Archive for August, 2006

In my previous post about sculpture vs. modeling, I mentioned a group that really latched on to the modeling aspect and had early success with our training material.

I received an email from my friend the project manager today that I must share.

A little setup- this is a small site plan that I am helping out with some conceptual layout, but the PM wanted one of her newly oriented interns to take a stab at it with Civil 3D first.

From the PM:

“I think she just figured the template thing out, after a frustating day yesterday.”

And attached drawing that looks like this:

I realize this isn’t the most complicated site plan, but it is a thing of beauty. There are no drawing errors, no topology issues. The drawing is tight, well done and clean. It is also very attractive.

Why?
1) One day of frustration is about 1/100th of the days of frustration I experienced while trying to master parcels. I was a good 4 months into it before I could produce a plan that was this tight, this error free and this well labeled.

2) None of the label styles nor object styles in this drawing are default. I left them a starter .dwt with a few extras in it, but each one of these was created from scratch by the intern. Now, perhaps you say “big deal”, but the first few Civil 3D label styles you create are difficult. Consider also that I did NOT teach them how to make styles during my two days- we just did some overview skills.

So why is this so darned inspiring?

Because it says to me that it IS possible to dive into Civil 3D and get stuff working well. If you have an open mind, get some baseline training and commit yourself to seek coaching and learning DAILY- all things are possible.

When I ask people what the best feature of AutoCAD is, I get many responses. Some are obscure, some are pretty self-explanatory (UNDO, anyone?), but almost always the subject of layouts will come up. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, a user in the Autodesk Civil 3D discussion group was pondering why his pipe references from vault looked like crap. They didn’t have his styles applied to the pipes, and there was no easy way to change them short of picking them all and editing the properties of the pipe network. Read the rest of this entry »

Just because you have a label type called, say, Station/Offset, doesn’t mean you have to use the offset part. Nor does it mean you are limited to just station/offset in your label.

This goes for many different types of labels. My model reference/expression labels are technically speaking, “Station/Offset” labels, but they don’t look like any omlette I’ve ever eaten.

There was a request for a label that looked like this:

Here is how to make it.
Note each angle, attachment point and other aspects show to recreate on your end.

Note that you DO NOT want this to rotate with the view. You want it oriented with respect to the object. In this case, 90 angle from the alignment.

When I say “HARD TEXT”, I mean text that you type in that is not harvesting data from the model, it is always the same no matter what. We could have a different style for every case of hard text, or we can override later. I show that at the end.

Now harvest the station.

Alignments>Labels Station Offset
Add it, use an offset of Zero.

To override text in certain labels (this works for Station Offset, note and a few other label types, but not all)

Type in the box that comes up. An alternative to dtext/mtext for sure.

So I spend the weekend playing with playdough to try to train my mind in the Clay Sculpture paradigm, but when I comes to pipes, I still dig my spreadsheets.

In the old days, I would make an 11X17 print of the site, and use a red pen (red=sewer in my head and always will) and mark in some prelim structure locations, pipes, etc. and use my scale to populate a simple sheet like this.

Today, I sketched my pipes and structures in my dwg as a pipe network. I have a composite FG for the rims to target, but otherwise I ignored the vertical- including inverts and cover.

Then I made my simple sheet. I did this entirely by hand for today, but I am working on some Excel magic to do lookups from info copied into Excel from the Prospector. Or perhaps something even better. We shall see.

I just have a really simple format that I like to follow.
(And yes, I know that in most parts of the world, you cannot connect a CB directly to another CB)

The above sheet is very basic- just the
Upstream and Downstream Structure Number,
Length of Pipe (2D CL to CL in this case),
Slope,
Size of pipe in feet (from outer top to invert- 15″ ID plus 3″ thick in this case),
Invert out Up Structure (or, start invert of the pipe)
Invert into Down Structure (or, end invert of the pipe)
Rim Elevation

There is a sample VBA that ships with Civil 3D that Nick mentions in his post today.

However, the format that it requires for reimport is nothing like my little goofy sheet.

But, not too hard to get where I need it to be. I just added a column for pipe name, then did a little copy and paste to end up with this:

Which I could sort to get this:

This last batch I just pasted into the sheet that the ExporttoExcel VBA makes, and executed the ImportfromExcel VBA. (Or whatever they are called)

Once Nick fixed the problem with the handles, it worked like a charm.

More to come, as this is a key component of my Stormwater Management using Civil 3D class at Autodesk University.

Many firms already have a sheet like this one, and it usually also has things like velocity, mannings equations, coefficients, etc. Those sheets you are already using can be added into this equation.

So maybe you will have to talk the boss into sending you to AU after all.

As the story goes Dana was working on this weekends design project with pipe networks. So I am idly minding my own business when I get an IM asking if I have any clue why the import portion from the pipes import/export routine that someone down Manchester way posted wasn’t working, of course it was posted with no implied warranty. So I began digging around to see what I could find. The routine worked just fine on the Getting started guide pipes drawing. An IM later and I had Dana’s current dwg.

Now I could see the error. Certain pipes inverts were not being updated as expected. After some hunting I was able to track down the error. Autocad and thus Civil3D track items by something called the handle(A unique identifier made up of letters and numbers for each object). The problem in this case was some of the handles were numbers which include an E, such as 305E8. Now in most cases this wouldn’t be a problem, excel however being a spreadsheet application sees that number as 3.05E+10. When one went to import the adjustments made in the spreadsheet no object in the drawing had a handle 30500000000 which was causing pipes not to get their updates.

I simply added a line to the export routine which formats the first column in the workbook to be text and stops excel from converting any of the handle values which happen to contain an E into scientific notation. So here is a link to the updated code.

This whole blog thing was new to me, so every once in awhile, I want to take the time to explain some of the options you have for reading Civil 3D Rocks and Civil3D.com

You may have seen this little orange square and text appearing around my blog and others:

CIVIL 3D ROCKS

Civil3D.com

What does this mean? Well, if you love reading blogs but find it hard to get to each website every day, you can have the posts delivered to, kinda like email.

This threw me for a loop– where do I read it? Is this something I have to buy?

And what the heck does “FEED” mean and what is “RSS”? “Feed” is a term that tells your reader where the blog lives. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and you could think of it as “How to Deliver that FEED to your inbox”.

To use this, you don’t have to buy anything. In fact, you may already use a tool that will allow you to read your blogs daily. If you use a yahoo home page, or a google homepage- in addition to allowing you to track your local weather and news, you can add your favorite blogs!

Lately, I have been using my Google homepage to read my blogs. Just go to www.google.com and sign up to have a personalized homepage.

Another free one that works nicely is Bloglines. I used it for awhile. You just set www.bloglines.com as your internet home page and it shows you what is new at your sites.

Other ideas- when I posted on this subject in the past, some folks make comments with suggestions of readers that they like. So check this link out, too.
Civil 3D Rocks: Keep up with your Blogs

So how to get started?

Click on the orange square and follow the directions. Here is what the link takes you to:

This title is newly updated and available at the Autodesk E-Store. Over 80% of the book was changed to reflect new methodology as users (and the authors!) have gotten more comfortable wth the program. Changes include:

• Better knuckle modeling
• Revised surface use and dynamic blocks for pad grading
• Use of one corridor to drive temporary and final surface models
• Wide use of feature lines for grading and drainage considerations

We will be giving away copies of this book at our booth and in the halls at AU this year. Come by and register to win one!

Oh, and for any resellers that are reading, please don’t try to teach this in a day, I’m not sure why the estore says that it’s a one day class. We designed it as three, shrank it to two. If your students are new or even just getting past Essentials, it will be every bit of two days. We’d like to work with you to present this to your clients, please e-mail me for more information!

Matt Kolberg from GCS Corp. in Vancouver was kind enough to post a small DVB file today that will push your structure rims to the reference surface if that surface has changed since the original placement. With his permission, I’ve reposted it here.

Here’s his disclaimer, but I think it works pretty well in my quick testing. From Matt’s newsgroup post:

Run the routine, then it asks to do an entire network, or to select certain
structures. It then resizes structures based on this selection.

***DISCLAIMER***This file is provided as freeware, it is
BETA software and will always beso. I have tested it only on one computer
and one OS, capishe? I am not aprofessional software developer and as
such, the code may not look pretty,or have all of the error checking it
should. In fact, I really don’t care.It does what I want right now and
that’s all that matters in my office.I accept no responsibility if this routine
FUBAR’s your drawing, though I really hope it doesn’t, and I don’t expect it
to.***DISCLAIMER***

Thank you again, Mr. Kolberg.
Updated at 9:10 CDT based on an e-mail from Matt. The download is the latest version.-JW

In today’s webcast, Scott Kent (Autodesk pipes guru) showed everyone how to control their structure sump depth. Great, it’s about time. Right now, it assigns an arbitrary “2 point something” depth to every structure. Also, there’s no way to group change that value - you have to edit every structure via the structure properties. A royal pain, to say the least. We’ve been screaming for this to be fixed for a while now.

My issue with this is that the functionality was being shown in the webcast with NO MENTION that you can’t do it RIGHT NOW. It’s scheduled to be fixed in a future service pack, but YOU CANNOT CONTROL YOUR SUMP DEPTH WITH CIVIL 3D SP1 or SP1A

So, before you start asking all over the place “I saw this on the webcast, but can’t find it in my program”, let me say “you can’t yet. Maybe in the future, but not now.”

I felt like that German Kid in the video on YouTube watching this one….