One of the main benefits of using object based design is having the ability to make the “drafting” a much more efficient task or bi-product of the design. A basic drafting entity shown on plans is the location of concrete pipe encasements. These encasements are usually required when utility crossings don’t allow for enough vertical or horizontal separation or if the fill height is too shallow and may need structural support. A typical concrete encasement on a sanitary pipe is nothing more than a concrete poured surrounding, a minimum of 6 inches thick around the pipe, for a required minimum length. When they are needed to be shown on both plans and profiles, I see many users taking a lot of time to draft these concrete encasements “manually”.

Civil 3D gives us users another, (not so obvious), option. In this post, I’ll share with you an idea of using the Pipe Network tools to give us a better, (I think more fun), way to add these encasements to your projects.

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Creating Linetypes

There are many ways that companies handle adding text to lines – from the Land Desktop routines that trimmed a line into multiple segments and through the text in between to using blocks (or now just Mtext) and masking. However, the most common way to add text to lines is to create a special linetype. Let’s just create a few linetypes of our own.

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One of the most frequently-asked questions in the Civil 3D discussion groups has to do with how scaling works for Civil 3D labels and tables.  The question usually comes up phrased as “How come my text looks good in modelspace, but is huge (or tiny) in paperspace?” or “How come my Table columns overlap in paperspace?”

At first glance, Civil 3D labels and tables seem to scale much like Annotative Text.  However, Civil 3D Labels and Tables were capable of their auto-sizing behavior long before AutoCAD got Annotative Text, and do not use the Annotation Scale at all.  Instead, Civil 3D Labels size according to their own rules.  Read on for more…

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AutoCAD Civil 3D Version Breakdown

I just saw a beautiful version comparison matrix done by IMAGINiT Technologies and thought I would share the link with you. You can find the matrix at:

http://rand.com/imaginit/1/pdfs/technology/software/2011_autocad_civil_3d_comparison_matrix_us.pdf

Now you can figure out feature by feature if YOU think AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 is worth the upgrade. Of course, don’t discount the benefits of stability improvements that are not listed.

 

I Can See Right Through You

If you follow any blogs – including this one – you will know that the Official Release of Autodesk’s 2011 Product line occurred today. I thought I would share one tool I am happy to see.

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