Pipe Label – Dimension Look

Occasionally getting labels to look like they did using regular AutoCAD tools can be a bit counterintuitive in Civil 3D. One method of labeling pipes, before Civil 3D, was to use a regular AutoCAD dimension label with some added information for pipe size and type. You can get the same look using a combination of Civil 3D Pipe Labels and Civil 3D Structure labels.

The picture to the is the look of the pipe label style I’m aiming for in this post. The picture shows a regular AutoCAD dimension. But if the material type changes then I’d have to manually change the pipe information in the label, and that just isn’t desirable.

The first thing we want to do is change the Orientation Reference to view. This way the label won’t follow the pipe slope. To create the line create an expression using half of the pipe length, using the drawing scale conversion to convert the line length to the drawing scale.

There are two line components and then two block components for each arrow. So the label should look something like this:

I don’t want the label at the pipe, but want it below the pipe. For this label I want all of the pipe labels to be on the same elevation in the profile view. To do this I was going to add an expression with just the elevation I wanted to place the labels at, but the clock struck Midnight and my Civil 3D 2010 turned back into a pumpkin just like in the Ugly Bug Ball play I saw today at the Pismo Beach Youth Theater. Maybe the prince will stop by shortly and my foot will fit the shoe and I’ll get a HULA to finish the post.