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Michael Kinnear/3 min read

Manipulating Point Markers and Labels in Civil 3D: A Comprehensive Guide

Point Style Controls

Point Styles

Control marker symbol, size, and visibility per point group.

Label Styles

Choose what info shows: number, elevation, description, or all three.

Point Groups

Filter and organize points by description code or other criteria.

Display Order

Control which labels render on top when points cluster — avoid overlap.

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This Civil 3D tutorial walks through manipulating point markers and labels in civil 3d, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we're going to talk about manipulating point markers and point labels. So, to do that, I'm going to navigate closer to another point that I want to start working with.

So, I'm going to go over to our points that we had in our previous videos up in the upper right corner under this manual point creation method. I'm going to be working with this point right here, and I'm going to go ahead and select it. So, when we're working with points and markers, we have the option for grip-editing these points.

So, if I hover over the grip edit for the point, I have the options of Move Point, Rotate Label and Marker, and Rotate Marker. So, from here, we have the options of, if this was a standard COGO point, we could move it. We can Rotate Label and Marker so that we can move the text out of the way, and it rotates the label and the marker.

So, you can see that crosshair is rotating as I rotate the text around it, and you can Rotate Marker. So, the text will stay where it's located, and the marker itself will rotate as needed. Moving on from there, if we hover over the other grip edit, we have the options for Move Label and Rotate Label.

So, if we wanted to maintain the marker orientation but rotate the text, we can choose this option for rotating the text, or we can go ahead and select Move Label, and it will create a drag state for the label. It will automatically create an arrow leader and a text that points to the point marker. The last thing that I want to talk about is about the size of your points inside of Civil 3D.

Oftentimes, you will come into a drawing and not have set your drawing scale, and when you come into a drawing like this, where you see that the text is starting to encroach on and overlap each other, you often want to check and make sure that you have your drawing scale set correctly. We can change things like text size in another video, but the first quick fix to making sure that your points are displaying correctly is to know that the points will resize themselves based on your drawing scale. So, if I navigate down to my scale options here, I can adjust the scale of the drawing to something that I would be working in.

So, for example, if I was working in 1 inch equals 10 feet and I selected it, the points inside the drawing will automatically resize to be 1 inch equals 10 feet when displayed inside of paper space, and you will be able to see how they look as they would be displayed in paper space while in model space. In the next video, we're going to discuss assigning and editing point label styles.