A Practical Guide to GIS in AutoCAD Civil 3D (Part 2) (REPEAT)

RICK ELLIS: So we'll go ahead and get started. I'm sure we'll have some stragglers come in. Just curious for you guys, real brief show of hands, how many of you came to part one of this earlier today or yesterday? Awesome. If you didn't it's OK. It's not like you can't figure this out without it. But knowing that, I'm going to keep some of the preliminary stuff to a minimum. It's all still in your handout, but I don't want to retread ground that we've all been over a bunch.

Just a real short background on this, I have done the first session, which you guys that raised your hands here recently about going to, I've done that session at AU for a couple of years. And wanted to get deeper into it and do a little bit more because 90 minutes is quick in here. And there's a lot of potential ground to cover. So this is kind of an extension of that.

That first session, we looked a lot at how do you get data into Civil 3D, and different ways, and hopefully given you an understanding of what your options are there. In this session overall, the idea is going to be doing stuff with that data once you've got it into Civil 3D. So we'll look at some thematic mapping type thing, we'll look at some analysis type options that you might have, and we'll look at exporting. Because just like importing, there's not just one way to export. So we need to talk about how would you get data out of this environment. So that is it for the background there.

Most of you, if you were in here earlier I went through an introduction, told you a little about myself. Basically for those of you who weren't in here earlier, welcome. I'm Rick Ellis. I'm from the Northwest, specifically a little closer to Portland. And I'm really a CAD trainer, author, consultant. That's what I've been doing for the last 15, 20 years now. Prior to that, more on the design side as a civil designer, CAD manager at a civil firm there in Portland.

So that is a little bit about me. We'll get on with this. I do have three very capable lab assistants, or at least two capable ones and one in a top hat. But these guys are here to help you as we're going through things. I obviously can't stop and take every single question that may come up, especially if it's like, I can't find this file, or Civil 3D crashed and I can't get this. They will help you with that. Raise your hand, get their attention, they can come around and do those types of things with you.

But we've got Scott over on the right side of the room here who can help you out. Scott is an application engineer at CAD Technology Center. Has worked with Civil 3D, taught Civil 3D for a long, long time. Very capable to help you out with questions there. Kurt Marino is our man in the top hat. If any of you have ever ran into or read the Kung Fu Drafter blog online, that is Kurt. Some interesting stuff there always. Kurt's also on the AU advisory council with me, so I've met Kurt and knowing him from a long time here.

And then finally Todd back there in the center by the white board making shadow puppets. And Todd is a customer success manager at Graitech out of Houston. Somehow I got two Houston boys back here, both you and [INAUDIBLE]. And again, Todd's taught classes in Civil 3D and AutoCAD Map, and stuff forever, too. So another great help. Thanks to those guys for coming and helping out with this. It is greatly appreciated on my end and I know they'll be a good help to you as well.

So as far as you guys, I asked earlier, how many of you attended part one? Most of you kind of said that you did. I'm glad for that. Don't feel like you're in trouble if you didn't, or that you're going be lost, because we've got all new fresh data in here and we can all start from scratch. So that will be fine. within that.

With that in mind, a little bit about you guys, how many of you have some sort of GIS background? So quite a few, I mean, for a quote-unquote CAD conference. So that is great. I'm assuming using [INAUDIBLE] products? Is that for the most part-- I'm seeing lots of heads nodding and everything. So I will keep that in mind as we go through stuff and we can maybe talk a little bit.

There are surveys, those of you who were in here earlier with me heard me say this. But if other classes aren't reminding you and asking you please fill these out, it is very, very useful information not just for us as instructors, but the people at AU use that information as well. And a lot of it helps determine and shape not only who is going to be teaching in the future, but what types of classes, what types of topics you guys are interested in with that. It's one of your places to be heard and that's really important. And hopefully you've been hearing people tell you not just from here, but at the keynotes and other places that they want to hear from you that feedback is important and stuff.

That's why I'm here, that's why the three guys in the back are here. We want to make this as good of an experience for you as we can. If you don't feel like this has been good, don't go away angry or something, come up and ask your questions, make sure you can-- we'll do whatever we need to make it right in that, or make it a good experience for you.

So we're going to do a brief introduction. Some of this stuff we've talked about in the first class, but I want to just reinforce a couple of those. And then basically the four things we're going to hit are analyzing different types of GIS data in Civil 3D. Data will come in different shapes and forms and we're going to have different tools to look at that with. So we'll do some of the analyzing that. We're going to create some thematic maps and look at how you can control display of that data so that you can actually tell a little more of a story visually rather than just clicking on something and looking at numbers.

And then we're going to look at exporting. Two different export methods, exporting AutoCAD geometry into different GIS formats. And then the really kind of tricky one here is how do you get Civil 3D data like parcels, or sewer lines, or something that's a Civil 3D AECC object, how do you get that out into AGIS format? Because the map export commands don't recognize that stuff. So that's a little more of a process. And we'll go through that as well.

And like I mentioned in the first class, this is another excerpt or chunk out of that GIS in Civil 3D book that I've written. I do have a copy up here and will give away one at the end of the class. So somebody may get lucky and win one of those.

So with all of that out of the way-- oh, one more thing, questions. To keep things on track lab-wise and stuff, please lean on these assistants in here as far as help if you get stuck in something. I will take a short time kind of at the end of each topic and as time permits and ask questions of the group, or say if you have questions, we'll take them and discuss them shortly there.

After the session I unfortunately have to leave, and pack up my stuff, and go down about one hall, and set up and do this exact same class again. It would have been really convenient for it to be here, but it's not. So I won't be able to stick around a long time. But if you want to come up while I'm packing up things and talk, I'm happy to do that as well. I'll give you my email address if you come up, I can give you a business card, or it's in your handout also so you can get with me that way.

And then finally, something new at AU this year was office hours, or is office hours. And I don't know if other classes they've been talking about this much at all, I'm not seeing a whole lot of that. It's an optional thing for instructors, so we don't have to do it, which is probably why it's not in the actual agenda, you won't see it in the app or anything like that. But what it is is just a chance for us to be in a room and if you guys want to show up, ask questions, talk about this, talk about whatever, I'll be available tonight 5:30 to 6:30 in Lido 3103, which I believe is just one hall over. And that's where my last class of the day is, so that's where I'm going to do all of my office hours for all of the classes.

So I will be there. If you guys want to drop by that is awesome. There's plenty of time to do that before the party. I won't keep any of you from that certainly tonight. But just make you aware that that is an option there. And if you have other classes where they have brought up that they do have office hours, you may want to take advantage of those, too.

So we talked about this this morning if you guys were in the part one. But just a reminder, Civil 3D is made up of AutoCAD, AutoCAD Map, and Civil 3D. The real important thing as it relates to our class is that some of the commands from different pieces of that program may not recognize objects from other parts of the program.

And the real specific example of this which we are going to go through and do today in the lab is if you have a Civil 3D object, like a parcel, and you want to export that out of Civil 3D with all of its data and put it into a shape file, the map export command comes from AutoCAD Map at this level and it doesn't know what an AECC parcel is. So if you try to select them it'll just filter them out and nothing happens. You get frustrated, you think it sucks, you complain about Autodesk and all those other things.

It just wasn't meant to do that. It's not broken, it's just that it was never part of the intent of the programmers. There is another way for us to get there which we'll talk about. But just as an example, that's a command that doesn't recognize things from other parts of the program. So keep that in mind, those will crop up once in a while.

But the first thing we wanted to look at is analyzing GIS data. And since data can be stored in different ways in Civil 3D, you have to know how you have the data before you can decide what commands to use on it. For example here, we're going to start with using AutoCAD objects. For those of you who are in the class this morning when we did the import and we had polygons with object data attached to them, that's what we're talking about. How can we analyze that and work with that data beyond just the labeling that we did?

That is one set of commands and one set of processes. You also have the option of having data connected as features. Again, for those of you who are with me this morning, that was the stuff we did at the end of the lab fairly quickly this morning because we were a little short on time. That once you connected to GIS data, those aren't AutoCAD objects. So the commands that you would use to look at them don't necessarily work. So it's a different process, different way to work with it. So your first step is decide what is it that I've got, and then I can figure out where I'm going from there.

So that's what we're going to do. We're going to start with working with AutoCAD objects. So if you want to open up Civil 3D if it hasn't been already opened on your machine, and I didn't see on these-- was Civil open or was it not? OK, if it's not, right on your desktop there is a shortcut called Programs. There'll be a whole bunch of shortcuts in there. We want Civil 3D Imperial if that was not open for you.

If you have a folder on your desktop with our data set in it, I think that was highlighted for you, leave that open because we're going to do some drag and drop stuff eventually. So we may want that. So I will give you just a moment there to let Civil open up because I know it's not instantaneous. Civil 3D Imperial, yeah, or English. Whatever they called the icon there. So we'll give you just-- just a moment because I know the first time it may take a moment or two to open up.

Once Civil 3D opens, we want to make sure that we're in the Planning and Analysis workspace up at the top. So if that workspace says Civil 3D, go ahead and change it. If it happened to have been left there on planning analysis from before then you're good to go.

And planning and analysis is just the AutoCAD Map tools being displayed. Really that's all it's there. So once you get that open, go ahead and open the drawing in our data set called sewer.dwg. Now the data set for this is on your c-drive. It's C, data sets, then my name, which is Rick Ellis, and then the class-- because there's several folders in there-- is CI138252. It should.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: CI138252. It should be the second one from the bottom.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: You're going to open sewer. So what we have here once this opens up, just while I let a few of you catch up with that, is just AutoCAD polylines and blocks that have object data attached to them. Something that you could have brought in with a map import command, something that you could have made yourself manually. Yeah sure, you're good. What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: OK. So just polylines and blocks. Now to see the data that's attached to those in a very manual way, all you'd have to do is zoom in and pick one of the lines-- doesn't matter which one-- right click, and go to Properties, which is something that we did in the earlier class. And you'll see it's a polyline up at the top, all the general AutoCAD stuff. And then at the bottom is object data sewer pipes and the three fields, it has a project number, a size, and a material on that.

So at a very basic level of analysis, you could go from object to object and just click on it and look at what's there. And just like other AutoCAD features, if you pick one or more objects, or more than one, now I have two polylines. Down here in the object data I can see the project varies because they weren't the same. However, the size and material were both 8 inch PVC. So you could pick multiples. And this data is all live. So if you wanted to edit it, make changes to it, type it into the Properties window, it would update it. If you change the one that says varies, it will make them both the same.

Also as far as editing goes, something to keep in mind when we talk about object data, it's attached to the individual entity, or to the object. So if you erase the object, the data's gone. If you copy the object, it copies the data. If you explode the object, you lose all the data. Those types of things. So it's part of the object just like any other property.

Now if you want to do something a little bit more in-depth, picking one at a time is pretty tedious if you've got a large area. And if I wanted to find all the eight inch pipes, that could take me a while. Or if I wanted to find the PVC pipes that were greater than a certain size, again, that could take a little while.

So there's a different command to do this. And we're going to start by just closing that sewer drawing that we had open. So that's the first unintuitive step that we have. No need to save it, but we closed it and got out of it. Then start a new drawing with the AutoCAD template, so just a new blank drawing. We can go to the Application menu or the big blue letter A, pick New, and then go to the AutoCAD template folder and pick ACAD DWT.

So that's a blank empty drawing. And if you have the hand out there, I'm on page 4 if you are wanting to keep track of them. Blank drawing, I am going to turn off the grid just because it annoys me on there. And you might not have the task pane displayed on your screen like I don't. So if you don't, go to the View tab on the ribbon. Under palettes, the task pane says it's turned on but it sure doesn't look like it. So if I click it to turn it off, click it again to turn it back on, we'll get that large panel on the left hand side of your screen. That's the map 3D task pane. You can also do that at the command line by typing in map w space, that would bring it up as well.

We'll come back to the display manager later on. I want you to pick the Map Explorer tab. This allows us to attach other drawings, kind of like xrefs. The difference is when you attach a drawing here, unlike an xref that would just automatically display the entire drawing, this attaches it and doesn't bring it in. You get to create a query to filter through all of the attached data and you can decide what is copied into the drawing. So that's where we can start to apply some intelligence here.

So to do that attachment to start with, I can do it by drag and drop. If I pick that explorer window that we had with the data set in it-- remember, that's C, data sets, Rick Ellis, and then the class number, whichever that was second from the bottom, I'm just going to take sewer.dwg and drag it and drop it into the map explorer. Don't drop it into the drawing window. That will insert it like a block. But just drag and drop it into the map explorer and you'll see it pops up right here underneath of drawings with a path and the whole deal for it.

You can do this with one file, you can do it with as many as you want. They would just continue to add to this little tree below here. Any attached drawing is now data that's available. It's not in this drawing file, but it's available. So if you wanted to just see what it looked like-- hey, what's in that drawing? You can right click on the drawing folder and pick Quick View.

When you pick Quick View you get a dialog box. And the drawings or drawing is listed there, and it says zoom to extents of the selected drawing. I want to have that on there. If that didn't pop up, if it just did something, that means you right click on the drawing file itself one level down, which would do the quick view without the zoom extents.

So right click on the Drawings folder, do Quick View, then pick OK, and you should see once it's done, there you go, there is the sewer pipes from that other file. They are not in the drawing, that's a preview. As soon as you redraw it goes away. Also if you tried to pick it, it's a preview image. If it automatically disappeared on you as soon as it came in-- sometimes it flashes and goes away-- that means you had an auto save that happened right when you did the Quick View that forced a redraw that made it disappear. Just do the Quick View again and it will show up.

But it's a preview image because maybe you don't even know what the drawing you attached look like because you haven't opened it. It might be huge. If I type R to redraw, that cleans it up. Now the more interesting or fun part of this. We want to define a query. And the way you define a query is in the map explorer. You go down here under current query and just right click on it and pick Define. You could also double click on the current query, that brings up the same thing.

This looks like somewhat of a complex dialog box. We're going to focus in on this lower left corner, query types. Location, you probably understand what that would be. You're going to draw a window or an area, only objects in this area. Property is AutoCAD property like layer, color, line type, elevation, length, those types of things. Data and SQL, those are database attribute values. So we want to go to Data and there it's going to show me all the information about my object data.

So I'm going to tell it I want to do a data condition of object data. And it shows me then there's two tables, sewer pipe data and sewer structures. You can probably guess what those are. So we want to go find pipes. And in our case I want to find pipes that are greater than or equal to a diameter of 10. So I want sewer pipe data. The size attribute operator is greater than or equal to, and my value is 10. OK, so we're saying look through any of the attached drawings no matter how many there are and find the objects that have object data attached to them with a table named sewer pipe data and the size field is greater than or equal to 10. So it's going to sort through and find all those objects for us. I'll click OK and that's the first parameter of my query.

Now before we do anything, there is this middle section, query mode. Preview, draw, and report. Preview is what it sounds like. It's a quick view like we just did a few minutes ago, but a quick view of only the objects that meet whatever this query criteria is. So it would just preview the 10 inch or greater pipes on the screen. Soon as you redraw they'd go away. They're not really here. Draw will actually draw them or copy them into this file. So if it finds 25 pipes, you'd have 25 lines in the drawing now. And then finally Report, as soon as you click that you get the Options button underneath it. And that allows you to configure a report that's just a comma delimited Ascii file of whatever information you want to pull off of that. So maybe you want to just have it report the pipe size, and material, and length for all the 10 inch and greater pipes. And you'd get a list of those. So you can do some quantity takeoffs and things like that.

In our case, we're going to leave it set to preview because I want to just test this out make sure we did it right. And then at the bottom we have OK, Cancel, and Help like we normally do, and then we have Execute Query, which is a little different. Because normally in AutoCAD we're used to OK means go. That was do whatever I set up.

AUDIENCE: Except profiles.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah, except for profiles. There's always-- there's plenty of except for's in here. But overall we're pretty used to OK means go do this. If you click OK here, what happens is it saves all the changes to this dialog box and closes it, and nothing happens. If you cancel, it discards all the changes you made to that dialog box and nothing happens. But execute is actually what does it. So click Execute Query.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: You'll get a preview of that. Again, if it just flashed on your screen and went away, that was a redraw from an autosave. So just go back up to current query and click Define and then run it again. It will be one click to do it. At the command line it shows me it found 81 objects. So it found 81 pipes that were 10 inches and larger in the attached drawing.

So I could do whatever I want to with these from here on out. I could also get more specific. Maybe I want to drill a little deeper into that data and I want to find not only the pipes that are greater than or equal to 10 inches, but I also want to find out which ones are concrete. Because that's what I need to know.

So start off, type R for redraw and enter, get that off of our screen. We'll go back to the current query, right click, and pick Define. It remembers what we just ran so that property is still there, the greater than or equal to 10 inches. Then we'll make sure and is selected as our operator and pick data again. Select object data. We're still going to be sewer pipe data for the table. This time we're going to pick material and the value is equal to CON.

AUDIENCE: Is that case sensitive?

RICK ELLIS: I don't believe that is case sensitive on that. But it does mean you really have to know your data because this doesn't have a list of what the possible values are. That's one of the downsides of this command is that it's not-- you don't get to browse or pick out of a existing list. And you can start to see where this stuff all works pretty good if you have standards in place, and you have done things very consistently, and stuff like that.

So we'll pick OK. Now I have what would be called a compound query. I have the greater than 10 inch-- or greater than or equal to 10-- and the concrete material I'll show on there. Then I'm going to change the query mode to draw. I wanted to actually copy in or draw in the objects that meet that criteria. Pick Execute Query and those are the ones.

So if I wanted to confirm that, I could pick one of those lines, right click, and go into the AutoCAD properties command again. And there you can see the one I picked happens to be a 15 inch concrete pipe we've got down at the bottom. So exactly what I would be expecting to see off of that.

Now, that lets you analyze and just find that information. Maybe that's all you need to do is just print me out a map of the sizes of pipes that are there and do that. You could do a report like we looked at on there. Also we're not going to do it in this class, but you could edit this information and save it back to the original file. So that gets pretty interesting at some point, because without ever opening this file you could modify it. Pretty powerful as well, so it's another whole different area of things that go into.

What I want is a copy. I just want to keep this stuff that I queried in, I want to keep that standalone by itself. That's kind of the answer to my question that I analyzed. So to do that, all I need to do is right click in the map explorer on the attached drawing file and pick Detach. And you may get a little warning balloon depending on your settings. It says, hey, you detached a bunch of objects that have been queried. By doing that, you're breaking the link between these objects and their source, which means if I do edit them now I can't save them back. Which in many cases is what you want to do. If you do want to keep it attached and save back, then just don't detach from there. So it's just a-- depends on what your purpose is.

But that is how you can begin to analyze and work with drawing data, or has AutoCAD objects and attached data to it. Little bit of a process, but it really lets you-- you can start to think about how could I look at my data in different ways? I mean, one of the queries we didn't look at would include something like layer. I only want objects on this layer that have this property. You could look at parcels that have data on them and say, I want to in this area find the parcels that are a certain zoning and their property value is in this range. If you have data, you can start answering much more complex questions like that.

So that's specifically with drawing objects. Now if you have attached features, then it's a little bit different story. So we're going to go to page 11 and we'll open up a drawing called feature filter that is in our data set here. So C, data sets, my name, and then feature filter. And in the Task pane, instead of Map Explorer go to the Display Manager tab.

So what's been set up here for us is this is a drawing that already has two different files attached to it. These were, I believe, SDF files, not shape files. But the format doesn't matter. It's just we have attached data for parcels and for streets. And using the same process that we looked at earlier this morning in the level 1 class.

Now if I pick the streets layer and then go up to the Table button, it brings up the table with all the data for the streets. And I can see here we have things like length, we have the name, we have an owner column, if it's paved or not, so on and so forth with that.

Now down at the bottom, there is this-- it's not a button, it almost looks like just a little link at the bottom of the table, it's called Search to Select. Everybody see that? If I pick that, it brings up a Query Builder dialog box. Most of the attached query operations will work with this type of dialogue box. They'll reuse that pretty often. So once you get used to it it's not too bad there.

So what I can do is go over to Property-- pick that Property button-- and I can see I have text properties and numeric properties. I'm going to pick Owner under text properties, then I'll pick the equals button up above, and it says value. What value do I want to put in there?

With that highlighted, I'm going to go over to this green button, which is get values for owner. And I'll click on that green button again, and that shows you a list of each of the unique values in that field. So unlike the object data thing we did a little bit ago where I said, well, it's CON, it's not CONC, or concrete, this actually shows you the list we can pick from. So that helps quite a bit.

We're going to just select out of that list the owner name of PVT. So that's our private streets. Once that's selected I can pick insert value, the button right below that list at the bottom. And by clicking here you can see it takes that value and puts it over here into the syntax for us. So it writes the expression for you. Now, if you had typed it in and you got it all typed in right and everything, it'll all work. Once you've done that, go ahead and click OK.

Now what happened is that it went through this table, it found all of the streets that are marked as private owner, highlighted them, and selected them graphically out on the screen. So pretty quickly we just drilled through the data and said, hey, find all the private streets. So I can see them, I could then modify and make changes if I wanted to on that. So a little easier to go through that and search through the data. This is with connected data. Everybody with me there so far?

OK, next we're going to move on to another drawing. I'll close out of this data window, open up another drawing that's in our data set, and it is called feature query. And we'll open that. Now very similar here, this drawing has parcels and streets in it. But it also has a feature layer that is called flood. And that's this big polygon or two out here that are showing the flood plain.

So if what I wanted to do is go find all of the parcels that had an improved value greater than 0 assigned to the parcels and that they're in the flood plain, we can set up a query to do that. So to start with I'm going to pick the Parcels feature layer. Once that's highlighted, you'll get a new ribbon up at the top for vector layer, a bunch of commands to work with it. And we want the command Query to Filter.

So over here on the left hand side, Query to Filter up at the top. That will bring up something that looks hopefully familiar from the last command. Same dialog box and operators that we worked with before. So for this, I'm going to start by using this button, Locate on Map. When I pick that I'm going to scroll down to touching any part of-- so the old AutoCAD crossing selection set-- and a polygon. So I want to find all of the features that are touching any part of a particular polygon.

Once you do that, at the command line it says go ahead and draw a boundary. So you could draw a boundary, or in my case instead of creating one I'm going to type s for select and Enter. And then I'm just going to pick this object, which is the big boundary for the floodplain. So pick the big blue boundary.

So currently what our query says is just find any of the polygons that touch the big blue flood plain. To get a little bit more specific than that, I'll go up and I'll select the And option. So I'll click the button that says And. Then I'm going to go to the Property button. And under numeric properties, eventually you will find improved value, IMP value. So I want improved value greater than zero. So you can just type in 0 for the value.

So what we were told based on our data is that any parcel that has an improved value of zero is one that is owned by the city. The city isn't assigning those to it, so it's a private lot. So you have polygon and an improved value greater than zero. Now, to check this to see if it's going to work right, there's a button down in the lower left corner that says Validate. That will check the syntax of your equation here. So if your query isn't right, you're going to get errors and hopefully information telling you where the errors are at so you can go back and fix that.

That all looks good. So we can go ahead and just pick OK. And once it goes through and does the query, now I only see the parcels with an improved value greater than zero and that are touching that particular polygon. So

AUDIENCE: Can you change your background color?

RICK ELLIS: Oh, yeah, I will-- let's do that.

Is that better, or is that way to--

AUDIENCE: Way better.

RICK ELLIS: Way better? OK, way better, good. Until I put something yellow up there and it just fades in. So process was, picked the layer you want to filter on. So we would pick parcels. We went up and picked-- that will give you a new ribbon. We picked Create a Query. And then we said in an area based on a polygon, we selected it, and then we did an improved value greater than 0. So questions on either one of those before we shift gears a little bit? I'll get it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: Oh, we're in the wrong drawing. That's OK. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Same queries we executed in [INAUDIBLE] files [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: Question was, can the same queries be executed against GIS files like shape files in future classes? That's what we just did. These were all attached. They were SDF files, but it works the exact same way with shape files, geodatabases that are connected. Anything that you would connect through the Data Connect button here, that process is the same. So yes?

AUDIENCE: So if I wanted to print this out or anything, it's not like the other where if you do regen or anything it disappears. This is here for me to print and display?

RICK ELLIS: Yes. Now, the question was, can I print this? Is it going to disappear if I redraw or anything like that? No, this will print. The one tricky thing in there is it-- well, in just a minute we're going to look at display styles, and theming on this, and how you can control colors. It's not based off of the AutoCAD 256 color palette. So if you're looking to do like CTB plotting, not going to work so well there, more true color stuff. So yes?

AUDIENCE: Is the task pane exclusive to Civil 3D?

RICK ELLIS: Question was, is the task pane exclusive to Civil 3D? No it's exclusive to Map. Since Map is part of Civil, it's in both of those. Standalone AutoCAD you will not have that in there. Which means this stuff, because it comes from here, won't show up in AutoCAD by itself. So that is a big caveat. Up here in the front. Yeah, right here.

AUDIENCE: You bring a drawing as an example. If you bring in a shape file, can you do the same thing?

RICK ELLIS: Yeah. The question was, can I do this with a shape file? And these actually came from a shape file. So we were doing it to a connection to a shape file. If you do the import on a shape file where do you get AutoCAD objects, then you can't use these tools that I just did. You'd have to use the first set of tools, which was where we attached the drawing and do the query of the other drawing. So these two, and then we'll have to keep going. So yes?

AUDIENCE: I was just wondering if you could extract that data to keep it to lock? Like if there's no-- it's colored, but I want to know which parcels stay on.

RICK ELLIS: Sure. So you want to just label them?

AUDIENCE: No, I want to be able to export them.

RICK ELLIS: Oh, export out as actual data.

AUDIENCE: You know, map, plot number, [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: Yeah. That is if you pick the layer and just pick Table, you'll get a table of all of it. And you can copy and paste out of there, or you can export out of there too.

AUDIENCE: One last question?

RICK ELLIS: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It appears that you [INAUDIBLE] start a new drawing by just getting the parts of the letter in [INAUDIBLE]

RICK ELLIS: Yeah the question was-- if I heard it all correctly, I apologize-- can I start a new drawing of just this information here? Now, there is an option to convert this stuff to AutoCAD objects. There's a command to do that. The problem is you will lose all of the connectivity to the shape file. The other option is if you just wanted objects rather than the feature stuff, do the map import command instead of this connection. That will create AutoCAD polylines and things like that.

And that's why, for those of you who were in the class this morning, I think I mentioned it's not that connecting is better than importing or vise versa. They're just two different flavors or two different ways to do the same thing. And depending upon what your needs are and what you want to do with it, then make the decision about which command to use.

The way I think about Map and using it is it's a big tool box. And you want to pull the right tool out for whatever job you're doing. And the better you can understand those tools, the better you're going to be informed and be able to make decisions on that. Which is why I'm kind of showing you multiple ways to do the same thing because there isn't a quote-unquote best practice, use this one, or those they would have gotten rid of the tool altogether. It's just some people need one, some people need the other. Sometimes I'll use different ones on different projects. So again, don't want to cut you guys off, but I do want to keep us semi on track. So I'll pick up more questions afterwards if you guys would like.

So thematic maps. Basically within thematic maps, we're going to do two different things, or three different things here, really. We're going to look at scale-dependent styles, which are styles for connected features that if you zoom in some stuff may show up or disappear. And if you zoom out, other things may show up or disappear based on your zoom scale. Just another way to depict data properly for you, or in a more useful way. And then we'll do actual thematic mapping of linear objects and thematic mapping of polygons from there.

So scale dependent styles, like I said, means that they can be styles that can be applied to the same objects so that the same object displays different ways at different scales. So in the example below here, we have on the left just parcels. You zoom in a little bit, you get sewer lines and structures that show up, and you zoom in a little bit more and you get labeling on them. That's just one example of scale-dependent styles. And you can have styles of no display or you can be changing the style. Because you might zoom out to a point I don't want to see them at all so we'll turn them off.

So there's some information about that on page 15 and 16 for you. Our exercise for us to work through together starts on page 18. So if you want to turn to page 18, and we're going to open up a drawing that I have for you called scale-dependent styles in that same data set folder. So hopefully it's showing up there.

So here we've got a drawing that has some sewer lines, some manholes, and some parcels attached to it. And the first thing we're going to do is just look at what's already defined here, or what's been set up in this drawing. When Map 3D is in Civil, the status bar down here at the bottom can be in a couple of different states that may look different and display different information.

I doubt that you guys have a scale thing here, it says click to adjust the Map 3D scale. This is not the annotation scale. So to get that turned on, if you look on page 18 there's a command called Mapstatusbar, all one word, no spaces, just Mapstatusbar, and use the option to show it. That will make this scale show up just so we can see what's going on.