Transfer Object Layer Settings Between Drawings

I found a nice "undocumented feature" in Civil 3D 2011 today. I found this totally by accident and though I lost a couple of minutes worth of changes to a template, I know that this find will save me a lot of time in the future, especially when a drawing is started from the wrong template.

One of the frustrating things about working with old drawings is that everything gets placed on Layer 0. Some of this can be corrected by using commands such as AECIMPORTSTYLES and AECCIMPORTSTYLESANDSETTINGS as posted by Scott McEachron of the I.II.I consortium. I haven't had great success with those commands yet, but as Scott stated, the commands are undocumented and unsupported.

Well here's another undocumented and unsupported feature (some might even call it a bug):

You can copy the Object Layers settings from one drawing to another...in seconds...FOR FREE! Want to know how? Here you go:

Before you begin, I will state that I'm using Civil 3D 2011 on the Windows 7 64-bit OS. I can't guarantee that it will work on older versions of Civil 3D or on a different OS.

1. Create a drawing from a template that contains the correct Object Layer settings. I'll call this drawing "TEMPLATE".
2. Now open a drawing that doesn't have the correct Object Layer settings. I'll call this drawing "BLANK".
   
3. Make Toolspace visible (type showts at the command line or locate the toolspace button on the Home Tab of the ribbon).
4. Select the Settings tab on the Toolspace palette.
5. Set the view dropdown to Master View.
   
6. Make sure that the "BLANK" drawing is current (it's shown at the top of the list in the Settings tab).
7. Now scroll down until you see the "TEMPLATE" drawing in the Settings tab.
8. With your cursor positioned over the "TEMPLATE" drawing name, right click and select Edit Drawing Settings... from the list.
9. Select the Object Layers tab and verify that these are the object layers that you want used in the "BLANK" drawing.
10. Now all you have to do is left click on OK.

Voila! You have just changed all the default Object Layers in your current drawing, "BLANK", to those in the "TEMPLATE" drawing. Feel free to check for yourself.

I'm interested in hearing if this trick works on older versions of Civil 3D and/or other operating systems, both 32-bit and 64-bit so please leave me a comment.

Trim and Extend. Can’t we do both?

Surely this has happened to you at least once or twice. You run the extend command, but there’s at least one object that needs to be trimmed, not extended. Maybe you ran the trim command and needed to extend a line instead. Never fear because the Autodesk programmers have designed AutoCAD to be multi-talented (thanks guys and gals at Autodesk).

What’s the secret? You can hold the shift key while selecting an object and AutoCAD will run the other command on the selected object.

Here’s an example:
In this image, the red line will be the “cutting edge”. I will trim the green lines and extend the blue line.

At the command prompt, type trim and press enter (or use the trim command found on the Modify ribbon tab in the Modify panel).

When asked to select the cutting edges, left click on the appropriate object(s) or just press enter to select all objects. In our example we’ll select the red line as the cutting edge.

When you are done selecting cutting edges, press enter to continue the command.

At this point, the command line prompts you to “Select object to trim or shift-select to extend…” so we’ll left click on the three green lines to trim them. Now the drawing looks something like this:

To execute the trim command, just hold the shift key while you select the object(s) to be extended. In our example we’ll select the blue line.

One more enter to end the command and the process is complete, using only one command to do two different tasks.

Here’s the final product:

In case you're wondering, this method has been available for several versions of AutoCAD. I guess it pays to read the command line once in a while, even if it is a command that you run all the time.