Every day, I like to check in with the Autodesk discussion groups to see what people are having to say, what issues they’re running into, or what they love about Civil 3D. As I look lately, it seems as if there are a lot of people just now adopting Civil 3D, so I want to write a post that will help them as they grow in their Civil 3D knowledge.

Do you ever wish that you had a way to set default styles in the program? Do you wish that when you performed a task, that it would pick up on that nifty style that you created automatically instead of you having to pick it? Well, that can be done with command settings - find out how after the jump.

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There has been some discussion on the Autodesk DG recently of how to work with Data Shortcuts. What are Data Shortcuts, how do you work with them, and how have they changed over the releases?

Click to read more.

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post called REGEN Rules that presented some ideas for datasharing and layout creation that would (hopefully) mitigate the torturous regen times that some of you are experiencing. Since then, I’ve had a little help understanding more about what is happening in the program. Special thanks to Lisa, one of the developers in Manchester, for helping me brainstorm some ideas and giving me a look behind the scenes.

Read on…

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If you’ve messed around with the Surface Analysis styles at all, you might have noticed that you cannot make the hatch anything besides solid colors.

Did you know that you can have your .ctb help out?

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In a bit of a surprising move, Riverbed essentially hung Autodesk out to dry with a conference call and webcast pointing the finger directly at Autodesk for issues with Riverbed hardware and 2007 format DWG files. You can view the webinar here, and download the PDF they released here.

It seems that Riverbed has been catching a lot of heat from users complaining about the lack of updates and functionality. It’s not unusual for developers to point the fingers at each other during a support call chase, but to air the laundry in public points to a breakdown in communication between the two parties. Based on casual inquiries, and out own attempts to get definitive answers on this subject over the years, it doesn’t seem that chatter was ever as open as it should be. For Riverbed, a company that made the AEC industry its bread and butter, this smacks of a desperate attempt to deflect some heat.

Edit: Someone pointed out that I’d given some serious love to Riverbed just over a year ago in this post. I did. I think they’re marvelous tools. Here’s the problem with that older post: the test was done with Inventor. Inventor doesn’t use dwg files. Damnit, that means all bets are off.

Have a Riverbed? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

I am here. You’ve missed me, eh? Well, I’ve put aside writing our two new books about the next release (an updated Mastering and a new title called Introducing), and my web training for just a few minutes to talk about something I’ve had on my mind for a long time.

The symptoms: Civil 3D had been working fine. You were modeling, building and shaping the land. Then BANG. Changing from one layout to another takes forever (such as 30 seconds or more). Regen times are slow. And plotting? Try sending a 20 sheet plan set to the plotter, go to the vending machine in the basement then back up to the 5th floor to chat up the receptionist for say, 3 hours (literally). Then your plot will appear. Or not.

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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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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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