This is just a little word of warning with a little new feature that comes with Civil 3D 2009. We now have the ability to use Cut and Fill factors when calculating volumes using volume surfaces and the Volumes tool in the Surface menu. There is a little gotcha, read on.

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Quick reminder, the EECast worldwide tour continues today! I’ll be looking at a intersection design and cul-de-sac design, and how you can do both without ever touching a profile again (after setup of course). Register here, and check out the full schedule at left.

The Magic Eight-ball sometimes delivers on your wishes. It’s not often that we give up free styles, but since this is one of my favorite hacks, and will probably be part of my AU class, here’s one for Sue. The point label style in the attached dwg file will label positive’s but not negatives with a sign. Follow the jump to see how.

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Have you ever wrestled with alignment curves in Civil 3D? You want a flexible, free curve that is constrained by radius, but you’d like it to come close to a certain location, or maybe even follow a few Civil 3D points.

Civil 3D 2009 adds some new alignment curve tools to help. Find out more after the jump.

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Here’s an update to a post I had a few weeks back.  I now have 2009 loaded and setup on our network for rollout to the troops. The only thing left was to cleanup some minor outstanding issues with the template - stuff that was bugging me, fixing the leading zero issues (easy fix), and tweak a few styles…

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If you’ve been following this case about end-users’ right to sell copies of software they purchased from Autodesk, you’ll find this story interesting.

Mark

Time flies when you are having fun and the EECast yesterday was incredibly fun. I was very excited to show dynamic feature line extraction from corridors and some ideas on how you might tie shared-site feature lines together.

I could see lightbulbs going on all over the place as the live questions and comments kept coming in… Since we only had 60 minutes together, I thought I would put up a few summary diagrams of the intersection. (I’ll do the lot grading one later.) Keep in mind that while Civil 3D 2008 has the same ability to have one feature line “drive” another on the same site, the dynamic corridor extraction are 2009 only.

Also note that next week, James will be doing an EECast on a different dynamic intersection modeling idea that uses the EEPropack and dynamically linked profiles, and on June 4, I will be doing an EECast on Building Better Terrain Models.

See the diagram after the jump.

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While popping through Google Earth today, I noticed a familiar site had a new image. If you’ve worked through Mastering at all, here’s a new view of the subdivision that serves as your sample data set.

Oh, and I’m testing a new blogging app, so forgive me if you get some funk on this one.

In my earlier post today, I pointed out that Google changed the rules and has made it impossible for Civil 3D to build a surface from Google Earth 4.3. I did some digging though, and I found a way to make it happen. Read how and learn the limitations after the jump.

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If you have had problems getting Civil 3D to build a surface from Google Earth, you are not alone. I thought maybe my laptop was angry at me again, but it turns out that the new version of Google Earth (the current download is 4.3) has changed something in how it handles the terrain model data. (By the way- importing Google Earth images into Civil 3D still seems to work just fine.) **This is nothing that Autodesk can fix. The problem lies with Google.**

Read more after the jump, and find the work around here.

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