Settings in Autodesk Civil 3D control many preset values, such as drawing units, scale, and coordinate system.
Autodesk Civil 3D has drawing, feature, and command settings. All three levels of settings in Autodesk Civil 3D are saved with the drawing, and they can be saved to a drawing template.
You modify each level of settings at a different location in the Settings tree, as shown in the following illustration:
There are two types of drawing-level settings:
You access drawing-level settings by right-clicking the drawing name in the Settings tree and clicking Edit Drawing Settings.
At the drawing level, the Edit Settings dialog box contains only the ambient settings for the drawing:
The following summarizes the controls in the Edit Settings dialog box:
Use the object collection level in the Settings tree to control all settings that pertain to the object type. Change the object settings at this level in the tree, and specify overrides for the drawing ambient settings.
Access the object- or feature-level settings by right-clicking the object collection in the Settings tree and clicking Edit Feature Settings.
At the object level, this dialog box also contains object-specific settings, such as default styles:
Use the Commands collection level in the Settings tree to override both the object-level settings and drawing ambient settings on a command-by-command basis. You can also specify command-specific settings.
Access the command-level settings by expanding the Commands collection for an object type in the Settings tree, right-clicking the command, and clicking Edit Command Settings.
At the command level, this dialog box also contains command-specific settings, such as the Plots and Alignments settings that are used by the CreateSite command.
Each lower level object in the settings hierarchy can either inherit or override settings in the level above it. The following illustration shows an override set for area units at the Plots feature level.
Feature settings can override drawing settings
The arrow in the Child Override column of the Drawing Settings dialog box (upper dialog box) indicates that an override has been set at a lower level.
The check mark in the Override column in the Edit Feature Settings - Parcel dialog box (lower dialog box) indicates that the value set in this dialog box overrides the setting at a higher level.
At the drawing level you can cancel a child override by clicking the arrow icon in the Child Override column. This causes the arrow icon to appear as follows: .
You can prevent overrides by locking a setting.