I contract for a civil engineering firm which deals mostly in land development. One of my major responsibilities is is drafting.
The firm uses Civil 3d and I use Carlson. So when I draft on a subdivision for instance I will get an exported Civil 3d drawing so that all of the entities look correct. I will sometimes then xref the exported civil design drawings (street, etc) into my subdivision plat. Whenever I do this the Civil 3d drawings seem to come in architectural. On the xref settings I have to scale x & y by .08333333333 and then it snaps right into place. If I don't it obviously comes large and in a different spot.
I spoke with one of the engineers about this and he said they run into this all the time when they CAD drawings with other people. They have to walk them through the scaling process to get things to come in correctly.
My questions is, is there some export setting in Civil 3d that needs to be changed?
Civil 3D drawings only come in feet (international or US), or meters. I'm almost positive there is no export setting that can change this once the drawing is set up. As a civil 3D user, I have actually dealt with this issue before when receiving drawings from architects (using regular autocad).
I know very little about Carlson, but something that worked for me was the INSUNITSDEFSOURCE system variable. You can read more about it here:
I believe you want to set the source (the drawing you get in C3D) to either unitless (0), or feet (2) - I can't remember which one.
Give that a try and see if it helps.
Sounds like they are somehow in architectural units or possibly they are on an older version. I have had odd experiences using older versions. In those instances it might be best to open each of their drawings and re-save them and while your at it, check their drawing settings.
I'd quiz them a little about their method of preparing a drawing for delivery. You can have a drawing set to feet units, then WBLOCK something from it in inches. It's common to prepare drawings for outside delivery using WBLOCK.
Thank you all for the input. I think Trundle may be right. I just had them look at their template and it's set up for feet instead of unitless. Does this sound like a reasonable explanation? I will test later. Thanks again.
AutoCad's and I believe Carlson's default is inches. If someone else is in feet, getting something from them would be 1/12 or .0833333.
Guy Townes, post: 414414, member: 11463 wrote: I just had them look at their template and it's set up for feet instead of unitless. Does this sound like a reasonable explanation? I will test later. Thanks again.
This is a common occourance, and one you'd never know about unless you knew specifically where to look and what to test for.
type insunits it should be set to 0 for unitless or 21 for us survey foot.
Civil 3D and most AutoCad products are unitless. They will display measurements in the preferred unit, but the objects are always drawn 1:1. This is actually in your favor. There is a setting in the "ddunits" command that controls how objects are scaled when importing. If the drawing is drawn with inches as the units, set the setting accordingly. This is also controlled in the "insert" dialog box on a case by case basis. Thirdly; this is controlled in the xref dialog box on a file by file basis.
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