The concepts are that design staff creates and models the Civil 3D design elements in the respective files. Upon pushing these files into the Vault, design elements become available to project team members through vault data reference in addition to the standard AutoCAD XRef functionality. By using the Civil 3D objects to feed the creation of plan files, the technician can begin creating and labelling plans as soon as the first iteration of the design has been checked into the Vault. Now let’s take all this theory and put it to work using Vault inside of Civil 3D.

Working in Vault:

Using vault Civil 3D requires some mental effort. It is simply a new process for moving and sharing data within the team. In this section, we will look at the mechanics of all this interaction, including setting up the project, checking data into the Vault, and creating some data reference.

Preparing for projects in Civil 3D:

For most of the AutoCAD based products, creating a folder in Vault explorer is enough to generate a project available in the program. Not so with Civil 3D. because of the project mechanism used to pass information from one drawing to another in Civil 3D, certain files must exist in a Vault folder for Civil3D to recognize it as a valid project. First, let’s set up a project template that matches our desired workflow; then we will move to creating a project.