Topic: ( C3D ) Editing Survey Points

[sinc]

I notice that, unlike most things in C3D, Description Keys are not dynamic.  So, if you edit your survey points, some aspects of the point will change, but not others.  Namely, the Point and Label styles do not automatically update, and the "Format" for the full description is not automatically updated.

So if you edit your Survey Points in the Survey Database, the changes may not be fully-reflected in your drawing.  To get your drawing points to fully-reflect the changes, you may need to "Remove points from drawing" and "Insert points into drawing".

Note that C3D is different from Land Desktop in that each point has an individual "Format" for the full description.  When the point is inserted into the drawing, the drawing Point gets a "copy" of the Format from the description key.  In Land Desktop, you could edit the Description Keys, and see the changes reflected in your drawing.  In C3D, you have to "Remove points from drawing" and "Insert points into drawing" to see changes made to your Description Keys.

We are also discovering that we really don't like having Description Keys stored in individual drawings.  We find the current setup of C3D is significantly inferior to the old Land Desktop way, where the Description Keys were part of the Project settings.  In C3D, it seems that any change to the Description Keys must be manually propagated to other drawings in the project.

[Cannon]

Loaded question:

What are you using the keys for? Unless you're doing sizing based on keys (which you could be, I just don't know,) then keys are kind of silly. You can use groups to do all the same things, and you'll get the updating you're looking for.

Or not. Your mileage may vary.

[b_hailey]

James,

So, what you are saying is to use groups instead of desc keys?  I'm really interested in this but I'm going to play devils advocate a little.  If I have points using a raw description (and currently my desc keys are changing them to a full description), how can point groups do this?   I know they can for an individual group but does that mean I need a point group for every desc key I have?  And what if I need to group points for something else and not just by their raw description, would the points then revert back to the raw description?

I'm gonna have to play with this a little tonight (since I'm stuck up in Buffaloe Wyoming due to a car accident we were in caused by a ground blizzard and idiots driving way to fast for the conditions).

Brian

[sinc]

Well, one particular usage is for found monuments.  The field surveyors use number point codes while collecting data, and have a set of numbers that they use for found monuments.  For example, when the field surveyor first finds an "RPC ILLEG" or whatever, he will note that desc code 430 is an "RPC ILLEG".  This basically comes into C3D with a description of FNDMON430.  C3D matches on the "FNDMON" part to get all of the monuments into one "Found Monuments" point group.  However, each different type of monument gets its own symbol - i.e., FNDMON430s might get an open circle, FNDMON431s might get an open square, etc.  And I change the "Format" part of the Desckey to say "RPC ILLEG", so that's what we see on screen and in plots (rather than the ambiguous "FNDMON430").

This method worked well in Land Desktop, but it may not in C3D, since Desc Keys are no longer located in one place in the project.  Instead, they are now in each DWG file.

There are also some symbols that we use the rotation feature for.

We also got used to being able to use Point Groups to slice-n-dice points in various useful ways.  We can still do that in C3D, but the whole thing is skewed by the fact that C3D wants to use Point Groups to control display (namely, which layer something appears on).  We wish this was an option - so that we could CHOOSE whether or not the Point Group Layer took precedence over the Point Layer.  Right now, the only way to get the layer in the Point Style to take precedence is to put the Point Group on Layer 0, which is often something we don't want to do.  We can generally get something that's working the way we want, but this whole way that Autodesk has setup Point Groups is rather annoying.  If the layer settings of the point group could be turned on and off in the Overrides (e.g. so that the point label color and lineweight came from the Point Style, and not the Point Group Layer), that would fix the bulk of the issues that we have with the Point Groups.

The rest would be fixed by fixing that stupid Point Group Properties box - the one that sets point group precedence.  We have probably 25 Point Groups in our template, and it's a major PITA to rearrange the precedence order of Point Groups in that tiny dialog box.  Especially since the damn thing resets to the top of the list every time the user hits the "move up" or "move down" arrow.

[Cannon]

James,

So, what you are saying is to use groups instead of desc keys?  Brian

Pretty much so. The PGs will let you assign any label style you want, so what you're matching on has NOTHING to do with what's labeled...if you don't want it to. It's all a matter of styles. I just find PGs easier to deal with and explain to users than Desc Keys. Especially since the DescKeys in C3D are, um, ornery, to put it mildly. Sinc's issues aren't uncommon.

Now, having 75 PGs in a file can be a mess, but start thinking about what you REALLY show, and what you REALLY need before you make them all into groups. A lot of Keys can really be eliminated if you start thinking about what you actually plot out or look out vs what you just plug into the background or slap symbols on. It can sometimes be easier if you quit trying to use points like you're in LDT and think about what the end use is instead.

I'm out of town for a week. Good luck, fight the good fight!

[mjfarrell]

I must protest, Description Keys are not 'silly'.
Yes Point Groups will serve similar function, however they do not render Description Keys obsolete.
True, the 'two step' edit keys, remove points, insert points remains as in Land this is a deficiency in programming, not an argument against using the tool. 
In practice you will find that using Keys does not exclude the use of Groups, and both have their place.

Sinc, some of the problem here is related to not being able to utilize any of C3D 'project' management tools without being force fed Vault.  And even in that environment, the process you describe would still have to be followed, and then it would be reflected in the Data Refs, or Shortcuts. In short, yes the programmers have some work to do.

[sinc]

I basically agree with what Michael says.

One of the things that Autodesk seems to regularly forget is that Surveyors are ALSO using their product (or at least, trying to use it).  They get into this engineer-centric point-of-view, and forget that a lot of people regularly try to use Civil-3D as a kind of super-duper graphical calculator, in support of construction staking.

The whole idea of using Point Groups to control display of points is predicated on this failure to understand how people use the product.  True, it can be a useful thing, but not always.  In support of construction staking, we often create Point Groups that disect points in various ways.  Sometimes it's OK that the Point Group tends to trump the Point and Point Label styles, but often it is very irritating.  True, we can generally get SOMETHING useful, but it is not exactly simple, or "obvious", or something that we would want to do because it easily supports our task.  (A main goal of software like this should be that it EASILY supports common tasks, not that it supports them in some funky, roundabout way, IF the user sets everything up in this one exact way, and follows this very-specific procedure, or does all this manual synchronization and forced updating...)

One common example of what we do is we use the Description Keys to assign Point and Point Label styles to points.  This is the way we want them to appear when we dump points in from a design survey (a FBK file).  However, as we work in a file, it can be useful to use Point Group overrides to change this display from the "default" to some other view.  For example, many points show up with a description-only in the label.  But sometimes, when working with the file, we may want to change them to display a full label, with point number and elevation in addition to description.  So we can use the Point Group to temporarily change the display of the points.  In other words, we like to use Point and Point Label styles *in conjunction with* Point Group overrides, to make it easier to work in a certain file.  The current setup of C3D is not very supportive of this.

Not to mention, if it were possible to use the Point and Point Label styles to control display of points, then we wouldn't need anywhere near as many point groups as we currently need.  Instead, Civil-3D likes to use the Point Groups to control display of points.  True, this means we can get away with fewer Point Styles, but I'd rather have a lot of Point Styles in my drawing template than a lot of Point Groups.  We tend to create a fair number of Point Groups to support construction calc's, so having all these default Point Groups in our drawing template often just muddies things up.

As it is, we manage to muddle through, and get both Description Keys and Point Groups to do everything we want, but with extra headache that should be unnecessary.  The "remove points/insert points" dance gets around the worst of the Description Key problems, except for the need to manually keep Description Keys synchronized in a project (which doesn't come up a lot, and can be managed if the user is careful).  And Point Groups are just flat-out annoying to use in the current incarnation of C3D, but we get by.

[mjfarrell]

For clarity; understand that Desc Keys are most properly used to control points that arise through the Insert, Import, or Create Points Command. And that Figure Preferences and Point Descriptions work together when one uses the Import Field Book operation.

Also understand that when one assigns a point style to the group; that one is applying an OVERRIDE to the default point style that should arise from proper use of Description Keys.
Thus one should not rely solely on Groups to control point display properties (styles).