How to Customise Strips in Civils


 Product(s):Keynetix
 Version(s):1.0
 Area:Assist

How to Customise Strips in Civils

Question

Is is possible to customise the appearance of Strips using the Civils Extension?

Answer

You can use the Civils Extension to customise how you want your strips to look. Currently the extension comes with pre-configured strip templates from which to get started with these are:

- CPT Geology Code

- Geology Code

- Geology Code 2

- Legend Code

- SPT N Value

These are listed as Styles within the Styles Manager and you can add you own styles if you wish to. Using the Styles Manager you can edit an existing styles strip and change the width, offset position, text size, alter the name of the strip and how the header is displayed.

The Hatch Manager lets you change how the Geology Sections appear visually by modifying the colours and patterns based on geology banding.

Process

Once you have connected to your project in Civils and the borehole locations are displayed turn on the strips visibility by clicking on the Locations Tab and selecting the strip checkbox.

After switching on the strips visibility you may want to first adjust the length of the strips. You can do this be changing the 2D Exaggeration Increasing the level increases the length.

If any of the Strips look like they are overlapping others then a simple solution is to select the individual strip and once selected use your mouse to drape the strip into a position you are happy with.

This method can be applied individually to all strips one at a time or you can do all of them by changing the offset within the Styles Manager. where you can also edit further aspects of the Strips presentation.

Open the Styles Manager and you will immediately see that there is a default style currently selected.

Click on the Pencil symbol underneath the Plan Strip heading which controls the default settings for the strips on the drawing. (you will notice that there are other Hole Types showing which you can customise the strip for the individual types which gives greater control over presentation but for the purposes of this guide we are only focusing on editing all by default)

A Plan Strip Editor dialogue window will be displayed and from here you can change the name of the Plan Strip, How the header is displayed, which strip template you want to use, the X and Y offset and finally the Strip Scale and Text Scale.

You can rename the strip if you wish and change how the Strips header is displayed by selecting from a default list. (please note that you can customise the header in more details using the AutoCAD tools but for the purposes of this guide we are only illustrating the functions that the Civils Extension performs.

To change the position of the strips use the X Offset and Y Offset entry boxes. Alter these to how you wish.

The Strip Scale controls the width of the strips so amend this to how you wish also. Interestingly the Text Scale number adjusts along with the changes made to the Strip Scale so by altering the strip scale you alter the text scale. You can change the text scale independent from the Strip Scale however.

Make your desired changes and click save. In order to commit the changes to the drawing you need to update the Style by clicking Set Current. Once you have done this you should see the effects immediately.

You may also wish to change the default colours which represent each Strata. This is handled through the Hatches Manager.

Click on the hatches tab a list of all stored hatches are displayed.

To change a hatch simply filter for the one you wish to edit or scroll down the list until you find the one you want. Once located select the hatch an editor section will be displayed. Here you can rename the hatch, give it a category which is determines what style its associated with, change the 3D colour which alters the colour of the 3D borehole Plan, give the hatch your own description and finally change the Hatch Style and colour which will appear on your strips.

At a basic level to show the FILL Geology Code part of the Geology Code Style in the colour blue you would first select the Hatch Name, specify Geology Code as the Category and select blue from the colour palette shown in the below image.

To commit the changes Click Save then go back to the Styles Manager, select the Geology Code style and click Set Current

As you can see from the above image FILL is now represented by the colour Blue.

This was an overview of how to make changes to Strips within the Civils Extension. For more information please consult the User Guide.