It seems like a simple enough request doesn’t it?
You’re an Autodesk Civil 3D user, and you want to insert tabulated geometric design data into your drawing, with the information in the tables being derived directly from your Civil 3D model. The data needs to be placed in static AutoCAD tables, not only so that you can easily manipulate them and apply your own styling, but also because you can’t tolerate any performance drain on Civil 3D. But here’s the rub – you need those tables to act intelligently and stay in sync with your design, reacting instantly to every design change made in Civil 3D.
Surely, you can’t have the best of both worlds – the customisation and performance benefits of a standard AutoCAD table, along with the intelligence to react dynamically to a rapidly evolving Civil 3D design?
If this is something you’ve been crying out for in Civil 3D, you are not alone. This has consistently been the top voted product enhancement idea on the Autodesk Community site for years.
So, here at 3AM Solutions, we set out to do something about it.
The solution lies in ProjectExplorer Object Sets
In ProjectExplorer 6, we have introduced a new Object Sets based workflow which allows you to create dynamically controlled AutoCAD tables containing custom Civil 3D content. This new feature allows you to:
- report any portion of your design to an AutoCAD table, then have the table update itself dynamically when a subsequent design change is detected.
- have style driven control over the content you place in the table, and decide how the information is titled, numerically formatted, and laid out.
- have style driven control over the styling of the AutoCAD table in terms of font settings, border and background settings, and cell padding settings.
- sync the table design and content to other object sets which share the same style settings but generate other types of output such as PDF reports and Excel spreadsheets.
- break the dynamic link between the table and related Civil 3D objects whenever you like to lock the table content, and subsequently reinstate the link later if you change your mind.
In ProjectExplorer 6 we have managed to achieve all of this, even though we are using essentially unintelligent AutoCAD tables.
We would love to know what you think.
Show me the basics
We have produced two YouTube videos. The first video is a short six minute overview of how the process works. It takes you through the process of placing a pipe network structures table into your drawing which updates when the pipe network is subsequently modified.
Want to know more? Take a deeper dive
The second video is intended to be an opportunity to dive deeper into this new functionality. This video is 18 minutes long, but well worth watching if you’d like to learn more about how it works.
In this video, we place a list of alignment entities from two alignments into a series of custom tables. We then take you through some of the other benefits of this workflow, such as the ability to effectively sync AutoCAD tables to outgoing reports and spreadsheets.
ProjectExplorer 6 is available now, and supports Autodesk Civil 3D 2020, 2019 and 2018.