AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks: LandXML Data Imperial Units Settings

This is the third of five AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks expanding upon a previous article I wrote outlining the 5 AutoCAD Civil 3D Settings Professional Land Surveyors Need To Know.

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The third of the five AutoCAD Civil 3D settings Professional Land Surveyors need to know was, “LandXML Data Imperial Units Settings“, which is explained in today’s AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks.

Please note that the images in this AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks represent the Units appropriate for my work area and project requirements. You will, of course, select the appropriate Units for your circumstances.

Also, in the following example I’m setting the LandXML Export Settings for Imperial Units to Survey Foot. The issue is if you export using LandXML set to International Foot and then insert that object into your drawing which has the Imperial to Metric Conversion drawing settings set at US Survey Foot, then the imported object using Land XML will be shifted geographically by the proportional amount that the US Survey Foot is different than the International Foot. If your projects are based in International Foot, however, then do choose that.

For assumed coordinate systems with small values (say N 1000, E 1000 for example) the magnitude of error is small (-0.002′) but when your project is using larger coordinate values, like in State Plane Coordinate Systems (N 300,000, E 300,000 for example), then the error is proportionally larger and significant (-0.60′). The larger the coordinates, the larger the error.

Now on to the AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks for LandXML Data Imperial Units Settings:

1. Switch to the Settings Tab of the Toolspace and right click on your AutoCAD Civil 3D drawing name. This will bring up a drop-down list of menu items. Select the third option, “Edit LandXML Settings …“.

   

2. With the LandXML Settings screen now open, switch to the “Export” tab.

   

3. Now, depending on your needs, select the correct “Imperial Units” of either “International Foot” or “Survey Foot”. Note: Along with a lot of other settings you can change in this dialog box, you might also want to switch to the “Import” tab where you can set Surface Import Settings to Convert Survey Foot to International Foot to “On” or “Off“.

   

4. Finally, click on the Apply button to save your settings and you’re done.

This AutoCAD Civil 3D Surveying Quick Tips and Tricks is brought to you by the Professional Land Surveyor Source, showing you how to use the LandXML Data Imperial Units Settings in your AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 drawings.