Today, I received an email from Carlson Software.   If you are a current Carlson customer or are considering Carlson, this may be of interest to you.   The email is copied and pasted in it’s entirety, and offered without comment.

Follow the link to read:

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Have you ever had a point show up in your survey database and it wasn’t where you thought it should be?  Perhaps upon further examination you find that the point was located twice in the field and the survey database is reporting the first location from the raw data file.  Today, we’re going to look at two things - the “why” and the “how” - why does this happen, and “how” do I fix it?

Follow the link to read more…

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As I traveled this past week to the Seattle area to visit a client, I had a four hour plane ride ahead of me. I don’t have a commute, so I tend to fall really behind on my podcasts, but as I flipped through my choices, I saw one that I simply had to listen to: Mapping on This America Life. Most C3D users spend so much time wrapped up in the minutiae of land development and our view of the world, that we often don’t even think about the other maps out there. Maybe some were made with software like we use, but a lot of maps are so specific, and so unusual, that they simply make you think, “What is a map?” The first “act” was based on sight, and my favorite of the bunch. Read more after the jump.

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I spent this afternoon with a great group of seniors from the University of Alabama’s Civil Engineering program.  The class is the last one before graduation, and it’s the dreaded senior design project.   I downloaded the dataset from Burk-Kleinpeter, Inc, the engineering company who has been gracious enough to assist with the class.  I walked the students through the project (roughly designed, of course) and gave them some tips and tricks on the software.   I’ll be helping them with support throughout the design process, and hope to see some of their finished work.  

This is the second semester that I’ve worked with the CE401 class, and have really enjoyed it.   I think that these students will have an advantage over other engineering students once they hit the workforce since they already have experience with AutoCAD Civil 3D.   Thanks to the class for an enjoyable afternoon, and a special thanks to Dr. Dan Turner for his assistance getting everything set up.

Below is a picture of the class - Dr. Turner is on the left, the students to the right. 

Thanks, Class!

I know I’ve seen this before, but since a quick google turned up nothing, and I didn’t blog it here, I was clueless on the exact Registry path that holds the Project Template Directory. If your firm is working with Vault, and you want your project folder to look like it always has, you should check this out. You’ve got a folder setup that looks something like this:

And you need to make sure everyone uses it as they create new Vaulted projects. There’s a little help, after the jump.

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I spent most of last week in the training room of George Butler Associates, Inc. in Lenexa, Kansas.   I was there helping the survey department learn all about Civil 3D, and developing workflows to utilize the Survey Database in Civil 3D to make their jobs perhaps a bit easier.   I had a great time with Terry, Andrew, and most of all, John Postlewait.   As most companies tend to do, the survey department was hidden down in the basement, so I felt right at home, especially when John served us all his absolutely freakin’ incredible homemade chili.   A very heartfelt thanks to John and crew for showing me some real hospitality.

Now, one of the things that we discussed that I’ve heard before is about stakeout points - those points that are calculated in the office to be uploaded to the data collector and staked out into the field.   How do they fit in with the survey database?   There’s no inherent functionality to get those points into the survey database - or is there?  Follow the link to see how I came to figure out a way to do just that…

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Hydraflow Express and Hydraflow Hydrographs are now up on the subscription site. Chuck Lamping was kind enough to remind me via a comment, and Angel has more information, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention it in a new article.

Happy Floodplaining! (And other H&H stuff too.)

With the essentially open Beta system that Autodesk uses now, it’s almost part of your job to get involved and get a preview. Even if you don’t want to test and comment, it’s homework and good practice to know what’s coming.

But please, for the sake of all that is holy, don’t be a beta dork. Don’t be a burden on the process. We discussed this over a year ago, but it appears it needs revisiting. Go read:

The  Rules of Beta.

No, really. Go read it now. Yes, I’m talking to you. Then, go post if you must.

take the edge off Civil 3D, created by Sean Twomey from down under has spit out a nifty solution for dealing with large surface data sets. I personally think the whole large dataset issue is over hyped, but I’ll leave that argument for another day.

In the meantime, check out his solution on his blog.

I thought about writing this post late last year after working on a number of earthwork projects, but after seeing the Quantity post the other day, I figured that I probably should add this to the mix. Civil3d.com is my default site for all things Civil 3d.   I did not come up with this idea and nor am I the first to blog about it.  I have been meaning to add this to our company template for a few weeks and have just added this information.

Check out the rest after the jump… 

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