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Civil 3D surface labels driving me nuts - are they worth the hassle or a waste of time? | Drafters - HW Forums

ben436•3mo ago

Civil 3D surface labels driving me nuts - are they worth the hassle or a waste of time?

I've been drafting site plans for about 3 years now, mostly in a small firm outside Nashville. For the longest time I refused to use surface labels in Civil 3D because I figured it was faster to just throw basic spot elevations on everything manually. My reasoning was simple - I can control exactly where each label goes and I don't have to fight with the software. But last month a senior guy at our office made me watch him set up a surface label style for a grading plan, and honestly the contour labels updated automatically when he changed the surface. That got me thinking maybe I was missing something. On the other hand, I've seen surface labels get totally jumbled when someone tweaks a surface boundary or adds a breakline, and then you spend an hour untangling them. So which side are you on - do you stick with manual spot elevations for control, or do you trust the surface labels to save time in the long run?

2 comments

2 Comments

noahs823mo ago

Have you ever tried using surface labels with a dynamo script to batch-place them based on slope or drainage paths instead of manually fighting with every single one? I set that up once for a big parking lot job and it cut my annotation time by a solid 40 percent because the labels only went where the math actually mattered. It's not perfect and you still need to clean up a few strays, but it beats jamming basic spot elevations everywhere and hoping they line up with the revised surface later.

felix_bailey453mo ago

Did you tweak the label placement rules at all so it didn't drop elevation points right on top of your catch basins? I tried a similar workflow on a site job last year and found out the hard way that the slope filter was grabbing all the subgrade drainage swales too, which made a mess of the cleanup. Ended up having to add a tiny spot elevation exclusion zone around my inlets to get it to behave. The time savings were real once I dialed that in though, probably around 30 percent on my end once the stray labels stopped piling up every time the civil engineer revised the grading.