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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Greetings from my new position at Engineered Efficiency!  I’m glad the folks here have let me join the party and I hope you’ll find my posts to be up to par with the high quality of past EE posts.

On to the subject at hand…

As you probably know, the ability to assign elevations from a surface to a feature line has been in Civil 3D for some time.  A big wish list item of mine has always been for that to be a dynamic relationship.  In other words, once the feature line gets its elevations from a surface, it would be nice if it would update those elevations to match any changes to the surface.  Well in Civil 3D 2009 ?!?!…..

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There are heaps of nifty new feature line tools in Civil 3D 2009 that will make your grading life a whole lot more fun. One of my favorites is using a feature line as a corridor target. Think of all of the times you would love to grap elevations to drive your model but it seems redundant to make another alignment and a profile, especially when you already have a feature line drawn.

Read on…

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I thought about writing this post late last year after working on a number of earthwork projects, but after seeing the Quantity post the other day, I figured that I probably should add this to the mix. Civil3d.com is my default site for all things Civil 3d.   I did not come up with this idea and nor am I the first to blog about it.  I have been meaning to add this to our company template for a few weeks and have just added this information.

Check out the rest after the jump… 

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Over the past several months, EE has worked with a few of our clients to create 3 case studies about successful Civil 3D implementations.

The 3 case studies are broken down by size of firm: Small (1-20 ppl); Mid-size (20-50); and Large (50+)

You can download the entire paper by following the link after the jump.

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Well things are getting back to normal around here.  Since they published that information that Baby Mozart is bad for baby’s language development, I discovered that I could put Prospector in front of archived Friday Webcasts and AU Online recorded Screencasts and get in an hour or so of work.  So expect to hear from me more and more over the next few weeks…

This question came up today and though I can’t take credit for solving it, I thought it was worth noting. I had no idea….

When editing a feature line you expect to see a PI glyph (little green triangle) at the vertex locations. But what if it disappears?

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I’ve always been had this strange fascination with the way Dana models parking lots with corridors.    I bow humbly to her knowledge, methods and creativity, because I’ve never fully grasped the process.   I have a slightly different approach to parking lots, using feature line grading to create the main outline and setting high/low points and setting the edge of pavement for my curb islands, then using projection grading to create the flowline of the gutters, face of curb, and back of curb.   The methods of projection grading for the curb islands can be found in the AOTC Designing Intersections and Cul-de-Sacs book.   To see details on how I grade my parking lots, follow the link.

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The other day I accidentally discovered something with copying feature lines.

Suddenly, I wound up with all of these extra sites.  I couldn’t figure out what was happening.

Read on to find out WHY this happened and how to prevent it.

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So a few other bloggers have already announced the release of this paper, but I wanted to put in my two cents.

I downloaded both the pdf and the complied HTML help file versions, and spent about 3 hours with it last night and this morning.

The paper is very easy to follow.  The premise is simple- the author explains how to get the best results out of your feature lines and grading objects by giving you a peek inside how grading is programmed and why it behaves the way it does.  As I try to explain in posts such as  Parcel Rules  the author works out what task feature lines and grading objects do well, what task they struggle with and how to approach a project to deal with that. (Keeping in mind that the author of this paper actually knows how the tools are programmed and therefore can better explain why things behave the way they do.  I just use a dartboard and a blindfold)

The paper is broken into Feature Line Grading and Projection Grading sections.

Ideas covered include: When to use feature lines, when to use grading objects, best ways to make edits to each, best types of projections, managing site geometry, why certain things don’t work, and much more. The HTML version has neat DWFs embedded in it.

If you haven’t downloaded the Grading Best Practices white paper DO IT NOW. Read it today and see if the lightbulb appears over your head like it did over mine.

The Dan and Dave Show blog has the download here:

Civil 3D Grading Best Practices Whitepaper

Feature lines are one of my favorite “features” in Civil 3D, but they have some quirks that make them a little irritating at times. Some of those quirks have been fixed in Civil 3D 2008 - click more to find out what those fixes may be…

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