Borehole Utility for Civil 3D 2012

From Autodesk Subscription, you have access to additional product enhancements.  One enhancement I chose to take a look at was the Borehole Utility, which is a part of the Civil 3D 2012 productivity tools.  This utility allows the user to import Borehole data into both plan and profile view. 

After loading the utility, here is what you should see on the toolbox tab of toolspace.

To run the utility, the user simply needs to right click on the Importer and select execute.

After running execute, you will see the following pop up.

The important things to note on the importer are as follows:

1. Under file in folder, you will select the file to be imported.  Note that you can select a csv or ags file to import.
2. The create Civil 3D points option must be checked on.
3. Under surface, the user will be asked which surface they wish to tie the points to.  This surface will determine the top elevation from which the boring information will start from.  In the capture above, I imported a Google earth surface prior to the import.
4. Under profile view, we need to select the profile profile view for which we want the boring information to be projected into.

The setting tab of the importer allows for the user to specify display options.  Most of the settings are self explanatory, but the two I will focus on are profile view settings and labels.  

1. The profile view settings allows the user to determine an acceptable distance from a given alignment that is allowed to display boring data within the profile view.  If the boring point falls outside of the maximum distance, the boring will not be displayed with the profile view.  
2. The labels settings simply allows the user to determine what labels will be displayed upon import into the profile view.  Sometimes the user may need to import multiple times to determine if the boring has too many or too few labels.

The screen capture above shows the boring data as Civil 3D points in plan view after they have been imported.

The screen capture above shows the boring data in profile view after they have been projected.  It is important to note that the projections are not dynamic, and will need to be re-imported if the boring locations change.  Also, the hatch patterns in the boring block, like the one above, are controlled by the same shape styles that dictate hatch patterns within subassemblies.