In Civil 3D 2020, your workspace environment determines productivity and comfortability. Luckily, Civil 3D provides customization options for appearance to tailor to your desired look. When your workspace is organized how you want it, your day can become more productive. In this blog, I will show you different ways to customize 3D and navigate through the interface.

Menu Browser

First, let’s take a look at the Menu Browser.

The Menu Browser contains a search bar you can use to look for anything inside Civil 3D – as simple or as advanced as you need. I find that most people don’t know this feature exists, so I highly encourage everyone to use the search function.

Custom Workspace

In the image above, you can see “C3D – Patrick”.  This is the custom Workspace I created to save my Civil 3D workspace environment. I HIGHLY suggest to not save over the default Civil 3D workspace environment, but instead CREATE a new one with your desired name.

If you create a new one, you will always have an out of the box workspace without overwriting the default workspace. The user interface will be changed and saved in a custom workspace in this blog.

Toolspace

Edit to your style in the Toolspace. Select the home tab and click the large Toolspace button to toggle it on and off. There are six smaller buttons next to the Toolspace button. The top four buttons are Prospector, Settings, Survey and Toolbox tabs, which can be turned on and off inside your Toolspace.

Since the Survey Tab or Toolbox isn’t used by everyone to run reports, Civil 3D allows the user to disable these tabs.

Docking Feature

The Docking feature is another useful feature that shows all open pallets in Civil 3D. Docking minimizes the pallet to either the left- or right-hand side of your screen. Personally, I like to have layer properties and Xref pallets docked and minimized to the left and properties and sheet-set manager docked and minimized to the right. However, right-clicking on the Toolspace sidebar, selecting ALLOW DOCKING and choosing which side you want to anchor (Anchor Left, Anchor Right) can achieve the same effect, allowing you to modify your Civil 3D workspace with ease.

Ribbon

Tabs and panels can be customized in the Ribbon according to what you want to see. Below is the basic Ribbon with a few extra tabs. Right-click on the Ribbon to add or remove panels.

The same concept can be applied to your tabs at the top. For example, the DACH Extension tab can be removed from my tabs list.

Nav Bar

If you have ever started a true out of the box Civil 3D drawing, you may have noticed the Nav bar. This tool may be useful for some people, but most people I’ve worked with do not have it activated.  To deactivate, type NAVBARDISPLAY in the command line and change the value to “0” instead of “1”.

This can be done with the View Cube as well, however, I do not recommend this. Type DISPLAYVIEWCUBEIN2D and set it to <OFF>

Transparent Command Bar

The Transparent Command Bar has a lot of versatility and can add nearly anything. Depending on how much you add to the command bar, you can be nearly keyboard-free.

Right-click on the Transparent command Bar in the open space. You have many different options to add. In the image below, I added the Draw Toolbar that includes all drawing functions.

Save a Custom Workspace

After your workspace is tailored to your desired look, don’t forget to save your current workspace. As mentioned before, do not save over the default Civil 3D workspace so you always have a fresh start to go back to.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope this has given you some ideas on how to edit your workspace to fit your needs.  Civil 3D provides an environment that allows you to see the tools you need and easily hide the ones that you do not. 

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This blog is written by Civil Technical Specialist Patrick Smith. If you have any questions or need help with your Civil 3D needs, please email us at whyATG@atgusa.com.