We have mentioned command settings many times in this dicuss; now you’ll learn what they are and their intended purpose. When you create a Civil 3D object, you define its properties, set design parameters, set default styles for objects, and so on. A Civil 3D object is defined through a command. To speed up the standardization of the creation process, the command settings take care of the default values used when a Civil 3D object is created. So, for example you can see that most of the default settings that the
CreateAlignmentLayouttool uses are defined within the command settings. The fact that most of the settings are defined at the drawing level can be seen by the small number of check marks in the Override column.
 |  |
|
| Command settings for Create Alignment Layout define the defaults when this tool is used. |
You have the option to customize the defaults for the tool so that every time the tool is launched you don’t have to type in the same values. Even though the values will be prepopulated in the specific fields, the user still has the option to overwrite those choices within the creation dialog box. Note, however, that only part of the predefined defaults are available to the user within the dialog box. For most of the defaults, the specific command setting dialog is the only place where those values can be defined.
Most of the settings within the command settings are defined on a global level for the drawing within the
Ambient Settings tab. Going from a global level to the object level, the same settings can be found and overridden at the object level through the Edit Feature Settings for that type of object. From the object level, you can move to the tool level, where within the command settings for the tool they can again be overridden to achieve the desired settings when using that tool.
