Archive for April, 2006

Well, Autodesk Bootcamp is finally over, and I felt like I’ve spent time with a drill sergeant yelling at me and running me to death. Classes here start at 8 and end at 5:30. That’s a long, long day. However, I’ve learned a lot, met a lot of very interesting people, reunited with some old friends, and had some incredible Texas food and drink.

Today, we learned about pipes, and some of the new functionality. How would you folks like a pipe interference checker? Well, it’s here now. How about new rules? Yep, got ‘em. How about customizable part sizes? It was in 2006, but undocumented, but PARTBUILDER is out of the closet, so to speak.

We also learned about new roadway design functionality. New corridor styles, graphically editing regions and sections, and one thing that I love more than anything else. Yes, it’s the small victories that make me smile - NO MORE “SET LOGICAL NAMES.” That made no sense to my customers. Now, it’s been changed to Set Targets. Much more common-sense.

Lastly, we learned about new drafting and productivity tips. Note labels? Very nice, and easy to create. And hey - they MASK, too. Reference notes, sweet. Notes that reference MULTIPLE objects. As Matt Murphy would say, that’s “Wicked Awesome” (or is it “wicked cool?”)

The remaining people at our company (those that don’t fly until tomorrow) had a nice authentic Mexican dinner at a place called Javier’s. Very good food, and the best margarita I’ve had in a while. We’ll be sleeping in tomorrow (for a change), then flying back to Birmingham. I’ve got exactly 2 weeks to prepare for our month of Autodesk 2007 Product Rollout Seminars. If you work in the Southeast, we’re likely coming to a town near you. Check here for our schedule, and to sign up.

Take care!

And here it is - back the way you want it, although I can’t grasp why. Yes, Civil 3D 2007 has the ability to do quick profiles. What’s a quick profile, you ask? Well, it’s a profile, and it’s created pretty quick. No need for a defined alignment, just a profile of a line, polyline, etc. Wait, maybe I do get it now. It really IS quick. Hmph, now I understand.

So what’s it like? Why do I need it? What’s it for? Well, if you’re asking yourself these questions, then you’re in the right place.

Say I’ve got a surface. Go ahead, you can say it. “I’ve got a surface”. OK, I have a polyline across this surface, and I want to see that the surface looks like along that polyline. Well, in the old days (ok, last week when we were just using Civil 3D 2006), we’d have to define an alignment out of that polyline and then create a profile and a profile view. It’s a little easy now. Here’s my surface, along with the polyline that I want to quickly sample:

Now, click on Profiles, then click on Quick Profile. Select the polyline (or line, or whatever) that you want to profile, and then you get the following dialog box:

This lets you do two things - sample any and all surfaces in your drawing, and apply a profile view style to your quick profile. A quick click on OK and here’s what you get:

Two things to remember - first, there’s no station information. That’s no problem, really. Second, there’s no way to save these views. They delete when you close the drawing. If you want a saved profile view, you’re going to have to define an alignment and profile it as you would any other alignment.

Have fun!

This morning’s class was about new survey functionality in Civil 3D 2007. This afternoon, we’re working on site grading, something that is much more stable in Civil 3D 2007.

But first, we need a surface to work with, don’t we? Can’t grade without a surface. We have an aerial topo that we can work with, so we’re going to use it to build our surface. In the past, we would have problems with flat areas on the surface - not so much in Civil 3D 2007. So we start with our aerial topo:

Now, we want to create a surface and add this contour data to is. So I create the surface, expand the Definition tree in Prospector, and right click on Contours. I have options now to add supplemental and weeding data, and to Minimize Flat Areas. Yes, this is the theme of this post. For the sake of comparison, I’m going to deselect all the options in Minimize Flat Areas so you can see what happens:

Now, let’s go back and rebuild our surface. If you look, the new contours of our surface do not closely match the original contours:

The red original contours are a little hard to see in the image, so I added some arrows to show you the problem areas. What we’ve got now is a surface, but it’s not very accurate. To make it a little more accurate, I need to go to my surface definition and right-click on Edits - tell me you knew about this. Now I’m going to click on Minimize Flat Areas. Here’s the dialog box that comes up:

You’ll notice that I’ve got options 1, 3, and 4 selected. The reason is that Swapping Edges and Adding Points to Flat Triangle Edges both use the same processing algorithm, but Adding Points to Flat Triangle Edges produces markedly better results.

Now that I’ve minimized my flat areas, let’s check out the resulting surface:

And now we have a pretty accurate surface (well, at least as accurate as the contours we were given). Now we’ve got a pretty good base to start from, and get into the new feature line capability of Civil 3D.

Have fun!

Today has been a very informative day. Well, OK, this morning was. We have learned a lot about Autodesk Vault, a Data Management program that ships free with Civil 3D. It’s a very good answer to a problem in past releases regarding multi-user access to Civil 3D “projects.” It not only provides a different way of doing things than the old Civil 3D “project” functionality, but a much-enhanced way. Don’t get me wrong - if you like the old version (2006) of Civil 3D “projects”, you can still do it that way, but a lot of that functionality has been taken out in favor of the Vault solution. Here’s a brief overview:

(I’ll show installation instructions at a later date - this post assumes that you’ve got Civil 3D 2007 w/Vault already installed and set up.)

First, open up a blank drawing using the template of choice. Next, save that drawing. That’s important - it’s got to be saved. Next,go to the Prospector tab on the toolspace window, and switch from Active Drawing View to Master View. The first thing to do is to login to Vault. To do this, right-click on Projects and click on “Login”. This will bring up the following window:

You’ll see here the options available - the user Administrator is created by default, with no password. You can create users and manage their permissions through Vault Manager, but that’s for a different post. You’ll also see that my Server is set to localhost, which is because I’ve got my Vault installed on my laptop (for demonstration purposes, of course). Yours will likely be a networked location. Next, you’ll see the database that we need to open - this is the vault (note the lowercase “v”? Vault creates a vault called Vault. Confused yet?) The last option is to Automatically login next session. This should be set to make the Vault functionality as transparent as possible.

OK, now we’re logged in. We can now start our project work (wow, this one is going to be long…) To get some data into my project (that I’m about to create), I’ve imported a XML file to create some data. I’ve got some alignments and a surface in this drawing to start off with. Now that I’ve got data, I can right click on that drawing name in Prospector and click “Add to Project.” This will save your drawing and add the drawing and data to a project. You get to select a project, where you want the drawing stored, and then what it is that you want to check in. This is a pretty important window -

If you look, you are given the option to select the drawing dependencies that you want to check in, add any version comments, create a DWF preview of the drawing, and if you want to keep the drawing checked out for editing or not. The next window has you selecting exactly what data you want to add. For example, I have multiple alignments in this drawing, and I can add any or all of them to the Vault. Now, I’ve got that data available in my project to add to any new drawings. Let’s do that now - open a new drawing, save it, add it to the project, and now we’re ready to either import or reference data. Now, I’d like to reference my surface, so I’m going to go down to my project tree in Prospector and expand my project and then the surfaces tab. I’m going to right-click on my surface name, and select Create Reference. When I do, the surface creation box comes up where I can give my surface a style and render material. My reference surface is now created and I go up to my open drawing in Prospector and look at it - but there’s something missing. See if you can spot it:

Sorry about it being so small, but I did help you out by circling the issue in red. If you look closely, you can see that our surface name has a small arrow beside it, indicating that it’s a surface reference. If we expand that tree, we’ll see something VERY important missing, the “definitions” selection. This is because we can’t modify the definition of something that’s referenced. If I want to bring that entire surface into the drawing for editing, all I have to do is right-click on the surface name and click “Promote.” Now we can edit all day long. Make sure to check the drawing back in, adding any revision comments that explain the edits that you made.

Lastly, let’s go see what’s in our project - all files, not just drawings and associated data. Vault also integrates with Microsoft Office products, so I can add Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations to my project. I can also add any other file to my project just by dragging it into the Vault using Vault Explorer. Here’s a glimpse of it:

So that’s the rundown on Vault. It’s much more involved than I have space to write. It’s going to take more training on my part, and more training on your part. At first, it appears to be needlessly difficult, but with proper setup and mindset, it can provide a very useful service to your company. It’s really filled a void that hasn’t been well addressed until now.

Really good news for ALACAD customers - not only am I a Civil 3D Implementation Certified Expert, but we also have a Data Management Certified Implementation Expert - rest assured, any areas that I might not be clear on with Vault can be cleared up by him! Together, we will work to provide a very stable and powerful data management environment for our Civil customers.

Yesterday was pretty much a refresher for those people in the class that attended Autodesk Civil 3D Implementation Certifed Expert training. It was basically the entire class crammed down into one day. The last part of the class was dealing with network licensing and network administration - I saw quite a few blank stares in the class, which leads me to believe that there are people out there struggling with the networking issues facing us.

For any of my customers, ALACAD provides custom network setup, installation, implementation, and administration. If you can’t find that perfect candidate that can serve as both a CAD Manager and Network Administrator, give us a call - that’s yet another service that we offer. We have many people skilled in network installation and administration of both Autodesk and non-Autodesk products. Let me know if we can help you!

Today is training on the newly-included program for data management called Autodesk Vault. It’s a process to be learned, but I think it is really going to address some of the multi-user issues that Civil 3D users have been wanting for some time. And to make it fun, it’s being taught by Anthony Governanti of Autodesk - I finally get to put a face with the voice that I’ve heard so much. I’ll try to post a comprehensive report tonight. I see Angel Espinoza 3 rows ahead of me steadily taking notes - check in on his site for his take on what’s going on this week.

It wouldn’t load in my previous post, so I’ll show it here. Again, this was done in less than 5 minutes from scratch with AutoCAD 2007.

First of all, they named it Bootcamp because that’s what it is - very little rest here in Dallas. Tomorrow’s schedule starts at 8 AM and is over at 5:30 - a long day by most standards. They’re pretty serious about this training.

Now, with that being said, it’s time for a report of today’s training. They were gentle with us at first, starting today at 1 PM for classes. Today was the same for almost everyone - AutoCAD 2007 update training. At first, I thought “meh”, but it was a very fun class. OK, the first part was fun. We learned about the new 3D drawing environment in AutoCAD 2007, and how to draw using new 3D primitives. We discussed many new/improved commands, like how to loft, the new PUSHPULL command, how to draw a helix, and how to sweep a part. Now, let’s throw in a disclaimer - I’m NOT a 3D Drawing and Modeling guru, even though the crew at
ALACAD seems to think so. I have learned enough about it to be able to teach the class, but anything advanced makes me have to consult outside help. With that being said, I had FUN with the 3D modeling features in AutoCAD 2007 today. I created a few nice models, including this nice goblet:

That was fun, and surprisingly easy. I created it in about 2 minutes, which should show you just how easy it was.

The next thing I created was my very own convention center. I tried to act like an architect would and make it as difficult as possible. I also used some of the new Visual Styles in AutoCAD 2007 to give it that “just sketched” look that architects like so much, and even threw in a sun study to show where the shadows would be on a given date in a given location at a given time. VERY nice, and (like everything else I’m talking about here) is new to 2007. Here it is - try not to be too critical. Oh, and total time from blank drawing to the print screen that you’re seeing was way less than 5 minutes:

(ok, this one won’t upload - I’ll try to post it in a different post)

Tomorrow will be spent learning all about Civil 3D 2007 Implementation and Network Licensing. I’ve been through this recently in the Civil 3D Implentation Certified Expert class, so maybe it will be more of a refresher than totally new. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post tomorrow the ins and outs of the new Cascading Network License.

Have fun!

You know, those of us that train and support these products have to get knowledge from somewhere. Well, since it’s time for the new version of Civil 3D to come out, Autodesk is requiring that all reseller Application Engineers (that’s us, by the way) attend a 5 day training session in Dallas, Texas. It’s called Autodesk Boot Camp, and I’ll be there next week.

Hopefully, I can post some of the neat new information that I learn next week - stay tuned!

If you don’t know Shaan, he’s the guru of the Autodesk Beta Programs. He’s also one heckuva nice guy (and quite the party animal). Here’s a link to his blog -

I won’t be the one to tell him that he reversed the code when he posted it….it’s not in the correct order on his page.

Shhh…..

It’s amazing to look at the stats on this web page. I have people visiting from all over the US (quite a few returning visits from Manchester, NH - is the Mothership keeping an eye on me?) I also have international visitors from Germany, Finland, Portugal, Canada, and California (I’ve been there, it’s like a different country!)

Would my returning visitor from Tallassee, Alabama please identify themselves? I’ve got industry ties to that area and am very interested in who’s looking!