Discover the various methods to generate points in Civil 3D, including the points creation toolbar and other specific methods. The article also discusses how to import points into your drawing through a text file, offering clear, step-by-step instructions to guide you through the process.
Key Insights
- The points creation toolbar in Civil 3D is a feature-packed tool with various methods to create points, including miscellaneous points creation, points drop down creation method for intersections, alignment creation methods, surface creation methods, and more.
- It's possible to import points from an external text file into your drawing in Civil 3D. The process involves selecting the import points button from the point creation toolbar, adding the relevant file, and correctly identifying the point file format (such as PNEZD).
- Besides the point creation methods available in the toolbar, Civil 3D also lets you convert older files or versions to Civil 3D points. Available conversion options include LAND desktop points, AutoCAD points, and soft desk point blocks.
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In this video, we're going to go over the different methods for creating points in Civil 3D, and ultimately, at the end of the video, we're going to go ahead and import some points into our drawing. In order to do that, we first need to open up a drawing that we're going to be working in.
So I'm going to navigate up into the upper left corner, click on File, and select Open. I'm going to navigate to where I have my file saved for the class, which is this Civ 201 working folder. I'm going to select my Civ 201 BEG.dwg, and I'm going to go ahead and click Open.
Once we've done that, you'll notice our window is empty, except for some text and some polylines over here on the right-hand side. We'll use these later in another video for actually creating some points manually using different methods. But first, we're going to go over the different methods for creating points in Civil 3D.
In order to do that, I'm going to navigate up to the Points dropdown in the ribbon bar, and I'm going to click the Points dropdown. Here, you have all of the options for how to create points within the Civil 3D program. The first section we have here is the Point Creation toolbar, and then all of the methods for creating points.
These methods listed below the Point Creation toolbar are contained within the Point Creation toolbar. There are just different ways of selecting these methods. So you can either open the Point Creation toolbar and have all the methods visible on the screen, or you can click the Points dropdown and then go to an individual method and select it as a single option.
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I prefer to work in the Point Creation toolbar so that I have all of those options visible on the screen, and I don't have to keep clicking dropdown menus and selecting options from them. So what I'm going to do is open my toolbar, and I'm going to walk through the different methods. We have our miscellaneous point creation dropdown, which has different ways to create points based on various miscellaneous methods.
Then we have our point creation methods for intersections. These intersections are based on different inputs that we provide to Civil 3D. It can be based on directions, and it will create a point at the intersection of those directions, or something like distance and object, where you have an object and specify a distance from that object to create an intersection point.
Moving on, we have our alignment creation methods. We have station offset, divide alignment, and so forth. Then we have our surface creation methods.
We also have our interpolation creation methods and our slope creation methods. Inside of this toolbar, we also have an Import Points option, which we'll be using later in this video. I'm going to go ahead and close the toolbar so that we can talk about the remaining options inside of the Points dropdown.
Inside of the Points dropdown, all of the options we went over in the toolbar are here as well. We have Create Points Miscellaneous, Create Points Intersection, Create Points Alignments, Create Points Surface, Create Points Slope, and Create Points Interpolate. If for some reason you want to use a creation method that you're not familiar with yet, you can click the dropdown menu, go to a submenu, and find a creation method you don't know about but want to learn how to use.
You can click the dropdown menu and go to something like Object/Object, and Civil 3D will give you an example of how to use that method. Object/Object creates a point at the intersection of two objects such as arcs, lines, lot lines, polylines, feature lines, or figures. If you ever have a method you want to use or think you might use, and you're not quite sure how it will work as a workflow in Civil 3D, you can navigate to these and read about them before you use that method.
Moving on, we have Create Point Groups, which we will talk about in another video. Once we have points, you can manage them and put them into groups based on certain definitions. Then we have Create COGO Points from a corridor.
In another class, we'll talk about creating corridors, and you can create points based on corridors you have within a drawing. You can create blocks from COGO points. You can take the points you have and create blocks inside of a Civil 3D drawing.
You also have options for taking older files or older versions of files and converting them to Civil 3D. You can convert Land Desktop points into Civil 3D points. You can convert AutoCAD points into Civil 3D points.
And then you can also replace Softdesk point blocks with Civil 3D points. So I'm going to go ahead and go up to the Point Creation toolbar. I'm going to select it, and then I'm going to navigate to my Point Creation toolbar.
And I'm going to go over to this Import Points button. I'm going to go to Import Points, and I'm going to select it. And then from here, I have the Import Points window.
The Import Points window allows us to add a file to bring points into a drawing based on a text file that would be available to us. So I'm going to go ahead and hit this plus sign here. I'm going to click to add files, and then I'm going to navigate to where my files are saved for the class, which is the Civ 201 working folder.
I'm going to select it. I'm going to select my Civ 201 survey.txt, and I'm going to click Open. Now that I've clicked Open, the file that I selected shows up inside of this window here.
And now I have to select a point file format. So depending on which point files you have and how they were given to you, your surveyor or the person who provided those points should tell you what the method is for how those points are laid out. If I open up my text file, what you can see in here is that we have a row of numbers.
I know because I created this file that it is a PNEZD format. So it is a point number, northing, easting, elevation, and description. P-N-E-Z-D.
So I'm going to go ahead and close this. I'm going to navigate down in this window to the bottom because I know PNEZD is in this location. And inside of my text file, you'll notice that
The numbers—the point number, the northing, the easting, the elevation, and the description are all separated by commas.
That's a comma-delimited text file. So I'm going to choose PNEZD comma-delimited, and then I'm going to navigate down. This gives us a preview of the points that are going to be brought in.
If there's something wrong with the method that you selected, so let's say we chose an NEZ comma-delimited, you'll notice that the northing is set to 1,2, 3, and we know that's not correct because generally northings aren't going to be a simple round number like that. We're going to go ahead and go to our PNEZD, and you'll notice point number is 1 through 3. We have a northing, we have an easting, an elevation, and a description. And so if something didn't look right, you could select your correct point file format.
So moving on from there, we could choose to add points to a certain point group. We haven't created any point groups, so if we selected this, we would have to then create a point group to add it to it. I'm going to go ahead and not select Add Points to Point Group, and then moving down into the advanced options, you have the options for performing elevation adjustments if available, and that's in the definition of the file.
Performing coordinate transformation if available, and that is also within the definition of the file. We're going to leave it as is based on the current drawing settings, which is to perform elevation adjustments if available, and I'm going to go ahead and click OK. So once we've done that, you'll notice all of the points are imported into our drawing.
Now that we have some points in our drawing, we can go ahead and start talking about how to edit those, but that's for another video. In the next video, we're actually going to go through some additional creation methods and work on these options of manual, along line and curve, divide object, and measure object.
