The Data Lab—How to Link, Extract, Customize, and Extend Data for BIM Readiness

LUCY KUHNS: And it's 8 o'clock. So welcome. Let's start. This is the Data Lab. I mentioned it was supposed to be a hands on lab, but they turned it into an instructional demo. So hopefully, with looking at these examples, I will also post the examples. So if you want to practice or try this on your own, you're welcome to do so.

The agenda and the class description is I want you to be able to see the possibilities of data within the Autodesk product line of Civil 3D, Navisworks Infoworks. Why is data so important? Because we need to have data for the BIM process. And it's all about the data. You've heard that term over and over again.

Now, I started my career as a land surveyor. And when I collected data, when we collected it, we took all the attribution that we could. We marked everything that we had. And that data then became more valuable as it lived in our database and in our drawings. It's a requirement for BIM readiness, especially for infrastructure.

The data exchange. The more information you have, again, the more possibilities for data exchange amongst different applications and different specialties. And of course, the future possibilities. You might acquire data and put attribution on it that you don't need now. But in the future you possibly could do it.

Now, about BIM. When we have a BIM model, we need to know things about the pieces and parts in that BIM model. It has to be attributed. It has to be located correctly. But we have to know what that data is, and what it's about, and what it's used for. Here's an example of a virtual construction simulation. The simulation is done so that we can make the overpass, the bridge through the median, without disturbing any of the traffic side by side. So if we model the elements in the computer, we will be successful in the real world.

Now, here's another model where we're doing time timelining, and a model where we're doing an automated clashed detection. Whether we're seeing where we're going to have some problems. Now here is an interesting-- is mike OK? Oh, dear, that's no good. Much better? OK. Thank you.

In this example that you saw here, what we did is we had a federated model, and we did a quick clash detection. Now the beautiful thing about a proper BIM for infrastructure model is that we're able to switch back to the authoring tool, make changes, and then go directly back and forth into the models. It's called switchback.

And the requirements for a BIM ready design is, of course, geometry in a precise location. That geometry has to have attribution. And that's the main purpose of this class, is to show how we put attribution on the various forms of geometric data. When that geometry has attribution, then it's smart. It has dynamic behavior.

Here's an example of dynamic behavior. And we saw it. I'm a pipe. And I have to live one meter beneath the surface. So when the surface changes, I need to change. That's dynamic behavior. I'm a pipe. I have to connect to a structure. That's intelligence and dynamic behavior. If that structure moves, I have to move. Then the criteria and rules that we apply to that dynamic behavior, the criteria I mentioned was one meter beneath the surface. That's an example of criteria.

Now, when we exchange data, we want that data to be agnostic. In other words, that data has to be able to be used in Autodesk products, in Bently products, in any other products across the BIM portfolio. We have to be able to comply with standards and things like industry classes and CoBie. And the example applications that I'm going to be using today are the Autodesk applications.

So the attribution, and, again, this class is all about attributes. And I mentioned that we have geometric attributes, which are called shape attributes. And we have characteristic attributes. Now you guys that have done AutoCAD, the characteristics of CAD are what? Layer color, line type, things like that. Layers are very, very important attribute. It's one of the few attributes that carries across all applications. And if you're smart about using layers, that can be a very powerful attribution.

We're going to talk a lot about these smart extended attributes. That's the extra data that you put on the geometry to make it work in a BIM federated model, and have that sense to work as a system. For example, the cost, the material, and the phasing. If I had the phasing, then I can put it into a system of timelining for virtual design and construction.

So spatial geometry and attributes. So we have the shape and the geometry, and that's what we see in a drawing, in the drawing editor. Those are the things that I can grip and I can dimension, and things like that. Now, the tabular data, that is the attribution that we're going to attach to the geometry. And the tabular data it can be automatic. If I change the area in the geometry, that tabular data should-- the actual numbers and values should change. So the tabular data is smart and it's also those static characteristics.

OK. Here's a process table. How many of these have you seen in this week? When we are doing BIM work, we are consumed with creating process maps, manuals, procedures. That's all within a BIM application in a BIM modeling process. Well, I've cut this down into what we're going to show today.

I'm going to show you, and we're going to start with, the very, very basics of adding attribution to data. And that's going to be layers, like I mentioned, hyperlinks, and notes. And then we're going to start to talk about blocks with attributes, very, very important. Then we're going to get into object data, and then property set data.

Now, the reason I have this form up here is to show you which type of data you could put on which type of objects. So for example, 3D solid objects, you cannot put object data on them. You have to put property set data. When I say object data, you're going to see what I mean. And so that's why we have this snapshot here.

So let's begin with the basic attributes, the basic attributes of layer, hyperlink and notes. These are available on all AutoCAD Civil 3D, Map 3D, any kind of AutoCAD vertical. And these are available on all of the geometry, and they carry through the entire process. They carry through from your authoring tool to your BIM federation tool, which might be Navisworks, and also Infoworks carries this information. And like I said, layers are one of the easiest types of attributes that you can use.

So here is a hyperlink attribute. Here is a lay out for a new station, for the Grand Paris on the outskirts of Paris. So that is a hyperlink. And the hyperlink, this will live throughout all of my process in the authoring tool, in Navisworks as we see here. And there we see the data table that shows that this has carried through. Will it carry through to Infoworks? Yes, it will carry through to Infoworks as well.

So hyperlinks-- now, hyperlinks don't always have to go to a URL. Where else can they go? A hyperlink can hyperlink to a document? It doesn't have to always go to URL. In Naviceworks this is how we expose them. And you can see in the properties column over here how we can get to those. And we can see there's a hyperlink that goes to a document, not to a URL. All right?

Now, when we use multiple hyperlinks here is a caveat. It will only-- work if you can put as many as you want on, but if you need to carry it through outside of the authoring tool, it will only take the top one. All right? So just a word of caution. We can also use notes. That is another valuable type of attribution.

Here isn't very basic. Now I like to use super basic examples because I want you guys to think out of the box. And if you understand how a basic attribute works-- and this is a note-- then you're going to be able to apply this as we get to more complicated attribution examples.

So this is super simple. Three boxes. I'm going to put the notes on them. And the note is simply construction 1, 2, and 3. And then you can automatically create a time line. Did you know that you can have a very complex drawing and hit the Automatic, and it organizes them? And I'm organizing them by the number in the attribute. And so then it automatically makes a timeline. So that gives me a rough Gantt chart that I can either edit outside the application, which might be easier, or inside the application.

For those of you that are in infrastructure and in Civil 3-D, and understanding what that picture is. And that is a very simple assembly. And as part of that assembly I'm showing what's called a shape. And in the shape name, the shape name can carry through vis-a-vis a layer. Now, this is an important thing to remember. How long can a layer name be? Anyone know what the limit is on a layer name? How many characters?

AUDIENCE: 256.

LUCY KUHNS: Yeah, 255. One under 256. So that means you can put a whole lot of things in there. And the shape codes carry through. So now this is interesting because when you design this assembly to use over and over again, what if in that shape code you mentioned things like material? And you mentioned things like, oh, it has to come after the base course. It has to come after this and this. And then we can pull out those.

So here's where we take it. In the name, template. And I make it a code. So that's the shape code. Now, remember you use your assemblies over and over again. So now, when I look at that pavement group 03, I can use that number three in a construction sequencing process. All right? It's a really nice little thing to add in your assembly work.

Does that make sense? Anyone do that? When you make your shapes-- I know you do, you certainly have to use logical naming. That's incredibly important when we add attribution.

So now, we started super, super simple. So this is going to be a progression. We're going to get a little bit more interested in more complication. And you might say blocks with attributes. Oh. Blocks with attributes is one of the most important things that you can leverage. And look at the blocks with attributes works on all of the primitive AutoCAD entities.

The blocks with attributes, here's the pros. 2D, 3D. They're held in the drawing database. They're transportable across all of the portfolio, also inside and outside of Autodesk products. You can easily export those to ASCII tabular files. When I say ASCII, that's good, because it's not compiled. It's not binary. It's readable. Again, across the broad spectrum.

It's scalable. Blocks are perfect for levels of development, levels of detail. I could start with a simple block as you're going to see, and as I start to understand my design more and more, I can refine that block. So it's a perfect use for level of detail. Automation. Let's say that I have to place 1,000 things in the drawing, and they're all the same, and they're equally spaced or equally gridded. Blocks you can automate this to make this very quickly.

Here's a con. You can't use parametric blocks in this attribution because, if you use a parametric block when you share it, you're going to see those asterisk U blocks. How many have seen those? Have you seen those where you do the Purge command? All right. Those are the results of parametric blocks.

So here is how we can take advantage of blocks for automatic placement. Here is a block, and the block has lots of attributes. I don't know what type of lamp this is going to be. I do know that it has to be placed along a path. So I have some placeholder attributes, auxiliary 1, 2, and 3 for future use. There is a pathway. And let's automatically-- I'm going to use tools within AutoCAD that will allow me to automatically place that block along that path.

It also can sense the rotation if you want. And that has saved me a little bit of time. The block is in 3D. That's one of the primary requirements of BIM for infrastructure, is that it has to be in 3D. So we've got the block information or the block itself in there. But all of those blocks are block 100. That's not going to do.

So what we're going to do is we're going to leverage the sink-- my favorite name of an AutoCAD command. It's called BATTMAN. And we're going to use the BATTMAN command. And the BATTMAN command is going to slap these attributes on all of those blocks. So if you had 1,000 blocks in the drawing, this would automatically attribute 1,000.

But like I said, they're all the same number. Now that's not going to work for us. So that's light 100. The next one's light 100. So I'm going to show you how we can automate this by using this export attributes. So ATT out. Now, when I export the attributes, this is a nice thing, because I have now done what? I have geometric attributes. And look, I have the tabular attributes.

So instantly, from just plain AutoCAD, I have a pretty nice system here. So this is Excel, and all I'm doing is I'm just importing those attributes into Excel because I want to take, and I want to make all of light number 100. I'm just going to start a sequence of 101 102. Once I get that sequence down in Excel, you know you can just pull down on the little right black box. Just pull down. And look, it's automatically numbering those.

All right. Now think about this. If you had 1,000 things, this would automatically do it. All right. So I've got external data, and I have the blocks in the drawing. We save this file, and then we have a command attribute in that brings the data back on the blocks. OK? So there we go. I use the Attribute In command, pick the text file that I just made, and now I have the blocks automatically numbered.

So sometimes it's easier to do things automatically externally, and blocks allow this process to happen. So just a quick review on these commands that you can use to automate lots and lots of geometry in a drawing. The attribute dialog, which turns the attribution on and off, and of course the BATTMAN command. I'm just splashing these up. I'm not going to go into them. I just want you to know the names of these commands.

When you create attributes on a block, and you can have many, many, many attributes. And as you see here at the bottom, I have three auxiliary attributes. That's for future use. I'm thinking that these blocks are going to get more sophisticated and more intense. So I just have temporary placeholders.

The reason I'm showing you this is when you create a block, in the process of making a block it says, select the objects to make a block. If you use a crossing window, you don't know what order the attributions are going to be sequenced in. So here's a tip. When you make a block, you pick the order of the attributes that you want to happen.

Why? Because later on, when I automate this, I generally want ID to happen first, type second, so on and so forth. OK. So just a tip, pick the attributes first, up, up, up, up, up, and then you can pick the geometry.

OK. The LOD concepts. That's why we have this auxiliary future placeholders. And the BIM advantages, like I said, it's in 3-D. They can take many, many attributes. They can be georeferenced. And we can use the block replace function-- it'll keep the attributes, but the LOD changes. And you're going to see these advantages right now.

So here are the blocks. They're on a path. One of the requirements of BIM for infrastructure is that these items have to be georeferenced. And they have to be georeferenced because these are going to be built on Earth. So there's the lat and long. OK? And for the lat and long, and we're also in the British National Grid, so I'm on a projection as well.

And let's see. I'm going to use the BIM Maps. You can tell me where this is. I said British National Grid, so I gave it away, but let's see where this project is.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LUCY KUHNS: How did you guess? In honor of Jack' [INAUDIBLE]. OK, so you can see that this is in England. All right. And this is just-- because if I'm connected to the internet, and I have my Autodesk account, I can use the big BIM maps as my underlay. So that's requirement number one for BIM for infrastructure. Well, other than it's 3D. It has to be georeferenced.

Now, there's the block replace. I'm demonstrating LOD aspects with a block. We didn't know what this thing is going to be. But now I have an idea that the shape envelope is going to be that. This thing that I'm going to pick out later is going to take that shape and, oh, it also has a globe on top. And so, do you see how easy that I can take something I have no idea what it's going to look like, but I can switch it out?

Now, here's another interesting thing. Those blocks are smart enough to live on a surface. Blocks know that they can move up to a surface. And there is the end result after I know what the block is. It's georeferenced. Blocks know that they can live on a surface. I didn't have to assign the elevation. I just said, block, go to the surface. Bam. And it does it. OK.

So why do I love blocks? They do all the work for me. It's an amazing, amazing thing. So here's the surface awareness. If you have a surface, and if you have a block, there's the tool. Move the box to the surface. OK? Anyone ever use that? Yay. OK. Lots of hands go up.

Now, I can also take advantage of this. Here are some 3D houses. There is the grading, the pad grading for the houses. They come right up onto the site. And now I'm just going to project them onto the profile view. So those are 3D blocks coming up to the surface, and then being projected to the profile view.

Update and date awareness. So I'm going to put an attribute on this block. And this block is going to have the date. And that's the date of the last inspection. All right. So now I'm thinking about maintenance. I'm thinking lifecycle on my block. Even though I'm just starting the design, I'm thinking to the future. And now we can see that I have a date. And depending upon how old the last inspection was, I'm going to assign whether it's stable, critical, or if it needs to be checked.

Here's a little simple LISP routine that is literally going to check the date on the computer, and run against the data on the block, and change its color. So the color of the block then will change, whether it's critical it needs to be checked, whether it's stable. Whatever it needs to happen. OK? So I'm purposely thinking about the lifecycle use of-- the future use of this block.

So now when I have this as a real tool, I can-- it's georeferenced. It's colored, which means it's one of the characteristics. That's super simple. I can put it on a mobile device. And now I know which one of these light posts to click Go To with the lat and long, and check for maintenance. OK? Very, very simple, but very effective. And again, starting with blocks with attributes.

I just put this in the slide deck just to remind you of the commands that you can use so that you can download and use the slide deck later. The data extraction that I've shown you and I've shown you this because there's another form of data extraction that we used to use, and it was called ODBC. Has anyone ever heard of that, where I have external databases, and I try to connect them to my drawing? Used to work pretty good, very easy.

Now, with the advent of Microsoft drivers and 64-bit Office applications and Office 365 and all that, this is becoming-- the ODBC thing is becoming-- harder and harder to do. But I just showed you how to do it very simply by sidestepping the ODBC thing. And that's with these commands right here.

So here is a different extraction. I showed you the one that started with an A. This is the EATTEXT, which means extruding the attributes. Now I'm taking this out as a Excel spreadsheet directly. This is the one that we used to use with the ODBC Connect. I'm just showing you this in case you do want to do ODBC Connect.

You've probably-- this has been in AutoCAD for ever. So who's used this? OK, excellent, excellent. This also allows me to instantly put tables into the drawing. When I put a table into the drawing, you know that table is live, and you can do things like sum columns and add rows and columns and do formulation in AutoCAD.

So here I'm just taking the time to set up this table, and then decide whether I want to put it in the drawing as well as have it externally, and the output format, whether it's CSV, whether it's a Excel spreadsheet, or whatever, or the old fashioned Microsoft Database.

Now, when the table is in the drawing, unfortunately it's not a live link. OK. I'm going to show you in our next example how we make a live link to something like a table and the geometry in a drawing. And there's this table. So instant bill of materials or whatever.

All right. Now we're going to take that block example, and we're going to turn it into something with object data. Now, that means that the geometry is going to have a tag on it that has object data. And you're going to see how much more powerful this is. Remember, I'm saying we're doing this as a progression. We're starting very simple. I'll show you blocks and the simple extraction of the data from the blocks. Now we're going to up it to a shape file, and we're going to use the Map Export.

So I'm starting with my 3D block. It's got the attributes. Now, this is the trick that we have to do with Map Export. That's the command. Who's used Map Export? Excellent. OK. So more than half of you. Ubiquitous shape files. So most of your software-- your spatial software, for sure, and a lot of your BIM software-- can read a shape file.

So I have to understand that these are points. I simply collect the points. After I collect them, make sure when you do the command that you make sure that they collect and that are not filtered out. So I look at the bottom there. And now, by clicking in the attribution-- these are all the physical attributes, the characteristics of the CAD entity. But here are the block attributes. So we have lots and lots of automatic attribution with the characteristics, and then the ones-- the attribution that I added in

OK. And so I've created that shape file. And the shape file in any of the CAD software I can drag and drop that shape file information in. I can go to the Map task pane. And in the Map task pane, now here is where we have-- this is the data, the tabular data, and the geometry. And now they are linked automatically simply. OK. So that is the method to do because it's a good linkage from the external tabular data to what's in the drawing.

OK. So in summary, the attribution order, how you pick them, is important. Don't use parametric blocks. Remember, this is good for LOD techniques. And there's several different ways for extraction. The best way of linking is using the object data and making shape files. Data connection strings are going to be a little bit difficult. Data connection strings mean ODBC. The shape files are good in AutoCAD and Infoworks, but shape files do not work in Navisworks, but regular blocks do.

OK. Now, we saw object data on blocks, which is pretty interesting. Object data, the pros. And you've seen it, a little glimpse of this. They're held in the DWG drawing database, so that means I can share them with all of you. And you get those data tables. They're transportable externally. We saw that with a simple shape file.

They're scalable. I can take object data from many, many sources and, as long as the attribution and tags are the same, I can join them. I can merge them. That means that they're scalable. So that's a very, very important thing to think about. And I'm going to show you some automation methods of how you get object data on hundreds and hundreds of little pieces of geometry.

Con is you have to set up an object data table. You have to make a list of what the attributes are. But that's a one time setup. The other thing is with the object data we call it 2 and 1/2 d. Depending upon what application you're using, sometimes shape files are not full 3D. But did you know that Civil 3D pipe networks can be held as shape information?

And then there are some geometry limits, some sophisticated geometry spirals and things like that would be difficult to do. And it does require-- you can't use base AutoCAD. You just have to use Map 3D or Civil 3D or Geospatial. And in GIS, when we're making this object data information-- again, I said you cannot use it in Navisworks.

OK. So the first thing we have to do. Remember I said there's a little bit of setup required. Now, I know many of you are pros at this. And I'm sorry to make you sit through to see how you make an object data table. But an object data table, I'm going to switch to the workspace for Map. And go to my Map set up.

And I am making this video in case you want to-- if you've never done this before, and if you want to try this-- I'll give you the, like I said, the base drawing files. I'm going to name this table. And then I need to give the field names. These are the attributes that I'm going to attach to the geometric shapes.

And once I have all of this data done, and you have to give it the data type, whether it's a double, whether it's an integer, whether it's a string. A string is a piece of text. And give it a default value and things like that. So here I'm going to make a single attribute of a building and the height of the building.

OK. Now we have to put the data on the buildings. So I need to attach this object data to the buildings. So now, what happens if I have 1,000 of these buildings? Years ago, there used to be advertisements for geospatial analysts. And guess what they did? They sat all day and put object data on things like the building. So this could take forever. But we need a way to make this happen really, really fast.

So now you see that with one of these I have the object data. You see that I put the building height of 25 that's held on that piece of geometry. Well, this can be very painful. And I don't want you to sit the rest of the class while we put object data on every one of these. So let's look at a fast way to do this.

So if I have a little piece of text, and you can do this for different types of attribution. So there's the text. That's a label. And that's-- in this case it's the height of the building. And as long as it's inside that shape, I can cast it to the perimeter. All right. This is a really old trick in Map 3D, where you picked the data table, and it will sense the text inside, and now it's been applied to that object.

So if we look at it, we can see that all of our buildings now have instant object data attached to them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LUCY KUHNS: The question is, can I erase the text afterwards? Yes, you can. Because that text was just cast in its place. Now, on the object we don't need that text anymore. And that's an interesting point because, once you erase that text, what happens if you put a different text in there? Like the number of floors or the name of the building? Guess what? You just run this again. And all of a sudden you have 1,000 things automated and someone didn't have to do it. So thank you for the question. Yes, it's not directly linked to that text. Once you've used it, it's done.

So now we can extract that data using the Map Export command. You saw me do the Map Export command earlier. And this time on the Map Export, remember GIS. You have certain things. You have a point object or you have a polygon object. And in the middle you have a linear object.

So we're going to make these shape files. We give the shape file a name. It's going to create the shape file set. So if you're asking for data and someone sends you one shape file, are you in business? No, you need the shape file set. OK. So there I'm picking that this is a polygon. And I'm going to collect all of those. And now we have a shape file.

What can I do with the shape file? It won't go into Navisworks. What will it go into? It will go into Infoworks. Here again, I can take full advantage of the default characteristics of the object. And then we'll also look at the attributes that we did apply.

AUDIENCE: Can it do this to any object?

LUCY KUHNS: It has to be a closed polygon.

AUDIENCE: Can it be like a pipe part?

LUCY KUHNS: If the pipe part is a closed polygon. If it's a 3-D pipe part, no. We have to-- we're going to look at that in a little bit with property data sets. OK. So there is that. And let's move that forward. And we've got, in this case, 38 of these done.

OK now let's see where we take this. Of course, this will link back and forth, as you saw before. We drag and drop the shape files in. And now, again, we go to the Map workspace. And we zoom to the objects. And we show the data table. And we see that the data table is properly linked. And we have the area attribute that was pulled from what? Pulled from the physical characteristic of that. OK. So there's a good link between geometry and a tabular data form.

Now we can see that this is in 2D. And now let's take this into Infoworks. So we have the 2D shape file. Now, when we bring it into Infoworks, what are we going to do to the shape file, to the footprint? We're going to use the attribute of a height to do what? Exactly. So we're going to tell it that it is a building because we want it to have characteristics of a building.

And we'll just drag that shaped file in. And when we attach it, look, it has within the properties the-- not only the ID, the custom or unique ID that we attach to it, but there is that attribute that we threw on it from that very simple text. And I'll give it a rule style of nothing, just the plain white shape mass, just so we don't offend any architects with a facade that we don't like.

In the geolocation, if I want to, I can drape it onto the surface again, so it's surface aware. I don't have to think about the elevation. And we'll close and refresh. And we'll zoom in there. And you can see that this is quite effective for making our little neighborhood with the correct building heights.

And I'm going to do the Zoom To. I select on them. And the Zoom To in Infoworks. I'm showing you this because it's not as easy as the Zoom To in any of the other CAD products. And there we have straight from super, super simple lines to something in Inforworks. OK. So that is a very interesting primitive workflow that ends up in some pretty nice results.

OK. We can combine multiple data tables. Like I said, I can put in exactly the question you asked. If I take out that one text, I can replace it with another text. And in this one, I'm going to turn 2D in our drawing into 3D. OK. So this is the mapping shape files.

Now I'm taking these out and I'm going right back to our original data. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag in a little lisp code. And it's like seven lines of lisp. And I'll show you what this lisp routine looks like. And I'm just going to drag it in and drop it. And what is it going to do? It's going to look at the text and, in my CAD drawing, it's going to pop up those shapes to--

I'm going to drag in this lisp routine. When you drag in the lisp routine, it's going to tell you what command it makes. Those are the southern lines of lisp, very, very simple. Look what it's looking for. It's looking for that tag called HT. The reason I'm showing you this is you can take this lisp routine and use it for your own stuff, and make it do things to your object data.

The trick there is how you pull object data with a lisp code. Sometimes that's not straightforward to do. So that's the reason I want to show you this Lisp routine. And now I run the lisp routine, drag it in. Tells me that the name of the command is Height. I type in height. And it's going to automatically do that.

OK. So some more automation. And there it is. Put it in conceptual view. OK. The best of all worlds, in CAD and in Infoworks. And again, I show this to you because that one line to get the object data record table, that code in lisp is something that you might need to use for other purposes.

OK, just a reminder. When you have object data in a drawing and you do edits, be careful who's ruined the data table before with improper edits. Be really careful if you start to-- remember we have the geometry in that data table. And if you mess them up, then you've ruined your data tables.

So just the last bullet point. Word of caution. Do not ruin the data table. You have to do the proper check out of the geometry, extract it, and then check the changes back in. All right. Now let's up the ante a little bit. Let's get to property sets, which is a little bit more sophisticated. These are where we can put property sets.

Now, why are property sets more valuable? We saw object data was only limited to the core or the vanilla AutoCAD entities. With object data, we can put them on to our specialty objects, like the architectural objects, the civil objects, and things like that. In property data sets, this is the place where we find them.

The definitions. We have definitions that are manual, that we have to type. In I'm going to show you ones that are automatic, and a few little lines of VBScript so that you can do automatic property set definition. We can also use AutoCAD Fields. Who remembers AutoCAD Fields? Does anyone use them? OK, good. Good. I use them in title blocks all the time. That's probably why my main use is in title blocks.

I'm going to show you how you can save and share property sets, how we can use property set information for labeling. And again, at the bottom, the property data set transfers through to Navisworks, and hopefully some they'll get through to Infoworks.

So for example, here are objects that can hold property data. I can have my COGO information, surfaces, corridor solids, plain old AutoCAD solids, and other Civil 3D objects. So this additional property dataset information, it's a great addition to the things that we can do. And you've probably, if you've ever-- who's applied property data in here? OK. Oh, not so many people. All right. You're going to be amazed at the list of items that you can put property data on. And I'm going to give you a reason why you don't check all.

OK, so here is an example of where I want to use property data. So there is the way that we can create property data. There's a new property data set that I'm going to create. And I'm going to call this construction information. Now, when it applies to so many people do, they just select all. Now I want to understand where I want to put this property data. And I want to clear all and be very succinct, and know what I'm going to apply this to.

And I'm going to apply this to my 3D solids primarily. And I'm going to do it to solid 2D What's a solid 2D? It's a body. Sometimes when we do corridor extraction you end up with bodies instead of solids, right? Because it's a link and not a shape. So here is a manual property applied-- I'm only applying these to 2D and 3D solids. This is a manual property. It's simply the ID.

Now, I am go to autoincrement this ID. In other words, one, two, three, four is going to automatically put a ID number-- a unique ID number-- on it. Now the next manual one is simple text. And that's going to be just an ID. And that could be-- as we develop our BIM libraries that ID is going to be very important. Correct? It's going to be our Unicode ID or something.

And now we have these two manual IDs. Let's put in a third one. This is just the description of our object. So that's pretty straightforward. Putting in these manual things. And you can put as many, of course, as you want. But it gets more interesting when-- and I'll put in the default here for the description, this is a single family residence, a single house. And we'll see how this is going to look.

OK. Now, this is the automatic attribution. Now, this list here is the reason that we only picked 2D and 3D solids. If I picked everything, this list would be really, really long. And it's difficult to select everything in those lists. So here I am pulling the automatic characteristic of volume from that 3-D solid. And that's going to give me the volume of the house. And then I'm going to put in a date. And the date is going to be in here a field.

So even though that's a manual, it is going to be automatic because I'm going to use the field property to pull the date out of the computer. OK? So there's an interesting place where a manual attribute that we think of as being static, if we put an AutoCAD field in there, it can actually be of benefit to us.

And so now, when we put this information on here, I'm selecting all of the solids. Here's how we apply. We have to put the property data set onto these. So in the lower left corner-- this is hidden quite nicely, so tiny-- in the lower left corner, you select-- after you select the items. I'm selecting all the solids in my model. And I'm going to make sure that they can use and make use the property data called construction information. Maybe some of the solids I'm not going to use, you know, put on there. But it's just easy for me to cast that information on all of the solids.

Now I can be very specific. And in this case, I'm selecting on a solid. There is the property data. And I can edit it within the properties data box. Or-- that's probably the easiest way to do it. OK. So now I'm changing that name to utility duct. I can select many of these all at the same time. If I select them one at a time, and I have 100 utility ducts, that's not very efficient, is it?

So we select all of them. And I can cast that property data onto those objects. OK. Now, only a handful of you have used property data? Correct, how many? One, three, OK.

Now, here I've selected some of the extractions from my corridor. This is a sheet piling that was part of my corridor design. And this would be like a retaining wall. In this case, it's a big sheet metal piling that runs along a riverbank. And we used that same property data that I originally created for the 3D solids of the house. But since I checked that it was applied to any 2D or 3D solid type object, I can apply that to any of the corridor data extraction objects.

All right. Now, what happens if, by mistake, or you need to change something, you need to remove property data from the objects? Right? It's not straightforward. But let's look at how we would remove property data once we have the property data attached.

So I come in here to the construction information. And that's the one that I'm going to eliminate. I'm going to select my objects. And, in the properties, I'm going to make sure that I get-- and again, this is why I want to assign property data and not to all of the entities, but in this case just the solids. And there I have the property data-- or these are the objects that had that property data. And I can remove those. And then I'm going to use--

So I'm going through each of those solids. And I'm looking to make sure that there's no property data attached to them. And now I'm going to use the Property Set Clean command. And once you have the Property Set Clean command, you name that property set that you wish to delete. And now you can see that I can purge it from the list. OK? So that's how you get rid of property data sets. You have to take it off of all the objects that you apply it to. Again, a reason not to use that Select All button when you have the option to apply property data.