About Project Management on the Prospector Tree

Projects can be displayed and managed from collections on the Prospector tree.

Note: A Vault database must be configured before it can be accessed in the Prospector tree. For more information, see To Configure Vault for Use with Autodesk Civil 3D.

Note: The Projects collection is available in Prospector only if you have installed Vault Professional or Vault Workgroup. If you have installed base Vault, the Vault interface is not integrated with Autodesk Civil 3D and is identical to Vault for AutoCAD.

Prospector collections for projects

The figure shows the collections for a Vault project named Trio and a data shortcut project named Arc. Both project types are created from the default project template. As a result, they have identical collections of surfaces, alignments, and other objects that can be referenced into multiple drawings.

You can store multiple projects in the same working folder. The default location of the working folder for data shortcuts projects is C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Civil 3D Projects, and for Vault projects is Documents\Vault.

Several Vault projects can be displayed in the Projects collection. For data shortcut projects, you switch from one to another by changing the data shortcuts folder.

Most commands for managing projects are accessible by right-clicking specific objects in the project collections on the Prospector tree.