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 inside of 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 need to first open up a drawing that we're going to be working in.
So I'm going to navigate up into the upper left corner, drop down 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 go to my Civ 201 BEG.dwg, and I'm going to go ahead and click open.
So 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 inside of Civil 3D.
In order to do that, I'm going to navigate up to the points drop down in the ribbon bar, and I'm going to drop down points. Inside of here, you have all of the options for how to create points inside of the Civil 3D program. The first section that we have here is the points creation toolbar, and then all of the methods for creating points.
So inside of these methods that come below the points creation toolbar, they're contained within the points creation toolbar. There's just different ways to select those methods. So you can either open the points creation toolbar and have all the methods there in the toolbar, or you can drop down points and then go to an individual method and select it as a single option.
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So I prefer to work in the points creation toolbar so that I have all of those options up and on the screen, and I don't have to keep dropping down and selecting options from the breakout menus. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to open my toolbar, and I'm going to walk through the different methods. We have our miscellaneous points creation drop down, which has different ways to create points based on different miscellaneous methods.
Then we have our points drop down creation method for intersections. So these are intersections based on different directives that we give to Civil 3D. So it can be either based on a direction and a direction, and it will create a point at the intersection of those two directions, or something like distance and object, where you will have an object and a distance from that object and an intersection from that.
Moving on, we have our alignment creation methods. We have station offset, divide alignment, so on and so forth. Then we have our surface creation methods.
We 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 drop down.
So inside of the points drop down, all of the options that 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 don't know what it does yet, you can go into the drop down here, go to a breakout menu, and find a creation method that you don't know the information about, but you want to learn about how to use that method.
So you can drop down, break out, and go to something like object slash object, and Civil 3D will give you an example of how to use that method. So object slash object creates a point at an intersection of two objects that can be arcs, lines, lot lines, polylines, feature lines, or figures. If you ever have a method that you want to use, or you think you may want to use, and you're not quite sure how it's going to go through as a workflow in Civil 3D, you can navigate to these and read about it before you use that method.
So moving on from here, we have create points groups, which we will talk about in another video. Once we have points, you can manage them and put them into groups together based on certain definitions. Then we have create COGO points from a corridor.
So in another class, we'll talk about creating corridors, and you can create points based on corridors that you have inside of a drawing. You can create blocks from COGO points. So you can take the points that you have and create blocks inside of a Civil 3D drawing.
And then you have options for taking older files or older versions of files and converting them to Civil 3D. So 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 soft desk 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.
So import points window allows us to add a file in 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 I have my files saved for the class, which was 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 selected 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 in order 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 doing elevation adjustments if possible, and that's in the definition of the file.
Doing coordinate transformation if possible, and that is also within the definition of the file. We're going to go ahead and leave it as is for what the settings for this drawing have, which is do an elevation adjustment if possible, 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, long line, and curve, divide object, and measure object.
