Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Civil 3D Object Tooltips

If you’ve been using Civil 3D for a while, you’re probably loving the object tooltips! The reason for this blog post is the few support calls we’ve received recently.

The typical technical call is along the lines of “Some of our project Surfaces / objects are not displaying the Tooltips? – help!!!”

Before I get into solving the problem, let’s explore a bit more on tooltips.

The following are from Civil 3D help documents:

There are 2 types of tooltips for C3D objects: proximity and rollover

Rollover

A rollover tooltip displays information about an object when you hover the cursor directly over it. If the object highlighting setting is on, the object will be highlighted when this tooltip is displayed.

Proximity

A proximity tooltip displays information about the current location of the cursor with respect to one or more objects in the drawing. More specifically, it displays information about the proximity of the cursor to the objects. These tooltips are displayed without having to hover the cursor over any specific entity in the drawing.

The most important object information is displayed at the beginning of the tooltip. For alignments and surfaces, the tooltip displays the station/offset information for the closest alignment to the cursor and the elevation of the topmost surface.

If you keep your cursor in the same location, additional information is displayed in an expanded tooltip that shows up to four more items. Which items are displayed depends upon the objects in the drawing and whether tooltips are enabled for that object. If there are five alignments and five surfaces in the drawing, for example, the proximity tooltip will display three alignments and three surfaces. Alignments are shown in order of proximity to the cursor. Surfaces are shown in order from highest elevation, to lowest elevation.

Ok, that’s enough “help”; let me get back to the technical support question.

On the Toolspace Settings tab, right-click Surface --> Edit Feature Settings


Notice the “New Entity Tooltip State”

On: Sets the default state of tooltips for new objects to be turned on.

Off: Sets the default state of tooltips for new objects to be turned off.

Click OK and voila the tooltips are back on all surfaces.

Well, the C3D world changes to a certain extent every release, mostly for the better, but sometimes the changes are painful :)

Wednesday, January 5, 2011













The First Ground Breakers Meeting of 2011

Wednesday, January 19, 2011
7:00pm - 9:30pm


Brix Napa Valley Grille & Wine Bar
230 Commerce Valley Drive, East #1
Thornhill/Richmond Hill L3T 7Y3

Meeting Topics

  • Introduction to the Meeting: Brian McCorriston, CAD MicroSolutions
  • BIM for Civil Engineering: Derek Gauer, IBI Group
  • Autodesk Subassembly Composer: Prem Joseph, CAD MicroSolutions
  • User Group Executive Committe Selection
  • Topics of Interest for the Next User Group Meeting
  • Networking Opportunities

REGISTER NOW