(upbeat music)
- Let's start with a quick tour
to learn the major components.
Now, Civil 3D is built on AutoCAD
so it has many of the same basic components of AutoCAD
and then some.
For example, it has this start tab where you can open,
create new drawings, access recent drawings,
even access your BIM 360 account and many other things.
I'll go ahead and open a drawing.
And now that we're in the drawing we'll be able to talk
about some of the other user interface components.
Here at the top left corner you see the big blue C
for Civil 3D and if I click that it expands
what's called the application menu.
This area here is called the drawing area
and in this particular drawing
I have three view ports but all three of them together
represent the drawing area.
Down here at the bottom I've got the command line
and the command line is kind of a chat window
that you use to communicate back and forth with Civil 3D.
At the top of the screen, I have the ribbon
and the ribbon is where I'm going to launch
most of the commands that I use in Civil 3D.
On the left side of the screen I see the tool space
and you can see that the tool space is made up
of multiple tabs, prospector, settings, survey, and toolbox.
Those are the main components
of the Civil 3D user interface,
but to finish the full list of components
I'm going to call up a few kind of random tools.
The first one is the inquiry tool.
I'll go to the analyze tab of the ribbon
and launch inquiry tool over here on the right.
And the reason I brought this up is it's kind of its own
user interface component, it's unique.
With this tool you can query your drawing for information.
Information about points, surfaces, alignments, and so on.
Another kind of random user interface component
is the Panorama.
To see the Panorama, I'll go to the home tab,
expand here where it says palettes
and now click this icon for the event viewer.
Now, the Panorama can house a lot of different information.
In this case, we're calling up the events information
which are things that may happen in your drawing errors
and things like that that you may need to know about.
You can see currently that my event viewer is blank.
But really what I'm talking about here
is this Panorama window.
And there's some unique behavior with the Panorama window.
For example, I can collapse and expand it.
I can control things like transparency
and whether it's auto hidden.
It's its own kind of palette
and it has some specific uses within Civil 3D.
And then finally we've got transparent commands.
These are over on the right of my screen
and these are a few unique toolbars
that you'll only find in Civil 3D.
In fact, I'm going to click this one and drag it out
so that you can see the other tool bar
that's kind of hidden beneath it.
These are specific drafting commands that make use
of some of the functionality in Civil 3D.
Before you do anything in Civil 3D
you'll need to open a drawing.
And that's done with an addition to the start tab,
the application menu.
So, let's start with the application menu
as our first detailed tour.
You'll find the application menu under the big blue C
in the top left corner of your screen.
I'll click in that location
and you can see all of the commands that are listed there.
Let's start by simply opening a drawing.
From here I'll click open, I'll click drawing,
and I'll click open.
Now let's go back to the application menu
and talk about some of the different menus and commands
that we see there.
We see a new menu where I can start a new drawing
or a new sheet set.
I can open a number of different kinds of files.
You'll notice that drawing is not the only kind.
I can save the file that I'm working in, or I can save it
as a different file name or file type.
I can export what's in my drawing
to a bunch of different formats.
I can publish what I'm working on to additional formats,
even 3D printing as you see at the top or eTransmit
where I'm sending the drawing as well as supporting files
that may need to go with it.
Printing and plotting are stored in the print menu.
From here I can take my drawing and plot it to paper
or even 3D printed.
Next, we see drawing utilities where I can do things
like compare two drawings to see where the changes are,
audit a drawing to remove any errors
that might be inside of it, or even access drawing settings
to control some of the behavior of the drawing.
And then, even the close has multiple options.
I can close the current drawing
or I can close all the drawings that I currently have open,
which by the way it is possible to open multiple drawings
in Civil 3D and each one will become a tab across the top.
Now, one of the most powerful
and frankly least used components of the application menu
is right here at the top where I can search for commands.
You know, when you know that command is in there
but you just can't quite remember what it's called
or where it's located in the ribbon,
you can just type it in.
And the application menu is going to show you
all the different matches to the keyword
that you've typed in.
And I can actually launch the line command
right here from this list.
In this section we have the recent documents
that we've opened and this is really powerful
because you'll find yourself while you're doing a day's work
that you're in and out of the same files pretty frequently.
So, this is a very efficient way to get to a file
that maybe you had open earlier this morning
or even yesterday.
Now you can control the way this list is sorted
by name, by access, date, size, or type.
You can also control the way it's displayed,
small icons, the whole way up to large images.
And these images can give you a bit of a clue
as to what you're trying to open.
You can even pin a drawing to the application menu.
So, if this drawing is something that I know
I'm going to be getting into every day
for maybe the next few weeks, I can pin it here
and it will always appear at the top of the list
even though I may have opened many drawings
since the last time I opened it.
At the bottom we see the options command
which is a powerful dialogue box where you can access lots
and lots of different settings inside of your AutoCAD
and Civil 3D environment.
And then to the right of that we can click this button
to simply exit Civil 3D.
By the way, you should know that if you double click
the application menu icon at the top left of the screen
it will exit you out of Civil 3D.
Typically, users find that out in a way
that they didn't intend to do it.
If Civil 3D suddenly shuts down
and you're wondering what happened,
it may be that you've simply double clicked the blue C.
So, there you have it.
Now you know all about the application menu
and what it can do.
(upbeat music)