Hi, I’m Charles Ellison. I’m a Civil 3D designer and trainer at autocadcivil3dtraining.com. Today we’ll be using the Toolspace in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2020. This is a panel specific to Civil 3D that controls the all of the Civil 3D specific objects. It also allows us to control our drawing settings and import fieldwork data collected from our survey crew. Let’s get an overview of how this panel works.
So far, we’ve covered user interface features that come standard with AutoCAD. Now we’re going to look at user interface features specific to Civil 3D. Under the home ribbon, below the palettes panel is the Civil 3D toolspace button. The toolspace helps to navigate through Civil 3D objects within your drawing.
There are four different tabs to work with such as the prospector, settings, survey and toolbox. The prospector tab shows us a tree view of all the Civil 3D objects within the drawing. For this example, this drawing contains multiple surfaces that contain different styles viewed in our graphic space. Some are visible, some are hidden. Visual control of these surfaces can be accessed through the prospector.
Additional controls and drawing defaults can be controlled within the settings tab. The survey tab controls the database information we use for importing existing conditions such as points and linework. Lastly, the toolbox contains ways of generating different reports and contains various utilities that might not fit contextually with the ribbon or panel menus. Plugins are available such as the subscription extension containing quarterly released tools from Autodesk compatible with this version of AutoCAD. Many of these tools will be released with the next version, but Autodesk makes them available as they develop them.
So, recognize the importance of the toolspace panel. Since it is a palette, it can be dragged off screen, docked, or set to auto hide. I find it’s best to leave it docked and open will working with Civil 3D.
