No, I’m not talking about any type of programming - that’s way above my head.   I know I’ve been absent for the last few weeks, but I’ve had a bad case of writer’s block.   But today, I’ve had a chance to work on something that I want to document, more for me than anyone else, but I’m in the giving mood so I’ll document here.

After Mark posted our Trimble Dimensions paper, I received a few emails about it, and I’m really happy to see people actually trying to make use of the Survey Database.   Well, in writing that, I think I left something a bit vague, and I’ve since come up with a better way to do things.   Let’s talk about coding features for automated linework - and see how you code.    Follow the link to see what I’m babbling about.

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I made a discussion group post the other day. Matt Wright was creating a new template and wanted some suggestions about pipe and structure layers and names. I have my ideas about what works well for me and I guess James liked it, so here’s what I do. Check it out after the jump.

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The Anonymous author over at civil3dblog.com has posted a routine that will allow you to use Match Props type functionality. Check it out here.

Yes, yet another Civil 3D blog to track. If you haven’t discovered RSS yet, go get IE7 or Outlook 2007 and check out their Feeds functions. I found them pretty good. If you’re on a Mac, Mail supports RSS directly inside, similar to Outlook 2007. Either way, RSS feeds let you subscribe to the growing number of blogs without having to visit every day to see if they’ve posted something.

Do you use a customized Google home page? If so, you might be interested in the search gadget I created. It’s a custom search gadget that lets you search civil3d.com knowledge base directly from your home page. Try it out by clicking here, and let me know what you think.

Enjoy!

Hi folks - as I sit here in the airport just waiting to get home for Christmas, I have time to waste, so I’m going to let you in on a little trick that I recently learned.    This one is so simple that I feel dumb for not already knowing it, and if you already know it, just breeze over this post.  

Have you ever felt so lazy that you didn’t want to go outside Civil 3D to access your favorite website (we all know which website that I’m talking about, right?)   ;)    Well, I’ve discovered a way to get here without ever leaving Civil 3D.   More after the jump…

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So you are working on a river project in Civil 3D… but you can’t figure out a good way to get that information out to HEC-RAS. You could take it back to Land Desktop, but that’s a real pain.

And besides, Land Desktop will only do a cross section with one vertex. What about those times you have cross sections that are cut perpendicular to the contour and have many many vertices?

If you would like to learn more about how to go from this:

To this:

Go ahead and grab the EE RAS Tools, and keep reading after the jump.

(Download EE RAS Tools Here)

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I plan on continuing my series in practical Map 3D / GIS skills for Engineers using Civil 3D over the next few weeks and months, but I found something today that I had never noticed before. It’s included in your Civil 3D install, but just not in your standard workspace, so you might have missed it. There are a series of tutorials called “GIS Skills for Engineers” that you can use to get up to speed along with my posts.

Find you where to find it after the jump.

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Yesterday, I used a theme to annotate the map (and somehow tonight I destroyed that post- I will redo it later- so sorry!)  Today, we will apply that same idea to automatically color some polylines representing road centerlines. This is the same technique I used in my AU class to automatically hatch my final overlay topology. Grab the paper here and watch the screencast here.

Find out more after the jump.

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Now that you have seen how to bring Map data into your drawing using Map>Tools>Import (see this post for detailed instructions), you might ask “How can I made a label that ‘reads’ the object data fields?”. Special text that reads the object data (and many other properties if you’d like) is called an “annotation”. It is similar to a Civil 3D label because it is semi-dynamic and reads some information from the object itself, but it is really just a beefed up attributed block.

In this example, we will label a road with its name. This particular batch of GIS data has a field called “STREET”. Yours might be called something different. Be sure to read the metadata or talk to the person who created the dataset if you are unsure which one to use.

Read how to do this after the jump.

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I am working on a series of posts to follow up on my AU Class. During the class, I made heavy use of Map 3D Tools (Civil 3D is built on Map 3D). Since Map 3D tools are often new to Civil 3D users, I’d like to take the time to get you “caught up”.

One of the first tasks you will probably run into as a civil firm is importing publicly available GIS data such as ESRI shapefiles (.shp), ArcInfo Exports (.e00) or similar.

In this post, I will explain how to import the file as AutoCAD entities. If you are interested in learning an alternative way to use this data through something called the FDO, read this article I wrote last year: Can You Do That In CAD?

Read more about importing shapefiles into your drawing after the jump:

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