How can I draw a legal description with curves?

[Tom Beauford]

Trying to switch to Civil 3D. This is a beginner question. Help clams there is an "Alignment Layout Tools" toolbar, but I haven't found it yet.

At Public Works we just fix roads and drainage created by others. I need to start by drawing a legal description of the Right-of-Way with curves for each project. Can this be done in Civil 3D?

[sinc]

The "Alignment Layout Tools" are only visible once you've created an Alignment.

But that may not be the tool that you want... If you have your ROW described as a bunch of lines and curves with bearing, distance, etc., then the easiest thing is to draw them using plain linework. For that, I mostly use the 'BD transparent command, along with the "Draw Line from End of Object" and "Draw Curve from End of Object" commands.

BTW, you may need to change some of your Drawing Settings -> Ambient Settings... For example, at least at one point, Autodesk had units for "Angle" set to decimal degrees in the stock templates; if your drawing/template is like this, you may want to change this setting to use DMS.

[brian.hailey933139]

Also, check out the mapcheck tools. You can use them to recreate a legal description. I wrote about it on my blog so I'm not going to recreate it here.

http://civil3dplus.wordpress.com/201...l-description/

[Tom Beauford]

I mostly use the 'BD transparent command, along with the "Draw Line from End of Object" and "Draw Curve from End of Object" commands.

Thanks guys, that was just what I was looking for.