The subassembly development process - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

- [Narrator] Let's start this adventure together within an introduction to the process of how we actually use all of these subassemblies we'll create together and the multitudes you'll create on your own. This will include steps for taking your PKT file into Civil 3D and actually applying them to a corridor. Just as a reminder here before we really get into this, if you do not understand the concepts of Civil 3D grading and how to use preloaded subassemblies for corridor creation, I would highly recommend spending some time in these areas and coming back. I'm making the assumption here that you have experience in the verbiage and the pace of this course we created with this assumption in mind. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's learn the subassembly composer. The process of importing your subassembly into Civil 3D is one that I will not do but one more time in this entire course. I feel it's vastly more important for us to spend our time in the subassembly composer and utilizing the tools there. I'll leave it to you to import these into Civil 3D and test and play with them. More on that in the next video. Importing your subassemblies into Civil 3D is a very straightforward process. I would recommend for the purposes of this course creating a new tab in your subassemblies Tool palette so that you can have all of them in one place. Once you're a pro and have created a 100 of these, you can use a different organizational schema. I've included with the course exercise files a very simple data set, that includes an existing surface, alignment, profile, and assembly. You can use these components to test all of the subassemblies we'll create together or you can use your own data if you're more comfortable there. Let's open the DWG now and see what we've got. Alright, in Civil 3D to get to our subassemblies Tool palette, we visit the Home tab Palettes panel and we select Tool palettes. We can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + 3. From here, we right-click on the Menu bar, and we select New Palette. I'll call this palette SC Course and we'll use this throughout the entire length of the course. Now to import a subassembly, I simply right-click on the Menu bar again, and select Import Subassemblies. I'm now gonna select a source file. Inside of our exercise file, there's another folder called Sample PKT from Autodesk. I'll explain later in the course where these actually come from, but for now let's just use them. For simplicity's sake, let's choose the Loop_Geometry_Example PKT file and select open. I want to ensure my Tool palette is selected as the SC Course and I select OK. I've now imported my first subassembly into Civil 3D. And from here, I know what to do. I can click on my Loop_Geometry_Example, choose the correct side, and then apply it directly to my subassembly. So now we see how following a simple three steps we can take our own tab and import any PKT file into Civil 3D and use what we create visually in the subassembly composer for design in Civil 3D. As a closing note, a PKT file is actually just a zip file that's been renamed and includes within it an image file, the help file, and the Visual Basic code the subassembly composer produces for you. It's pretty cool all these steps are actually done at one time and packaged up to one file that we can import without worry. And now that we've a good understanding of what we'll need to do about 40 more times during this course, let's really dig in to the absolute most important part of developing any subassembly, the plan of attack. The planning process to ensure we're not wasting our time or double-coding. See you there.