This isn’t really a Civil 3D thing, but since Civil 3D labels respond to a dview twist, it is about time we all figured out how to do one with as little pain as possible.
There is always a lot of passion surrounding the use of UCS rotation vs Dview twist to change the way your plan looks when placed in a layout. For some more information about UCS vs Dview in Civil3D see my next post.
I am a resident of a Dview state, so I cast my vote for the twist. Jason, however, is from UCS country, so perhaps he will share his approach later.
One of the main objections to the Dview twist is that it can be tricky to figure out your twist angle, where with UCS you can do UCS follow or some other methods that make the flip fast. I always struggled coming up with a dview twist angle until I found this.
There is an express tool that makes this go really quickly.
It is called ALIGNSPACE and it works very similarly to the ALIGN command in AutoCAD.
I have a site plan with area labels I’d like to always remain readable, and I’d like the long roads to be parallel to the bottom of the page.
I make sure my area label is setup to change with the view.
Go into layout and make your viewport
Draw a Guideline parallel to the bottom of the page.
Execute Express>Layout Tools> Alignspace
Choose two points in model space and two points in paper space as directed.
REGENALL to see your label size and flip react.
Now if you want to replicate this view in model space so that you can work on your drawing in an orientation that makes sense to you, you can name the view so you can access it again- either in model space or on another sheet.
Oh man, I had no idea you were one of those people. I’m not sure we’ll be able to maintain our relationship.
Dview…wow.
then what are you doing to get labels to react? when jason explained how he used ucs, it was essentially just a way to get a dview twist setup.
labels won’t react to a UCS change- just world, dview or object.
Thanks For the Tip!!
I just gave it a shot w/ a UCS. All I had to do was define a view after I used the OCS /Object command, set up the label style as you said & viola!!
On another UCS note, I was suprised that I was able to define a parcel in a UCS correctly. This was all a quick test (time to cut the lawn).
The UCS Object Toolbar Button might help you get that rotation a bit easier.
Okay, I rushed through that reply & left out some important info.
My UCS Object Toolbar button incorporates the PLAN command & the UCS commands. The firm I work for has been useing this and other custom UCS buttons in Land for some time. Here’s a few of the macros for WCS and a UCS that gets named “PL” in all ploted drawings.
^C^CUCS;n;OB;plan;c;
^C^CUCS;r;PL;plan;c;
^C^Cucs;w;plan;w;
The PLAN command sets a view & there is no real need to save a view if the UCS is saved in the VP’s properties.
I think the UCS/DView debate will grow a little less important with Civl 3D labels. You folks have shown use how to label practically everything and anything. There’s nothing left to annotate or label by hand.
Okay I should have reread you original post and thanks for putting in the time here.
I have it all working & I think I can even code it into similar toolbar buttons for our users.
One lingering question though. When you were using Land, how did you create a leader with horixontal text in MS (we don’t label plans in PS) using these methods. Even if I had to do it in Civil 3D (which we hope not to be doing with the broad functionality of Label Styles) I would still get the mtext aligned to World Coordinates.