Civil 3D 2013–Detail Tools

It’s hard to believe just four years ago I was wishing for Detail Tools to be included in Civil 3D. Well with this release of Civil 3D my wish is finally being granted! Well mine and some other people’s wishes, OK it’s just me voting over and over again for a period of time.

Well my wait is over. There are tools now to create details that are related to Civil design, even in 3D! No more having a drafter fake a detail that doesn’t work, you’ll now get a nice 3D image of the detail to make sure everything works. I know after working in construction, there’s nothing worse then ordering a 10 foot metal fabricated piece and only having to really need 3 feet. It’s kind of hard to fix that issue especially when there is an eight week lead time. Well those times are things of the past.

To create the details there is a tool that has a collection of objects. The standard primitives include Pavement, Curb, Gutters and Plane. You know the things we are designing. The dialog is customizable by allowing you to create your own shapes and add it to the standard list or a custom list of objects. Now while it would have been nice to be able to create details from the model directly, this does bring us one step closer of a fully integrated design product.

Detail tools are pretty useless without a corresponding tool to note where those details are located on the plans. Thankfully this new feature also includes a way to label them in Plan view. For instance I had a detail for the parking lot stripping. I tag the line work in the plan using the QTO tools and link it links it to the detail number. There is now a labeling feature that attaches to the objects. Move the object and the callout goes along for the ride. This removes the need to move the callouts if the design changes. Since it is linked to QTO, if you change the assignment there, the callout automagically changes to the correct detail callout. This eliminates the headache of detail callout hunting when the design changes. I see it as really limiting redline comments of using the wrong callout on an object.

The Tagging tools are located on the ribbon. You can Tag by a variety of options. My favorite is the ability to Tag All. There is even a fantastic method Autodesk has come up with to be smart enough to not label similar objects close together. Like the image above, not every stripe is labeled. Although I didn’t take advantage of it in my example, there is an option to include TYP. for typical in the Tag component.

I’m really excited about this new feature and can’t wait to start using it in production.