The Levels of Settings

No we are not talking about the European way to describe elevations (I just couldn’t resist) and we are not talking about the Bentley way to describe layers. We are talking about the idea that with Civil3D, getting the settings to work is based upon a hierarchical level. Let’s illustrate this and see if we can better understand Civil3D settings and their relations with each other.

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Have you ever went to Draw Pipe Network Parts in Profile View only to have the Profile View become a “Sky Scraper” or in the case of setting the Profile View elevations to user specified, not have any of the pipe network parts show at all?  (That’s because they’re lost in the Sea, Right?  Well not really, they just have an elevation that is 0.00 or less.)  Sea Level, get it?  OK, maybe that was a stretch.

OR

Has it been so early in the design process that your co-worker wants to get started on the Storm Sewers design before you’ve even touched the PG surface and they want to get started preliminarily on the pipe calcs. and you’re afraid to define any Pipe Networks until you get the PG finalized or at least close to done?

I’m going to make an educated guess that some of you have.  This topic might be somewhere out in Blog Land or Discussion Depths, but I occasionally see this happen to a few users.  Hopefully this post will help those few and/or it may just create an additional item to your list of best practices. Make the jump for a tip that may just stop any of those from ever happening.

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Forcing a Profile from Network

I’ve been working quite a bit on making C3D play nicely in a PowerCivil environment. One of the things that we ran into was using the PowerCivil launcher to pull up C3D and make sure the environment was the exact one we wanted. The first answer was to launch a specific profile to make sure the support paths, lsps, and other settings we wanted were queued up at the launch. Of course, users sometimes mess with their profile, leading to problems. The solution there was to call the network version of the profile at each launch, but if you’ve ever tried this, you know that AutoCAD won’t read the network .ARG file if that profile name already exists. So, what’s a Type A Cad Manager to do to make sure that the program launches the exact same way every time? Make the jump to find out.

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The World According to Chuck: Commandments of C3D

It was too good a comment to not spread the love, er, testify!- JW

What sort of a Commandment list would we have, if there weren’t 15 *crash* er, um..10! Yes! 10 Commandments! (more…)

 

Commandments of Civil 3D

My tweet apparently struck some nerves and 140 characters is just too little for good discussion. Let’s see what happens here. The initial comment was:

  • Thou shall not label in design files for plotted output.

I’m a major advocate of workflows that don’t use the design DWGs as anything more than containers and producers of C3D objects that are then DREFd across. So, disagree with that one? Have more Commandments to share? Let’s see if we can create a true list of agreed commandments. Thread the conversation and bring it on!

 
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