Well . . .well

I know it has been REALLY long time since my last post. In a way I kinda fell off the face of the earth. To be completely honest things in my life are getting ready to change pretty drastically. See right now I currently work for a local reseller, which has been great in every way. However an opportunity has arisen and I have decided to take on this opportunity.

So starting May 21st I will be employed at Autodesk. Now you may be asking what in god's name is he going to do at Autodesk, well it just so happens that I have taken on the Technical Marketing Manager position for Civil Engineering. Yes, these are big shoes to fill but I have been told that I have big feet. . . :-). So with a lot of luck and a little bit of skill you will be hearing a lot from me in the near future but possibly in a different forum.

So please stay tuned and I will continue to post but for the next month or so it may be a little sparse, since I will be in the process of relocating to Manchester, New Hampshire.

Upcoming Webcasts

Well folks it has been quite some time since my last post and needless to say it has been a little crazy around here. Anyways today I wanted to remind people about the upcoming webcasts that are going to be highlighting some of the new Civil 3D 2008 features. So if you are sitting on the fence trying to decide if you and your company should make the jump to Civil 3D, I would recommend checking it out. The nice thing about his forum is that you have the ability to ask questions and get responses. Plus you are hearing this information from the horses’ mouth, not that I am calling Dave or Dan horses but you get the point.

Also, don’t forget that this information is FREE! In addition, these webcasts are also archived for viewing at a later date. So for those of you that cannot attend a live webcast, login anytime and check out all the cool features that are coming out with the latest release of Civil 3D. The link I am providing below will get you to a list of the upcoming webcasts as well as the archived section.

Learning Civil 3D is a bit of a process but once you do, I am willing to bet that you will never go back to LDT. . . ever! Kind’ve a crazy thought, huh!

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 Webcasts

Xrefing from Vault. . .Take 3

A while ago I wrote a post about how AutoCAD users could Xref from Vault which seemed like a slick little option for those of us that wanted to introduce Vault into our workflow. What was weird is that this option was only available in vanilla AutoCAD and not available in Civil 3D. Well our wait is over and I am here to tell you that from the looks of the Preview version, Attach from Vault now shows up in the Xref palette. By having this option available you can attach or overlay any drawing that has been added to your project, plus it it still gives you the option to Bind, just in case you need it. In addition, you also have the ability to Check the file out while it is attached to your drawing, just in case you need to do a Xref Edit. As you can see there really isn't a limit on the types of files that you can add to your drawing.


Well folks with all these new features that myself and others will continue to highlight it is inevitable that Civil 3D is here to stay so I guess it is just a matter of how and when you are going to start using it.

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008. . .is it worth it. .Oh Yeah!

Well well, the inevitable question. Let's just say that you would be out of your mind to not consider upgrading to the upcoming 2008 version. With all of the cool new features that where added, plus it seems that stability has been improved quite a bit (and this is just the Beta). One thing that was a challenge was when I would create an Alignment or Profile, you are asked to select a Style for the object you are about to create. Well knowing me I always select the wrong style and need to change it. It used to be that if you wanted to change the style of an object, midway through a design, you would have to exit out of the command then reselect the object and access the object properties to change the style. Not anymore, it seems that when you are creating Alignments and Profiles, you are able to pick on the object and right click, while the toolbar for creating the object stays open. This is just one of the many minor items that they have changed. Now one of the major items that was added was the Plan & Profile Wizard. This thing is simply amazing and easy to use. Of course it is based on Styles so by taking a little time on the front end can really save you a ton of time when it comes to setting up sheets. It also gives the user the ability to add Match lines, plus shade the adjacent areas that are not supposed to be shown on the current sheet. More on this later!



It also seems that there has been a whole host of surface features added such as Exporting to DEM, Draping Images, Moving Blocks to Elevations, just to name a few. What is interesting about the Point and Surface menus is that they have grown quite a bit, in length. In the 07 version if you wanted to create Points on an alignment you used to have to run the Create Points command just to bring up the toolbar. Which could turn into quite a pain if you where setting a lot of points. About midway through the year I posted a utility that I found on the Discussion Groups for rotating points, which worked great but it seems that you can FINALLY rotate points around the marker point without having to add some other routine to do it for you. Plus, the label flips according to your Plan Readability Bias.

All of the Swap Edge, Add Point, Modify Point, Paste Surface, just to name a few have all been added to a new menu item called Edit Surface. It also is nice to have all of the Surface Labeling features available without having to run the Add Labels command.

One of the last items that I will talk about for this post is the new Lines/Curves features. We now have a whole list of items that we can create all kinds of line work the way we used to in LDT but with a twist. Well I am certainly not done highlighting these features but I am done for now. Enjoy!

Design Review-IT'S NOW FREE

For those of you that have not heard. . . Design Review is now FREE. As of Feburary 1st you can now download DR completely without charge. I am hoping that everyone takes this on and finally starts using DR to create a virtual paperless submittals for you design process. Now when people hear paperless office they kinda freak out. Honestly if you haven't played around with the tools then I would highly recommend at least trying it before you throw your hands up. Here's how, after downloading Design Review from www.autodesk.com/designreview , open up AutoCAD, LDT, Map or C3D*. Plot something to a DWF file, once the file is created open it up in Design Review and mark it up, add notes, draw lines, or add stamps. Once completed, save and close the DWF then go back into CAD. The way this works is that instead of just opening up the DWF file you have to load it using the Markup Set, which you can typically find under the File menu. Once the Markup Set palette is open you can browse to the DWF file you just marked up and it brings the data into the markup set. After the data shows up, you can double click on the DWF file name and have it open up the DWG file while overlaying the DWF file on top of it. Using the palette you can hide or show the markups which allows the user to not have to keep switching back and fourth from his/her screen to a marked up set of plans on the desk. This essentially create a full circle for digital data. Ideally the way this process works is that when you originally created the DWF file it was as if you where about to email your project to either a client or a jurisdiction for submittal. The client or city then uses Design Review to "markup" your DWF file. Once the city or client is finished they email you back a copy of the DWF file which contains all of their markups. Then by loading it into CAD using the Markup set you are able to see both the markups as well as the original DWG file that created the DWF. Or once you are finished making the necessary changes, you can replot the sheet(s) back to DWF, then re-email then to the reviewing agency. . . .full circle!

Now there is one small catch (maybe two). . . about 4 or 5 months ago I was playing around with this feature and I noticed that Civil 3D does not have "Load Markup Set" in the File menu. Since this is the Civil 3D "File" menu you won't see it. However if you access your CUI and turn on the "File" menu located under Partial CUI Files -> ACAD, you can have this nifty little tool. Or without turning on the menu you can type the command MARKUP and the palette will load for you. Every other program that I have used this in it has worked great, however I have had limited success with this in Civil 3D. So what I am asking for whomever reads this, is to try it out and tell me if you have had similar results.

Regardless of the results this is one heck of a step for DWF. In my opinion DWF's are a lot better then PDF's, granted there are somethings you can do in PDF's that you can't do in DWF's but the same could be said for DWF's. Anyway enough rambling, since it's free use it. All that is left now it to convince your clients to use it instead of PDF's, right.

Corridor Contour Problems

Lately, I have been getting a lot of calls concerning Corridor errors and contours. It seems that some users are a little fooled by how Civil 3D shows it's data. For instance in the image shown you can see that this Corridor has a slight problem with contours going all the way down to 0, even though the profile is tying into existing grade, yet you still end up with these contours. What you may not notice is that the EG profile is not being correctly shown on the Profile View. Notice in the next image that at first glance it looks as if my FG Profile is tying into the EG surface. What you don't see is that this is not the true starting point. Now I do understand that a good designer would or should notice the starting station in the profile, but honestly I wouldn't be writing this if users have noticed this. The key to working with profiles is to use the AutoCAD command Draworder or DR as the shortcut. Since the EG surface happens to be lined up with the grid at elevation 116 (in this case), the grid is actually overlapping the EG surface. So by using the draworder command on the EG Profile you can clearly see where the FG profile should begin. I guess there may be a case where the user needs to have the corridor not start at the beginning of the alignment. In that case the user would need to setup his Corridor properties accordingly, in this case at starting station would be 0+52.28.

In all, I know a lot of this seems pretty obvious for the advanced users but since a lot of users are just now starting to implement and use Civil 3D in a production environment, overlooking a small thing such as this can cause quite the headache. Not only with creating data but also with plotting.

Description Keys & Point Groups

I was playing around with some Description Keys one day when I noticed an item that didn't give me the desired result. What happen was, I had a drawing that I had built a Description Key for and in that DescKey it had everything that I needed except for EOP. At the time I didn't realize that I forgot to put it in because I was to busy working on something else. So after the points where brought in I began to filter my data so that I could build somewhat of a clean surface. Typically, I would create a Point Group for all the points that will be included in the surface then another should I need to create breakline info off of any of the point data. What I noticed was that since I forgot to add EOP into the Description Keys it didn't get added to the Raw Description Matching tab in the Point Group properties. I know this isn't that big of a deal but it was a little surprising when I went searching for it. So of course the easy fix for this would be to flip to the Include tab and add it in manually. Honestly, I think the Raw Description Matching tab is great but what if you don't use DescKeys. I guess if you don't then you are stuck using the Include tab. Now that I look back at this I can certainly understand why it didn't get added but initially it was a little surprising. So long story short. . . if you are not using DescKeys it's just one tab you won't be able to use, Right!

Saving Command Changes

No I didn't fall off of the face of the earth, I have just been on vacation and buried in snow for the last couple of weeks (36"-48") so to start off the New Year I am going to Highlight an item that I found in the latest TechFAQ. It has to do with setting up a override for the default style. For example, say your default style for creating alignments was set to Exisiting and that is the way you want to keep it 99 percent of the time. But we all been in cases where we have to keep changing the style from one to the other, which can be quite the tedious task espically if you have alot of items that will be using the same style.

By accessing the Settings tab on the toolspace and Right-Clicking on the Drawing name and select Edit Drawing Settings, once there select the Ambient Settings tab and expand out the General section. Find the "Save Command Changes to Settings and change it from No to Yes. This little setting can give your tired little fingers a break from clicking your life away in the endless drop downs, tool palettes, etc.

Keep in mind that you can use this feature deeper into the Settings tab. For every "Object" on the Settings tab has it's own "Edit Feature Settings", which can also be changed if you like the way this handy little setting works. This is the same setting that can also be found under some of the Commands items that are also located in the Settings tab. Simply find the command that you would like to turn this feature on, Right Click and select Edit Feature Settings, turn the Save Command Changes to Yes and tell your little fingers sorry for all the anguish you have caused them.