This past weekend, I received an email from a person who has worked on creating and developing a pretty nice raster-to-vector conversion program. This program is called MagicTracer.

I haven’t done much testing on it, but what I’ve seen is very impressive. The install went smoothly, and was very straightforward. Since I haven’t purchased the program, I can run it in a demo mode - this allows for 35 program uses, at a maximum of 12 hours per use (if I read it correctly). The interface is also pretty straightforward, and offers some very in-depth features. The program opens various raster image formats, although one negative that I saw was no Adobe PDF support. I get a LOT of drawings in PDF format that need to be converted to a vector format, so I’m wondering if this is something that could be added at a later time.

Just to have something to do with it, I opened a topographic survey in Civil 3D 2007. I isolated the surface layer and then used SnagIt to do a screen capture of the surface and saved it as a TIFF file. Then, I created a new project in MagicTracer and opened the image file that I had created. Using the Vector menu “Vector Convert” command gave me a TON of options, some of which I had no idea what to do with. The first thing I did was turn on “Enable Real-Time Preview” so that I could see what I was doing. After changing a few options, I came up with a very reasonable conversion that wasn’t too “out there”. Smoothing was something that I didn’t even attempt at this point.

I also saw some very nice Raster editing functions in another menu, as well as image enhancements. At first glance, this seems to be a VERY powerful program. Even better is the price - at $49.95, this offers some nice raster conversion tools that you can’t find in many other places. Try it out - I think you’ll like it.

Blogger sometimes has issues with some of my images. I’ve spent the better part of the last hour trying to fix the last post. As a result, some of the images look TERRIBLE when viewed on this website. To see the full size image, simply click on that image, and it will display full-size.

Have to be careful with my template layout - it can get pushed down the page VERY easily.

And now, to try to put the hair that I just pulled out back in….

What a catchy title

OK, many people have asked about balancing proposed surfaces in Civil 3D. So far, I’ve found how to do this, but I’ve had mixed results actually doing it. In other words, it crashes. A lot. I’m hoping this is fixed in the upcoming service pack.

So let’s look at what I’ve got - I have a 6 lot subdivision with an existing surface in it. I’ve imported some 2D polylines in that represent building pad locations. I’ve converted those polylines to feature lines, assigned elevations from my surface, and elevated the feature lines to the building pad elevation. I’ve also graded these building pads to the outside. One issue that I ran into when doing this is the face that create grading infill doesn’t seem to work correctly. I’ve worked around this (somewhat) by grading to the inside at a very small relative elevation and very steep slope. 0.05′ at a 1:1 slope filled in the inside of my grading quite nicely. This gives me a complete surface to balance. So here comes the fun - you can see where we’re starting:

Before we start, let’s do a quick check of the volumes here. To do this, go to Surfaces>Utilities>Volumes. Select your base surface (EG here) and your comparison surface, and it will do a quick check of the volumes for you:

OK, to get started, let’s go to our Grading menu. Next, select Grading Utilities, and then Grading Volume Tools.

This will bring up the following window/toolbar:

The first thing we need to do is select the grading group that we’re trying to balance. Note that this will only work if you already have a grading group defined and graded.

Now, we have two different ways that we can balance our volumes - we can input a value and raise/lower the surface manually, or we can automatically balance the surface. Here’s a screen shot showing how to raise/lower the surface manually:

The other way is to automatically balance the surface. This will bring up indow that asks for the required volume - set it to 0 and it should balance the volumes:

Please remember that grading, whereas more stable than 2006, is still buggy. I have issues with it every day. This may work for you, it may not. As with almost everything in Civil 3D, please save your drawing before performing any functions that require intense calculations (and boy, does this one require intense calculation).

Have fun!

In keeping with the theme….

OK, sorry I haven’t updated lately. Combine client meetings, a really bad summer head cold, fire department fund-raisers, and the death of a really close friend, and I just haven’t been here lately. I had a good how-to ready to post on Thursday (balancing grading groups), but Blogger was acting weird and deleted my post before I could get there. I’ll try to get it posted today.

Now, with all that bad news, I also found out some other bad news last week: SP1 for Civil 3D 2007 has been delayed to a tentative release of Wednesday, June 14. You can believe that I’ll be posting as soon as it’s available (if Blogger can keep their stuff together…)