Proper setup for using a shp connection and state plane projection. Civil 3d 2013

[bsims1229]

so heres the deal. i am a GIS who is trying to teach myself autocad and this is the scenario.

-I have a shp file that is in a nad83 ms west state plane coord system us feet.
- I want to display that in autocad civil by using the connection option.
- When it is put in of ocurse it is in decimal units. (45.
- I would like it to show in engineering units. (ex. 45' 8")

this is what is happening:
- After being imported it will show the 45.8 what ever.
- When i change it to engineering units it becomes 3' 9".

- I want it to be set to a scale that when it does come in it is read in foot not inches.
- I have read multiple forums and trying several different options and cannot get it to work.
- Does anyone have any suggestions?

i understand autocad does not work by ft or in but by drawing units and that in some way you have to trick it to think it is reading feet.

please help.

[rickh]

Hi bsims1229,

I don't think you will want to use engineering or architectural units when in Civil 3D. It is simply not made to handle them. You can force the drawing units to be inches, but I think a lot of settings and calculations behind the scenes assume feet or meters. You have probably already seen in the Units and Zone tab that the only options are Feet or Meters....if you force this to Inches (with "-dwgunits") and then pick the zone you need....you'll notice the "Imperial to Metric Conversion" setting is still using Feet and Meters. I think you would have to somehow find a way to include "US Survey Inches" which to the best of my knowledge is not available. Bottom line, you can trick some things in the drawing, but it will inevitable come back to haunt you....or whoever recieves the file after you. Here is another link of older information, but I believe it is still valid for all versions.
http://beingcivil.typepad.com/my_web...-civil-3d.html

p.s. as I do structural drawings, I too would love to use foot-inch input, but I gave up and left it to phony architectural dimensions with 12 scale and decimal dimensions with a ' suffix.

[bsims1229]

As I said I am completely new with AutoCAD. To be honest I have spent one days worth of time on it but produced the site plan so far. I have always worked on pipeline row but have recently tried to expand my knowlege on the facility side . Basicallly my goal is to create a construction cad layout only instead of it being a preliminary drawing, the pipelines are already in place. I will be going off sketches, photos, measurements, and GPS positions. Do you have any advice? I am am very quicck at learning software and I don't stop until I figure it out.

[bsims1229]

Wow just realized your in Houston I am also located in Houston as well.

[rickh]

For starters, have you set your Zone in the drawing settings? http://docs.autodesk.com/CIV3D/2013/...r=CUGd30e24687

That will be important for importing all those gps and other data types. That is also why I mentioned to not use architectural or engineering autocad Units (I would stick with Decimal and Feet in any place where the options arise). Especially being in GIS, you will have to find out how the units and zone settings manipulate data when you bring it into the drawing (honestly, I don't fully understand all the transformations...I just know to set the correct zone...and I never use the 'transformation' settings - the link above should also show help on this information). If you don't have the zone set, or if you change it in the middle of a project, the same inserted points (for example) will show up in different locations (assuming they were created in a zone themselves).

When you get these existing files, or files from others, you may have to go in and check those settings also. Probably the most common problem I see is the US Survey Feet is set to International Feet. This is because typically the company or client that created the file was not using Civil or Map, so these options did not exist for them. It can get tricky...because a lot of normal autocad stuff doesn't really matter, but the civil and map stuff definitely moves with these changes (so a problem is when someone tries to copy and use that client's file thinking it will be easy to bring in some of their design elements...and then it's ~30 feet off because of the International Feet). I lean very heavily on our Survey and GIS departments to convert coordinates and check the info in my drawings as I'm making the base files just to be sure everyone is on the same page before any major design.

I guess my advice would be to really dig in and figure out how all the units/zone/transformations work (or don't work?) in the program. We did a lot of random testing, like attaching survey points with no zone, then change the zone...do they move....bring in some more....did they move....do xrefs apply the zone when attached...etc. There are some good posts from surveyors out there in the google world if you search "civil3d units and zone" and they will have done a lot of the testing (with more knowledge on what it's supposed to do than I have). One little thing I did during all that was create a note label that showed N,E , grid N, grid E , and lat/long labels so you could try to see what the program is doing. I would try to give better knowledge of this, but I remember getting so confused that I just figured out what I need to do and what I need to check...and just assume I shouldn't do anything else without the Survey department giving me their blessing...

hope that helps a little.