Customizing Plan Strips in Civil3d

Hi Christopher,

I was curious about your post and based on your screen capture, I would have thought it should have worked for you, so I gave it a try.

Here is what I tried in Civil 3D that worked for me, in the hopes something here might work for you.  In my example, I turned on the "Strips" in The Locations Manager ribbon with the Band set to "Geology Code".  I have a hatch for "Class 4B" which is a blue diagonal hatch and I want to change it to a red cobble hatch pattern.

In the Hatches command, I select the Class 4B material and copy this hatch to my project, which is what it looks like you had done as well.  I changed the hatch to be red with our internal LEESCobbles hatch pattern.  Note that this style is in LegendCode but will work in GeologyCode.  Save this hatch.

In the Styles command, I select the Geology Code style and select the "Set Current" button and the drawing refreshes to show the new pattern.

I hope this might help you out.

Mike

Hi Christopher, 

I think the key may be that you need to do something that causes the strip the be rebuilt by the extension. The simplest way is to set a different style from the current one and then revert to the original style. Both profile and plan strips are essentially static objects until something is done that causes the extension to rebuild them, they won't dynamically update when a change is made.

Hope that helps,

Taylor

Hi Mike,

I just want to clarify that the final screenshot of changing the Strip Style by Setting it as current is actually causing the hatch to update.

The band dropdown in the first screenshot refers to the 3D model view and doesn't really affect the strips at all. In the second screenshot, those Categories are used just to help organize the hatches. 

Hatches are style agnostic. If you have a hatch for "GW" for example, it will use that hatch pattern and 3D colour regardless of how other things are set up.

Cheers,

Taylor

Hey Taylor,

Thank you all for the help and sorry for the delay.  I'm trying your workflows and it's not catching the changes.  Let me show you what I'm doing, and perhaps we can figure out what I'm doing wrong. 

I've set up a plan strip using the geology code strip for a borehole.

I want to change the color of the geo code "Med Silts and Clays" from white to a light brown.

I go into hatches, and I choose the med silts and clays and edit it to be brown.  I click save.

Nothing has changed on plan yet.  

I go to the styles setting, it was originally set to geology code, but now I'm moving it to a project specific one called Geology Code 60% Design.

  All that's changed is the text sizes. 

I click set current.

Nothing has changed colorwise.

I try switching back and forth between styles, switching back and forth between 2d exagerrations, and nothing.  When I build a profile cross section, however, it works.  Thoughts?

There are some nuances to how hatching works and when it updates within the Civil3D Extension. 

Generally, once a strip is built it doesn't update automatically if you change things like hatch colours. My initial guess, is that both styles use the same "Plan Strip Style" of "Geology Code", so changing styles won't cause those strips to be regenerated.  However, when you created the profile strip, it was a new strip, so it generated properly with the new colour.

Try either starting a new DWG file (for the same project, as the hatch colour is saved to the project) or switching styles to one that has a different "Plan Strip Set".