What are Point Styles in Civil 3D 2020? Part 2

Hi, I’m Charles Ellison. I’m a Civil 3D designer and trainer at autocadcivil3dtraining.com. Today we’ll be diving into Part 2 of taking a look at Point Styles in Civil 3D 2020.

Remember that Point Styles give us visual control over points that are either imported from survey data or created during the design phase. We’ll continue to work with our point marker and point labels in the properties panel to achieve the desired look using point styles.

If I select one of my points, you’ll notice that the contextual ribbon shows up. Click on the properties within this ribbon to open up the properties palette. I’m going to dock this palette on the right side of the screen. I’ve already selected a point within the properties palette. Because it’s a Civil 3D object, it shows up as a COGO point and has two options. There’s the style of the point and the point label style. Anytime we’re working with coordinate labels you will have two styles, the marker and the label. This applies for a point, but can also apply to station offset labels for alignments, or elevation labels for surfaces. Zoom in on the point number one. Come back to the properties palette and change the style by navigating down to the IM-V-UTIL-WATER-HYDRANT. After selecting this style you’ll notice how the marker has changed. I wanted the marker to symbolize the object that it’s marking. I haven’t changed the label so it shows the default label.

Let’s change that point label style to Just Description.  Now it’s showing us the description of that point. The point has two grips when I float my cursor over it. Look at the grip in the middle, it’s a rotated square. There’s a rotation of 45 degrees which actually controls the coordinate. If I select it and move it, it would change the coordinate and the Z elevation. Although, if I hover over it, I can move the point with the contextual menu that opens up. With the point grip you have many different options as you can see here. Now my fire hydrant is rotated, but my label isn’t. If I pick my grip I can move the label and the contextual menu opens up independent of the marker. Let’s go ahead and pick the grip and move it to wherever we want. Now you’ll see there are some additional grips now on our label. These grips are for a leader. When we move a label, it goes into a dragged state. When the dragged state opens, a leader with an arrow could show up depending on the style. But, since this style doesn’t display a leader, it won’t show one. Although the grips for it still show up.

If I don’t like these changes, I can float over these grips and choose to reset the label, or reset all. If I choose to reset all, the marker will rotate back to its original rotation and the label returns to its default state. Working with points is all about visual control. Know that you’re dealing with two different styles, one for the point marker and the point label.