Use drawing templates to eliminate duplication of effort and to help maintain consistency across drawings.
As a basis for configuring your drawing settings, you can choose an existing template that is closest to your needs.
To see the available templates, click New. If you want some preset object styles, the templates that have names beginning with “_AutoCAD Civil 3D”, are recommended.
After choosing your initial template, the next logical step is to review and edit settings. On the Toolspace Settings tab, right-click the drawing name and click Edit Drawing Settings. The Drawing Settings dialog box includes five tabs and many settings.
Drawing Settings dialog box
One setting on this tab often overlooked is the Save Command Changes To Settings under the General setting group. If you set this to Yes, then whenever you change a setting, such as the radius of an alignment curve, it is saved as the default value for next time.
Another important setting is Independent Layer On. Set it to No if you want to be able to control object visibility by turning layers on and off.
The ambient settings you configured at the drawing level are available at the feature level in case you want to override them.
On the Ambient Settings tab, you see an arrow in the Child Override column next to any setting that is changed for one or more features (objects) in the drawing. You can cancel the override by clicking the arrow, and you can click the lock icon to lock any setting and prevent overrides at the feature level.
Use Ambient Settings to cancel style overrides.
After configuring the drawing settings, you should work down through Point, Surface, and other features in the Settings tree, right-clicking each feature and selecting Edit Feature Settings. Doing this allows you to examine the default styles for each feature and its labels, the feature name format, and other settings that you may want to modify.