I was testing something for Dana today and ran into an unexpected event with Civil 3D 2009, and thought that I should let users know about it so they won’t be surprised. I have confirmed that it is a known issue, but definitely not a show stopper.

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With Civil 3D 2009, there are a lot of small things that make me happy. There are quite a few tweaks to styles dialogs, user options and command prompts that don’t seem like much but really make a difference.

Read on to see one I am working with today…

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I’m sitting here at Chicago O’Hare airport, delayed for over 3 hours due to the nasty storm covering the midwest, and chatting with Nick Zeeben. I was looking for something to write about, and happened to remember something I saw while reading the New Features Workshop (you DO read that, don’t you?) and kept seeing on my tool palettes - assemblies! I tried to add one (the program comes with some pre-installed on a new palette) and was unsuccessful. I tried a variety of different methods, and nothing worked. Instead of beating my head against the wall trying to figure it out (and attracting the unwanted attention of airport security,) I decided to ask Nick. He’s always good for an answer, even if it’s one that I don’t want to hear. If you want to see how this is accomplished, follow the link!

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Another week, another great guest post. Throw some feedback and tell us what you think of Mr. Risch’s post- JW

So a friend of mine and I were talking about different ways to incorporate handicap ramps into a surface. He’d mentioned he had some creative ideas about using/editing corridor sections and the next thing I knew he was calling me into his office to show me what he’d done. Check it out after the jump

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Every now and then we find ourselves doing the same thing over and over and over.  So did one of your fellow readers. The blue surface at right is a pair of subassemblies, custom written to model a dam face with varying slopes as the height changes. It’s the kind of thing that  sounds simple, but becomes an exercise in tedium as the design changes, making the creation of multiple assemblies and managing the regions an exercise in tedium.

EE prepared this subassembly for a client, who has already recovered the cost in under one week. Next time you find yourself repeating a process over and over, drop us an e-mail. A little programming can turn an instant headache to an instant solution.

A comment was made on the last post on assemblies.

“A question regarding a similar(?) problem to this.  In ‘07 you could copy assemblies and then edit them to your hearts content. In ‘08, you cannot do this, it simply copies the assemly line and sends the sub-assembly parts flying. Any workaround suggestions? (the above solution doesn not work.)”

Click more to find out how to deal with this…

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If you are working in Civil 3D 2008 and you open a drawing from an earlier version, sometimes your assemblies look a little funny.

A regen doesn’t fix it… what does?

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If you haven’t been able to resist the urge to explode Civil 3D objects, or you copied and exploded a surface to extract some contour information, you may not realize that there are monsters lurking in your drawing.

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Sometimes if you build a corridor that has a complicated daylight or twisty baseline you wind up with “bowties” or little overlaps in the corridor feature line….

Sometimes you might run your assembly around your edge of pavement instead of down your centerline and have an overlapping centerline feature line…

A Road

You might want to extract a grading feature line or polyline because daylighting can sometimes be tricky around complicated corridors, or maybe you’d like to do some lot grading with grading objects and need that “base” feature line.

Or Sometimes you might want a a feature line but nothing else- such as in a parking lot corridor.

So how would you deal with this?  Press more to find out…

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I’ve been putting this off for weeks for varying reasons, but the main reason is because I think I suffer from adult-onset ADD. I am so busy when I finally do get a day or two to spend in the office that I get VERY distracted VERY easily. So yesterday, as I’m on the phone with a reader of this site, I’m browsing some of the other blogs out there (see, I told you I get distracted), and came across Angel’s latest post regarding a program from our friends across the pond at CADApps. Believe it or not, there’s a reason we look to alternatives for intersection design - Civil 3D lacks any automation tools for the process. The whole process is tedious.

So, if you’ve read Angel’s post, you now have seen his reaction to CADApps’ program. Now, click more to see my alternative (guess you can’t figure out where this is going…)

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