Changing Multiple Surface Styles in Civil 3D 2014

by Graham Riddleston

When using Civil 3D on a day to day basis one of the most often used features is to change the style of Surfaces.

Your project may contain surfaces created from existing survey points, corridors, gradings or perhaps volume surfaces or pasted surfaces. This could result in your drawing becoming very cluttered and difficult to read.

There are many ways to change surface styles including using the ribbon menu, prospector, properties or quick properties panel but these methods only allow one surface at a time to be changed. I’ve often wanted to display just a single surface and turn all others to ‘No Display’ or ‘All Off’ which, using the above methods, can become time consuming.

While watching an Autodesk webinar recently I noticed the presenter used a smart technique to do exactly what I wanted! So this is a quick way to change the style of multiple Civil 3D surfaces in one go.

1. In the Prospector, select top level of Surfaces, this will show all surfaces with their current style in the information area. In this case I have a mix of surface types.

2.       Select all the required Surfaces to be changed (using pick then ctrl + pick) then right click on ‘Style’ in title bar and select ‘Edit’:

3.       This launches the Surface Styles menu. Select the required style from the drop down box and click OK:

4.       All selected surfaces will have the chosen style applied!:

In the above example my drawing will only show the Combined Surface as a triangulation.

Hope this will be helpful.