Civils 3D – Information and Property Sets

By Trevor Clayton

Property Sets
Defining your Property Sets
Figure 1

You may or may not be aware that AutoCAD Civil 3D has the ability to add information to objects within the model. This means that you can associate all sorts of additional information to individual objects for downstream uses such as scheduling, costing or participating in a BIM project.
This functionality has been available for many years although in earlier versions the command was not uncovered. However if you have 2016 version you will need to Productivity Pack 2. Earlier versions can access the functionality by invoking the “PROPERTYSETDEFINE” command, which is a pleasant hangover from AutoCAD Architecture. In either vesion once invoked you will be presented with the following dialog box:

figure 2

Creating a Property Set couldn’t be easier: simply select the Propert set definitions and right click and new. Give it a descriptive name and description, open the “Applies to “ tab and select all, continue to open the “Definition” tab. Now for the interesting bit. Add new definitions as required, see figure 2.

All that is needed is to now add these additional properties to the applicable object.
I find it easier to select all the objects I want to apply the additional data too and isolate them. In this case it’s a pipe network.

It’s just a case of selecting all the objects you want to apply the addditional data to and open the AutoCAD Property navigate to the extended data tab dialog box and select the Add property Sets button located in the bottom left of the extended properties tab. Choose the Property Set you wish to apply (you can have multiple sets if required). We can even add a Hyperlink here if needed.Now when I select an object and navigate to the extended property tab I get access to all the additional

information associated with the object including the hyperlink.