Archive for May, 2007

I’ve turned in my papers and finalized my agendas for the AUGI CAD Matinee, so this is the last time you’ll hear from me on the subject until May 17!

2007 EVENT INFORMATION

Radisson Plaza - Warwick Hotel
1701 Locust Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

May 17, 2007

8AM- 1PM includes Keynote Presentation and your choice of classes

http://www.cadmatinee.com/philadelphia/default.asp

Cost :$89 for non AUGI members, $79 for AUGI members (AUGI membership is free)

Here is a detailed breakdown of my agendas (click more to read on):

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If you don’t already subscribe to Donnie Gladfelter’s blog, “The CAD Geek“, stop everything right now and add it to your feeds.  Donnie is a master of the artistically cropped screen capture, a Civil 3D user in active production, a mentee of the AU grading guru, Eric Chappell, and a true CAD Geek.

(If you don’t read blogs on feed, check out this post for more information on how you can stay informed using feed readers: Getting Civil3D.com in your email and other ways to read blogs)

The other day I posted about how changing annotation scale in model space changes drawing scale, well Donnie was experiementing and discovered that annotation scale can be different from viewport scale and explains how this effects Civil 3D labels.  A MUST read that will save you time in style creation and frustration if you accidentally change the setting.

http://thecadgeek.com/blog/2007/05/08/separate-annotation-scales-per-viewport/

I am married to a DOT engineer.  He can be quoted as saying “No DOT will ever consider a move to Civil 3D”

Louisa Holland would beg to differ. The Wisconsin DOT has just made an announcement that the WISDOT Technology Committee had made the recommendation to move to Civil 3D.

Is this the dawning of a new age? 

“Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. Have it your way, at Burger King now…” For those of you old enough (and willing to waste the brain cells) to remember this old Burger King jingle (the original 1974 version, not the rehashed 2004), you’ll recall the that the gist of the marketing campaign was that you can have your Whopper anyway you like it. Well, a recent thread in the discussion group about the FILEDIA system variable reminded me not only of this jingle, but also of an old Autocad trick to ensure that the application loads your way, with all variables set; workspace loaded; and support file paths established. Read the rest of this entry »

As James mentioned in a post a few days ago, I’m sidelined at home recovering from hip resurfacing surgery.
Thankfully, some genius invented WiFi allowing me to browse the web from the bed.
In doing so, I came across an interesting site by John Walker, founder of Autodesk.
If you’re interested or just have time to kill, check out the Autodesk Files, which chronicles the history of Autodesk.

Enjoy!

I don’t know if all of you read the Daily AutoCAD blog (you should if you don’t)

One of the gentlemen over there posted a free ebook pdf on the new Annotative Text, Hatches and more in AutoCAD 2008.

Go here here for a link to download the pdf.

Go get this great little pdf that shows off some of the best features of AutoCAD 2008.

Lynn Allen’s 2008 Tip Book

I had a question today from a client about getting the “S” in their manhole block to be plan readable/rotate with view. 

He thought this might make life easier when manholes show up in multiple viewports at different rotations.  An “S” in the structure style block doesn’t want to flip around. (Although I haven’t tried annotative stuff in 2008 for it yet- we’re working in 2007 in this office for now.)

This is a solution I came up with- let me know if you have other ideas!

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Thanks to Shaan Hurley for pointing it out. Sanjay Asnani, P.E., formerly of CAiCE,  and now of Autodesk, has created the 2D to (Civil) 3D blog under the corporate umbrella. Looks like much of his current work is in higher ed, where there cannot be enough effort to educate college engineering students about the power of design software.

Keep an eye on this new blog, more voices are always interesting. We do hope he’ll add civil3d.com to his list of favorite blogs in the future, but welcome to the party, Mr. Asnani!

And if you’re not using a blog subscription service I have to ask why not? IE7 has it built in, there are dozens of plugins for Mozilla. Get the latest as soon as it’s published!

Though I am a big fan of the FDO data connection that came around in Map 2007 (which of course, Civil 3D 2007 was built on), I do sometimes like to import map data the old fashioned way through the Map>Tools>Import.

In 2007 and below, I always had to manually assign the input coordinate systems.  Map didn’t seem to want to automatically find the .PRJ (projection) files for me like the FDO did.  This was a bit tedious, especially when importing a collection of .SHP files that each had a different coordinate system.

Click more to find out what I discovered in 2008.

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