Archive for July, 2007

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I really think this is the last theme change for a while. I’m quite happy with it, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to manage.

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My buddy Todd over at LRHA pinged me today asking about restarting tag numbers for siteless alignments… and it got me thinking about something…

Civil 3D 2008 introduced the idea of a siteless alignment. For those out there who have struggled with the idea of site geometry, this is a nice improvement. Alignments built on the <none> site will not interact with feature lines or parcels or other alignments.

Alignments can still be placed on sites, however, and here are a few reasons why you might consider putting a few alignments on regular sites along with your parcels.

Read on….

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If you are looking to learn What’s New with AutoCAD 2008 and Civil 3D 2008 here is your chance.

I will be speaking in Atlantic City, NJ on Wednesday and in Timonium, MD on Thursday.

For complete information, agendas and directions visit http://www.cadapult.net/company/events.htm

One of the first tasks many new users are faced with in Civil 3D is importing an ascii file (otherwise known as text file) of points into Civil 3D for the purposes of building an existing ground surface.

You might get the points as a .txt, .prn, .csv or similar. In addition to their file type, points will have a format such as PNEZD, PENZD, NEZ, etc. and be space or comma delimited.

If you are wondering how you “create contours” from a list of points, here is the step by step on importing your points file, creating a point group, building a surface and viewing your surface contours in Civil 3D.

Read on…

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So I had heard about this idea of corridor overhang correction that is new for 2008, but I hadn’t really run into anything that required using it until two weeks ago. I was working with a really terrific group of guys and gals that design dams and spillways. We built some pretty simple but powerful assemblies using generic links.

All went well until we built the surfaces….

Read on to find out what was happening.

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Welcome to our newest poster, Christopher Fugitt of Tetra Tech in San Luis Obispo, CA. He runs his own blog at Civil 3D Reminders. I thought some of his posts on modifying the pipe rules and hacking VBA were great, so I invited him to post some of them here. Let me (and him) know what you think in the comments below! - JW

Civil 3D ships with some Sample VBA code for various Civil 3D objects. They provide some good starting points for creating your own programs and not have to wait for Autodesk to add it to the program in a later release. In the Autodesk Discussion Group a person was looking to create points from a pipe network with the z elevation being the invert of the pipe.

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After Dana’s great post last week on pasting together surfaces to get a finished composite surface, and after this request for help today, I thought I’d actually write up something and work in a quick lesson on moving from elevated polyline to labeled C3D surface. No rocket science here, but a good fundamental in getting going with C3D.

So here are the givens: Polylines with elevations and a decent C3D template with some good surface and contour label styles. I’m going with the NCS Extended template.

Now, let’s get in to it after the jump!

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If you’ve ever had to connect a bunch of survey points you know this is sometimes a chore, especially with a very long project.  You’ve taken a look at Civil 3D’s survey tools because you want to use Figures and Figure Prefixes to make you life a little easier.  You tried to convince your surveyor to add all those “BEG, CONT, and END” codes to his FBK file, but he won’t budge.  He surveys in the “ZORRO” method (cross sections as opposed to all down one side and then back).  “That’ll take way too long to code in the field.”, he says.

Well, there may be an answer.  Take a look after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Based on the readme and some testing, we’ve updated the 2008 Bug list page. Enjoy.

 Have you ever wanted to make a surface that was the composite of two other surfaces?

For example, would you like a complete finished ground model consisting of roads, ponds, lot grading and more combined with the original existing ground?

Do you dream at night about it being dynamic to the original surfaces?

Well, dream no more.  Surface pasting is your answer.

Read on…

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