Archive for April, 2006

I was sent this today by Rich Tate, our Autodesk State and Local Government Sales Manager. It’s the Map Adviser - and one of the best marketing efforts I’ve seen coming from Autodesk.

Unsure if Map 3D could help you? Check out the Map Adviser.

If you do, and you’ve ever heard of the game “You Don’t Know Jack” I’d like to see if you think there’s a comparison
Have fun!

I try very hard not to copy what other people are putting on their industry blogs, but I’ve got to do it this time - this is too important for my readers to miss! To be fair, I’m giving thanks where thanks is due - this came from Angel’s website.

Autodesk has introduced something new on their website JUST for Civil 3D users - Autodesk Civil 3D Skill Builders. That’s right - not only are the folks at Autodesk putting out a wonderful product, they’re helping us to learn how to use a great tool even more effectively! Once again, you can find the Autodesk Civil 3D Skill Builders HERE! (Did you notice all the links? I really want you to go and check this one out!)

As of today, the only skill builder available is the Superelevation skill builder, but more should be added soon. The skill builder contains a PDF that shows you how to do the skill, and the dataset to do it with.

One word to describe this - AWESOME!

Well, next week will be spent touring parts of the Southeast to rollout the new features of Autodesk 2007 products. Next week will find me in Jackson, MS, Memphis, TN, Birmingham, AL, and Montgomery, AL. If you’re planning on attending, please introduce yourself to me - I’ll have some time while our structural group does their presentations, and am more than willing to talk shop!

Have a great weekend!

Two tips this morning, both involving the word “Dynamic:”

1) A new feature of Civil 3D 2007 is called Dynamic UCS.
This allows people using the 3D features of AutoCAD to change the UCS Dynamically (well, at least the name makes sense!) For example, let’s say that I drew a box in AutoCAD. With DUCS turned on, I can hover over any side of the box, and my UCS will temporarily change to be relative to that face. This is pretty neat, and something I’ve had fun playing with (I also teach a 3D Drawing and Modeling class on occasion). However, being Civil-minded people, we all know that a change in UCS could prove BAD for the type of work that we do. As such, I’m suggesting that it be turned OFF.

2) If you didn’t already know this…AutoCAD 2006 introduced the concept of “Heads-Up” design with Dynamic Input. This effectively put everything that could appear on the command line to be near your crosshairs. Again, great feature for AutoCAD, bad for Civil 3D. Some of the options that we need to choose on the command line in Civil 3D just don’t quite make the jump to the dynamic input area. Again, I’m suggesting that DYN (conveniently located right next to DUCS!) be turned off. As a matter of fact, remove these buttons from your screen so you don’t turn them on by mistake.

Have fun!

In April, you ask?

Well, the guy in Brown (UPS) brought me a box yesterday. It had that nice green color and said “Civil 3D 2007″ on it. HOORAY!

My Bootcamp (beta) version would not uninstall! What? Nothing I could do would make it uninstall. So, it was a manual uninstall. To make things even more fun, I decided that this would be a great time to give my laptop a fresh start, and get rid of all Autodesk products on it. After a lot of manual deletion, registry editing (my office chair has a pronounced wrinkle in it now…) and general sweating and swearing, I got it clean. I’m installing the 2007 line of Audesk ISD programs right now - on my other laptop, checking in here.

Good luck with your install - remember, your package will only have 2 discs in it this time rather than the 4 that we’re used to. Civil 3D ships on one DVD and Land Desktop ships on another DVD. You can go online to request CD’s if you need to.

You know, Civil 3D objects are great. I absolutely love them - the ways that I can work with them, display them, and tweak them are simply incredible. However, for someone wanting to view Civil 3D objects who DOESN’T have Civil 3D, that ends up being a nightmare.

Take a topo for example. You often have to ship it out, maybe to an architectural group running ADT. If you export to AutoCAD, you get nice contours. However, upon further inspection, you find that they’re polylines, and they’re all at a 0 elevation!!! That’s not good - what on earth would someone do with contours that are at an elevation of 0? “Not much” is the correct answer, by the way.

To get your surface into plain AutoCAD, you’re going to have to do something bad…something that we never like to do. You’re going to need to EXPLODE your surface. What’s more, you’re going to have to explode your surface TWICE! Yes, one litle stick of dynamite won’t do it, you’re going to have to do it twice. Exploding once retains the object, doing it twice explodes it to 2D polylines (with the correct elevation) and labels intact. Now, and only now are you ready to export your drawing to AutoCAD.

Oh, and here’s a tip: Don’t explode your good surface. That would make it useless to YOU, and that’s certainly a bad idea. Copy your surface! How to do this? It’s as easy as using the AutoCAD “COPY” command - just select a base point of 0,0,0 and a copy point of 0,0,0 (or a displacement of 0) and you’ve got a copy of your surface over in Prospector that you can explode to your heart’s content.

Have fun!

This one doesn’t really fall into the category of Civil 3D, but is a feature of AutoCAD 2007. Now you can assign what happens when you double-click an object, based on what that object is.

From the Civil 3D 2007 help file:

Double click actions are used to make editing commands accessible when the cursor is positioned over an object in a drawing and a double-click is registered from a pointing device. The double click actions are object type sensitive, allowing you to set up a specific command to use for a specific object type.

Now, to make it clear as mud, let me give you a scenario. Let’s say that you normally double-click on an image in AutoCAD to display the Image Adjust dialog box. But you want to shortcut and turn on the TFRAMES system variable - you go into your acad.cui file and expand the Double-Click Actions tree, then scroll down to the Image entry. If you expand that, you will find the macro that is attached to that double-click action. Currently (out of the box), it’s set to the IMAGEADJUST macro. You can change that macro to ^C^C_TFRAMES to change the double-click functionality to toggle TFRAMES - here’s a shot of it (click on it to enlarge):

This is a nice addition to AutoCAD. Everything’s been preset before for us, but now we can change what those preset functions are - sweet!

More on some new features of the CUI later. Until then, have fun!

Today’s Dave and Dan Show was all about new production drafting capabilities in Civil 3D 2007. Again, I gotta tell you people, these weekly webcasts are like a gold mine. They’re short, they’re incredibly informative, and best of all, they’re FREE! What more can you ask for.

A new feature in C3D 2007 is dynamic notes. They’re very nice, and I’ve got some samples to show. What’s even nicer is the inclusion of REFERNCE TEXT - yes, I can create any style note that references object data. For example:

Here’s a spot elevation:

What’s so special about it? A few things make this note stand out - first of all, notice the background mask on it. (note: ok, so you can’t see my background contours so well in this image. Trust me, there’s contours there, and they’re masked!) Yes, I can mask the contours with my label now. And once I insert one label, all I have to do is copy it and place new ones anywhere I want to. And what happens if I move it? The elevation updates, of course! Sweet!

Here’s a general note:

Again, note the background mask (which can be turned off if you want it to. And changing the text contained in the note is as simple as right clicking on the note, and clicking “Edit Lable Text” This allows a note, or “dumb text” to have the automatic resizing effects that other labels do when you change your viewport scale.

The last label that we’re going to look at is a label that contains reference text. This is where new labels really shine. Let’s say that I want to label the intersection of two alignments. I’ve created a note style that references the station of each alignment and the alignment name. Here’s a sample:

The good news is that they aren’t that hard to set up, providing you have a pretty good grasp of label style creation. Email me if you’d like more information on creating these new label styles.

Have fun!

How’e this for marketing - think customers will get the message?

Well, I’m back here at the office for two weeks, getting ready for our 2007 product rollouts. Once again, if you work in the Southeastern United States, please go here to find out when we’ll be coming to a city near you and also to register! Hey, c’mon, who wouldn’t want to see my smiling face at 8 AM?
I know this is my work blog, but a little personal info about me so you’ll know why I’m dragging a little this morning - in my “spare time” (what is that?), I’m the Chief of a Fire Department, President of the County Volunteer Fire Association (11 member departments), and President of a 5 station ambulance company. I’m an EMT, and this weekend was busy, busy, busy.

Anyway, back to business. You’ll notice the conspicuous absence of a review of the survey functionality in Civil 3D 2007 from last week’s conference. That’s because I’m still undecided. I can really see some real use in the program, but I’m not convinced it’s what people are going to be thinking it is. Not to mention, I can foresee some problems if people begin using these survey databases and NOT using Vault - there simply HAS to be somewhere to store these databases.

Let me work with it for a few weeks, and then I’ll post a full report when I feel like I’m really qualified to do so.