Boundary Iron Pin Mask

This tip may be floating around out there, but I came up with this version myself. When drawing Boundary surveys in Civil 3D or AutoCAD we always had a problem with the Property Corner symbol (See Figure 1) say you had a corner where two property lines meet and you show a circle for the Iron Pin or some other material unless you trimmed the lines within the circle they overlapped worse yet if you trimmed the lines inside the circle the distances got messed up. This new Style masks the lines underneath the circle without actually trimming them. 

Figure 1 "Before"

"After"

Create a new Point Label Style or copy an existing one and modify it. Name it "Boundary Circle Mask" Go to the Layout tab and click on the ellipses button in the contents parameter under the Text fly out; delete the default text string and type a period (yes I said a tiny period) make sure you match all of the settings in Figure 2 & 3. Make sure the background mask is set to true as in figure 3. Click

OK to exit out.

Figure 2

Figure 3

What is this White thingy on my screen???

Ahhhhh..... This little white thing that is always on the screen in model space. What is it and why can't I get rid of it? says just about everybody. Well there is a way to turn it off by just changing a setting. The best practice is to open your company template file and change it there for everybody.

1. Open your template drawing.

2.Type "GEOMARKERVISIBILITY" on your command line and set it to 0.

3. That's it. You could be "the man" this week at the office with this little tidbit of info.

Where is my Right Click Osnap Shortcut??

This is one of the first questions I hear when people start using Civil 3d that were previously using Land Desktop. Where is my Right Click Osnap Shortcut. You would think that their dog got run over. However I'm about to reunite you with Fido. Civil 3D didn't do away with your command they just added a extra button to it.

Here it is:    Press and hold down "Shift" and Right Click your mouse and presto there it is.

Fillet Preview in Civil 3D 2012

I always remember having to fillet a corner of something and unless I had a actual radius size to apply it was sometimes guess work. A new feature in 2012 is the preview within the Fillet command. Once you specify your radius size you select your first object and when you go to select your second object a preview of what it will look like appears if you don't like it you can change the parameters before you draw the final arc.

Surface Grid Ticks (In Color)

I have posted a step by step guide (see link below) to create color grid ticks in Civil 3D that most of us are familiar with. It seems the simple grid tick creation command that was in LDD was not included in the newer versions of Civil 3D.

Surface Grid Ticks In Color (Step by Step) pdf