to this file and we can point to it.

Survey database extended properties file. How many people have put user-defined properties in their survey points for things like pipe data, right? Or like tree species data? Something besides just Northing, Easting, elevation description, right? You want more information. That definition, those extra attributes, those save in an external file as well.

And then survey user settings is a file exported from here that's actually kind of redundant with the profile itself. So let me just go set these paths. And this one is like Windows 95, this interface. You get this beautiful thing here. You set the path. CTC.

What I'm pointing to here is those files again, OK? OK, don't worry about writing everything down that I just rambled off really quickly. Again, this stuff is in the handout. In fact, all these file types that I have in a nice little spreadsheet-- I put in a really big OCD table here.

So it says, what's the category? What's the file? What does this thing do? And how do I like point to it and set it up? OK? So again, leave here just understanding what you have to do, and not every little detail.

Equipment database, you don't need that unless you're doing like traverse adjustments within Civil 3D. Up here, set the path. And can you copy and paste the path in here? No, you've got to go through this lovely interface. It's like [INAUDIBLE] exercises.

This is what you guys came for, right? To see how fast I could click through things? I swear I click faster when there aren't 180 people watching. All right. I think we're about there.

So you're pathing. Same path every one of those. These are the four main ones you want, OK? Coordinate system and units to start with. Any additional user-defined properties. Line work code set. Figure prefix database. So you path to it, and then you set the one you want, and then it comes in here.

Now, back in there, I can say export all of those paths to a location. I am going to overwrite the one I have there. This is actually redundant. It's redundant with the AutoCAD profile. The these settings save to the AutoCAD profile. With the one exception. It's kind of a weird one.

Unless you start Civil 3D in the profile you want to be working on-- versus like starting Civil 3D, and then opening Options, and then going and switching your profile. When you do that, everything in Options will switch, but this stuff won't switch. So I'm going to show you a little bit later just how to force what profile you start with right off the bat. This is one of the catches though. If you launch it in

Civil 3D Imperial and you switch to my company's profile, this stuff will be stuck on the Civil 3D Imperial stuff. So it saves in profile, but you got to launch on the right profile right on startup.

AUDIENCE: With that being true, that's why you would have that second thing. They're going to have to launch that second piece.

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: I use that as a backup.

AUDIENCE: Well, if you're forced to go through different standards for different companies, and you have to launch different profiles for different resources--

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Yes, yes.

AUDIENCE: Then the surveyor needs to make sure he launches--

BRIAN LEVENDOWSKI: Yeah, you might want a different profile. But I'm still using my survey database files, the same ones there. Yeah. Yeah, good example of how to use that. Or maybe you went to a user's machine, and they just screwed everything up. And you just went like override the settings just for survey databases. That's how you can do it.

Intersection. How many people use the intersection tool? Cool. You guys, like pretty routinely? Works for you? Kind of? It's a fine tool, right?

It's got its place, right? Fairly simple. You know, non-divided roads. Fairly standard widths. It's got its place.

Anyway, there's a path in there that dictate what subs or assemblies come in, OK? In that Intersection Wizard, it prompts you for an XML file. That XML file basically just says, use all of these assemblies, OK? Those assemblies come in, and out of the box, they don't look the way you want them to look. So you got to go into those source drawings, you got to change them. Put on different sub-assemblies. Make them look the way you want for your projects, OK?

And then you actually have to modify this XML file. This XML file actually has paths in it. I've actually got a YouTube video on website. It explains how to customize that XML file. Open a notepad editor, do some find replaces with some text and some paths. It's pretty simple.

But make multiple sets of these. There's a residential set, and then there's a rural set. If you're making the intersection work for you, it gets even better if you have custom assembly sets. And so, where you set this and where it saves it's a little different to get into it.

Let's start a drawing from our design template. And I've got just a few alignments to bring in here somewhere.

So when I run intersection, create intersection, it prompts me here. Yep, those defaults are good. Right off the bat, right down here it's saying, what assemblies do you want me to use? OK, you can go out and browse here, and go and find that. And it'll populate that list of assemblies down there, OK? Really cool.

I mean, if the intersection tool works for you, it's mind boggling how much it does. All these regions, and baselines, and targets it sets, it's really cool. You obviously wanted to use your standards, whatever typical sections you need, that's what's in these assembly files.

This path right here saves to the profile. It remembers this. And so, if you have a residential set and a rural set, like I said, it's going to remember those. And users can just come in here and go, give me that one. No, it's this one. Maybe there's a curve set, there's no curve set, all this stuff. It's pretty cool. It's worth building out.

And so, that is sitting-- if I haven't showed you-- intersection. There's that XML. There's a DWG. You'd have a whole set of those for each whole assembly set you want. And I think I got a little Christmas present. I think I got a fatal error.

You guys are probably wondering, did we lose everything? Most of that's saved to the profile already. We did backup the database settings in that file. We can bring them back in. All right. Let's go back here. CTC, that profile, OK?

Let's go to the Survey tab. Yep, see. That bugger. Here's my backup. Import settings from a file. And I will set all of that stuff as I had set there. Let's keep moving on here.

The last final one, OK? We're about 40 minutes in. We got 90 minutes. We're going to spent about 10 minutes. Or we got QTO, going to mentioned that. Then we'll get into tool palettes. I want to spend about 10 minutes on tool palettes, because there's a lot going on there. And I hear from a lot of folks like, oh, they're cool. The interface is nice, but they're a bear to set up.

There's a lot of files at play there to make that stuff work. And if you understand what they are, you really can make this nice for your users. Really easy. Tool palettes, they're so customizable.

So I did want to mention QTO. OK, so this is Quantity Take Off Manager. These are files-- again, external files, that dictate how QTO Manager. There is a pay item list. Can be a CSV file. A formula file for converting things like volumes to weights, or something like that. And the categories file. And this stuff, this actually saves in our template.

So I did an Open. Open my actual template, And go to QTO Manager. Right in here, open pay item file. And you set a path, again, to a CSV-- that's the pay item file. And then there's a categorization file as well, OK?

So when you start new drawings, this QTO manager will have those pay items loaded into it, OK? If nothing else, use QTO manager and pay items for pipe networks. You can assign them in your parts lists. Quantifying things like pipe, lengths, and numbers of structures. It's really easy. It won't count vertical length as structures. It just counts 1, 2. You know, so there's a little extra work there. Anyway, that saves in your template.

That's probably the first one, right? That's not saving to our profile. But our profile points to this template, so it's as good as saving to our profile.

Where are we going? Over here. All right.

Tool palettes. All your libraries, all your content. How many people use tool palettes for their blocks, for any custom assemblies you have? How many people use it for like load chapters of your awesome CAD manual in it? How many people have LISP routines loaded in there? You can put anything in there. Anything you can put in the CUI, or in the command line, or in a macro, or in a list, like you can put it all in there. You can organize it the way you want. You can make cute little pictures.

(WHISPERS) I love tool palettes.

But behind the scenes, they're kind of a nightmare. Like someone played a joke on us to, you know, how this works. They're a bit of a challenge, OK? And there's two sets of files I'm going to talk about here.

There's source files. That's just your source content, OK? It's DWGs with blocks and things like that in there, details. There's LISP routines, that's just a source. I just need this button to go grab that lisp routine. and there's documents, or Excel files, or PDFs, or anything. I'll show you a few tips on selling some of this stuff up.

And then there's assemblies. You might make custom assemblies. You might have some custom sub-assemblies as well.

And then there's setup files. These are the background ones. I'm going to show you those kind of as they're created, OK? So right off the bat, we're going to go to Options. And we're going to change the tool palette path. This is the one path we care about for tool palettes. And if I come back here, tool pallet, that's the path. And right now, I have some content in there, but it's just those source files. So there's none of those goofy tool palette files, ATC files and things like that.

So I'm just going to grab this path. I'm going to put that in there. And as soon as I do that, watch, my tool palettes are going to disappear. And I go to Customize Palettes, it's empty, right? OK. As soon as I do that, though, it's going to make two of the files I start to care about, the ATC file-- this is like the overall catalog file. It just basically points to all the palette ATC files that will be in here.

So an ATC file, you get one pallet ATC file per tab you create. Things like what layer does the block land on? Those little settings and the properties of tool palettes save to ATC files, OK?

And once we start making some content over here, we're going to get an Images folder in here. And it's going to be all the little thumbnails that are created. You don't have to make those. Those happen automatically. OK.

So the ATC, that's that master one over here. That just creates automatically. The palette ATCs, those will be in here. We'll get one of those for every tab we make. The PNGs, those are the images that are in here. And then the tool palette groups, the definition of my groups, saves to an AWS file. And it's all kind of linked and messed up with the AutoCAD profile. We'll get to that one in a second.

Let's just make some of these tool palettes though. Let's actually open up some of those source drawings. Go into my DWGs. I'm going to open up the miscellaneous blocks, OK?

I'm a big advocate of taking entire categories of blocks and throwing them in a single drawing, OK? So if you have like 18,000 blocks, you know, don't have 18,000 drawings, because your content's going to be like 10 gigs. If you take those 18,000 blocks, and say, break that up into 50 categories, 50 tabs over here. The amount of data is going to go from like 10 gigs to half a gig, right?

A drawing with just a single little block in it, the little stuff in it is like 1% of the drawing. The drawing database itself that's empty is what takes a ton of space. So organize your DWGs for your tool palettes like this. A DWG for each tab, for each group. Utilities, surveys, it's different stuff like this, right? And those are blocks in there.

It's really easy to manage when you want to tweak this. Oh, wait. We want to change our standard and make this look different, right? I come in here, and I got all my trees, right? These are just some of the out of the box stuff I threw in here. OK.

The other reason is when you're building the stuff for managing these tool palettes, it's really easy to come into design center. If you guys aren't familiar with design center. And you can come in, you can look at the blocks of the drawing. And you can take all these things, and you can create a tool palette from it. Just write it all over there.

Yeah. So I'm actually a fan of coming over here, making your palette first, and then drag what you want over here. And it's just kind of a-- OK, I'll admit it-- it's kind of an OCD thing for me. The way it names that palette, it'll be utility. If you do this command, it doesn't name it the way you quite want. Either way, it works the same. But you can press and drag the stuff you do want.

And so, it turns away a little bit. So if you've got 100 blocks in here-- OK, walk away for a few minutes. But it's creating all those image files. It's writing to the ATC. It's setting everything up for me. And all my user has to do is click that tab. Boom, there's my stuff.

And what we'll get here is an ATC that says utility. And we'll get a bunch of images auto-generated from that, OK? So kind of the old way of thinking was, I for insert. Then I go browse to DWG, then it inserts. Take those things, insert them into categorical DWGs. You'll take your library and scale it down by like 95%.

How many people set it up this way currently? Like sets of blocks on a drawing? How many people have the 18,000 individual DWGs? OK, maybe 1,000, or 500, right? So lots of tabs like that, right? It's pretty straightforward.

Let's look at a couple of other things we might do on here. New palette. We're going to say standards. I want to put a document up here. I want a button. When I click on it, it opens up. It tells me how to import survey data into Civil 3D.