Archive for June, 2006

At the risk of this site becoming overly technical, I’ve added Nick Zeeben to the civil3d.com blogging team. Nick works with Engineered Efficiency Inc., after three years in the AE market in Vancouver. In addition to being one of the Young Turks of the C3D world, he’s a decent golfer and VBA wiz. His contributions in the newsgroups, to our clients, and at AU 2006 put him in an elite class.

Nick will be focusing more on the how-to and other technical aspects of the program while I remain more focused on commentary at large. Please, send your comments to let us know your thoughts on this exciting change!

It’s out. Click the header. Install. Get on with life.

Hi Folks! Sorry that I haven’t updated in a while, but I’ve been on the road. I did an on-site Civil 3D class last week, am doing one this week (in Chicago, of all places!), another NEXT week, then a meeting in California the next week, then a class here in our company headquarters the week after that. As you can likely tell, there’s one heckuva demand for training and implementation for Civil 3D. If you’re in need of these services, feel free to email me using the link to the right.

Now, down to business. You didn’t log in here to hear me talk about my busy travel schedule. If you did, you really need to find a hobby…I’m just saying…

In the world of Civil Engineering, we often have to work with data that is in another format. One thing that I love to show my customers is the untapped wealth of information that you can have once you start using the GIS capabilities of Map 3D. The best part about this is that you already have it - it comes built into Civil 3D.

For this how-to, we’re going to assume that we’re about to subdivide a piece of land, but the property owner wants to know if the project is feasible. That’s a reasonable request, and one that we can do quite handily with the software at our disposal. Now, for the sake of this discussion, let’s imagine that the area that we’re looking at is already assembled in a county or city GIS. Many local governments have TONS of information that they’ve collected, from property descriptions to owner names to detailed information about property. Unfortunately (or so we think,) most of these local governments assemble and work with their GIS in a competitor’s product. OK, I’ll say it - they mostly use ESRI. Now, I’m not going to talk about the pros and cons of ESRI products vs. Autodesk Map 3D (at least not in this post), but I’m going to show you how this doesn’t have to be a hurdle that you have to jump - you can use it too!

Now, to use this ESRI data (which is in the SHP format), we’ve got two choices - well, with the 2007 release we do. We can go to the Map menu and select Import, then bring in the SHP file in question. However, it’s now converted into DWG format and if we make any edits, we have to export to SHP file. That’s OK, and how I’ve been doing it for years. However, Map 3D 2007 has a much better way of doing this using a Feature Source. You may be asking “What is a Feature Source?” AOTC Map 3D 2007 Essentials defines a feature source as the following:

A Feature Source is any source of spatial data that has been connected by means of feature data objects (FDOs). An FDO enables you to connect directly to SDF and raster data and databases that contain spatial data. No import or export is necessary to use the spatial data that resides in the original feature source.

What’s great about Feature Sources? Since a Feature Source is just a representation of the data that you’re working with, it renders on your screen very rapidly, allowing you to work far more efficiently. Feature sources can be sylized using the Display Manager, but that’s a post for another day. However, one of the best things about a feature source is that we can edit the data (both vector and database) and save it to that file natively! No more import/export!

Let’s get to the meat of this discussion - how to use feature sources. First, of course, you need to have your Map Task Pane active. If it’s not, or you can’t find it, type MAPWSPACE in the command line. That should bring it up. Now, to connect to the data, you need to click on the Data button at the upper left of the Map Explorer portion of your Task Pane:

(Hey, I finally got images to work in Blogger - it was an Internet Explorer issue - works fine in Firefox. Yet ANOTHER reason to use Firefox)

Next, you’ll want to connect to data - keep in mind that you’re not IMPORTING data, but merely connecting to it. By connecting to it, you can view it and the data that it contains, edit it, and have it saved without ever doing an export or saveas. You’ll use the following form to connect to data - simply choose the folder where your data resides:

Once you connect to a folder, all the compatible data in that folder appears - for example, I’m connecting to SHP data, so all SHP files in the folder will be displayed. I now can check the ones that I want to connect to, and click add to map, as below:

Once I’ve connected to it, you can see that the data is added to our drawing:

Now, if we look in the Map Task Pane, we can see the data that we connected to listed at the very top:

Now, to see the object data that is associated with this file, we need to select the data grid view. To select this, expand the data in your Map Task Pane and select the particular SHP file that you want to see the data for. Then, select GRID from the buttons above:

This will bring up the grid view, as shown below:

Now, select any bit of data that you’d like to edit, and edit away! This view is similar to a spreadsheet view, and can be edited easily:

Note that there is no “SAVE” necessary. We’ve connected directly to this data and edited it in place. It’s now saved DIRECTLY to the file. To edit the graphical (or vector) data, we can pick any particular piece, and use the tools on the DATA toolbar to check this vector data out and edit it, then check it back in.

It’s amazing how much functionality this gives us - the ability to connect directly to ESRI (and other) data, edit in place and always stay in sync with your GIS data is phenomenal.

As usual, Have Fun!

I haven’t forgotten about this place, and I’m glad to see so many people are still checking in on a daily basis - and people from places that I wouldn’t expect….some domain names that are showing up are really surprising me. I’ll say this - it’s good to know that the “Mothership” is keeping tabs, but the competition is too….

Haven’t updated lately because I’ve been out of the office teaching users all about Civil 3D. Late last week, I upgraded my laptop - I’m now running Civil 3D 2007 on Dell Precision M70 with 2 GB RAM and a 256 MB nVidia go1400 video card. So far, so good, but I haven’t put it through all the paces just yet.

This week, I’m in Chicago, IL, teaching another Civil 3D class. Been a rough day - delayed flights, lost luggage, bad directions…but it’ll all be better tomorrow in the class.

I’m still working on that big how-to post. Maybe I’ll get it posted tomorrow night.

I’ve been asked a number of times how I wound up with civil3d.com, so here’s the Reader’s Digest version. At one of the earliest gunslingers for the product, a name hadn’t even been chosen yet. As part of the weeks activities, they ran a number of names by us, as they had been with focus groups and other members of industry. The product was simply called Vine at this point, and this was the 2004 release cycle.

On the last day of Gunslinger meetings, there is typically about two hours of open dialog, “What did you like? What didn’t you like? What’s still missing? What’s your favorite new tool?” type stuff. There have been some spectacular rants during these meetings, and some good smackdowns. It has never gotten ugly, but I think tense would be a fair assessment.

During this particular wrap-up session, someone comes in to announce they’ve chosen a name. Civil3d. I’m sitting at a computer, so my immediate reaction is www.civil3d.com. And what appears? A blank holding page? An Autodesk logo? Nope. This. Mining software. (Thanks Internet Archive!) Are you kidding me? Don’t you people Google? I was dumbfounded, but that’s the way it was.

Fast-forward to January of 2006. I’m telling this story to a Jason Hickey, laughing as I type www.civil3d.com, expecting the same thing. Instead, up comes a “This Domain for Sale” page. Done. Bought, and now blogged. And no, Autodesk has never asked for it back, or offered to buy it. Bentley on the other hand….

So, now that you know how we wound up here, a bit about the people behind civil3d.com:

James Wedding, P.E. Hall Monitor.

Jason Hickey, Agent Provocatuer

Jason is our expert reviewer and excels at drawing people offsides with their comments. A reseller AE with a ball of passion about the product and a surveyor’s inane paranoia about engineers, he brings an entirely different point of view to the proceedings. His reviews of alternate solutions are getting read far and wide and leading to some real interest from the cetners of development, in NH and other villes across the globe.

Dana Probert, E.I.T., Diva

Dana received her BSCE from Georgia Tech in 1998.   Since then she has worked for consulting engineers in the US and Canada doing a variety of civil projects from large planned residential communities, small subdivisions, commercial site design, stormwater management, road design, sanitary sewer networks, stream restoration projects, and municipal GIS.   For most of this work, she has used AutoCAD based products, including Land Desktop, Civil Design, Raster Design, Autodesk Map, and Civil 3D.

Dana began instructing users Civil 3D in October 2004, and since then has used Civil 3D herself for design of subdivision layout, road design, grading, stormwater management and utility projects.   In addition to her own design work, Dana has been working closely as a team member with several firms on their Civil 3D pilot projects and implementation plans, and taught many Civil 3D training classes. Oh, and she also built the best 52 baseline corridor known to man.

Nick Zeeben, Young Turk & ET from the Mothership