Not all news here has to be about Civil 3D, right? Some of you use some of the functions in Map 3D as well - especially since it’s built right into Civil 3D. Well, here’s a bit of information that you may or may not know about Map 3D and some new (returned?) functionality for it. Follow the link for more information.

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The other day I taught a short (ahem, too short!) class at the DE GIS conference. One of the things that we talked about was building a Civil 3D Surface from LIDAR contours. If a picture is worth 1000 words, a film is worth 1,000,000, so I made a short video using jing.

Read on to see the video and learn more. (*** if you can’t get the video to play, I might have reached my jing bandwidth limit. I am working on an easy way to get video out to the masses so stay tuned!***)

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I’ll be teaching a pre-conference workshop on Tuesday April 22, 2008 at the DE GIS Conference in Dover, DE. The Conference itself is on Wednesday, April 23, and is always a great program. I’ll be attending the conference as well. If you hustle up and register by April 4, the conference is only $90, and add $20 for the pre-conference workshops. I’d say that’s a STEAL, wouldn’t you?

I’ll be giving away two (2!) copies of Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008. So bring your business card!

GIS for Civil Engineers and Land Development Professionals in the CAD Environment (Dana Probert, Engineered Efficiency)
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 1:00pm - 4:00 pm

Learn more about the Pre-Conference Workshops here:

http://www.degis.org/workshops.html

Read below for my agenda (which is also on the Workshops page)

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As I traveled this past week to the Seattle area to visit a client, I had a four hour plane ride ahead of me. I don’t have a commute, so I tend to fall really behind on my podcasts, but as I flipped through my choices, I saw one that I simply had to listen to: Mapping on This America Life. Most C3D users spend so much time wrapped up in the minutiae of land development and our view of the world, that we often don’t even think about the other maps out there. Maybe some were made with software like we use, but a lot of maps are so specific, and so unusual, that they simply make you think, “What is a map?” The first “act” was based on sight, and my favorite of the bunch. Read more after the jump.

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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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Now that you have seen how to bring Map data into your drawing using Map>Tools>Import (see this post for detailed instructions), you might ask “How can I made a label that ‘reads’ the object data fields?”. Special text that reads the object data (and many other properties if you’d like) is called an “annotation”. It is similar to a Civil 3D label because it is semi-dynamic and reads some information from the object itself, but it is really just a beefed up attributed block.

In this example, we will label a road with its name. This particular batch of GIS data has a field called “STREET”. Yours might be called something different. Be sure to read the metadata or talk to the person who created the dataset if you are unsure which one to use.

Read how to do this after the jump.

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I am working on a series of posts to follow up on my AU Class. During the class, I made heavy use of Map 3D Tools (Civil 3D is built on Map 3D). Since Map 3D tools are often new to Civil 3D users, I’d like to take the time to get you “caught up”.

One of the first tasks you will probably run into as a civil firm is importing publicly available GIS data such as ESRI shapefiles (.shp), ArcInfo Exports (.e00) or similar.

In this post, I will explain how to import the file as AutoCAD entities. If you are interested in learning an alternative way to use this data through something called the FDO, read this article I wrote last year: Can You Do That In CAD?

Read more about importing shapefiles into your drawing after the jump:

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Though I am a big fan of the FDO data connection that came around in Map 2007 (which of course, Civil 3D 2007 was built on), I do sometimes like to import map data the old fashioned way through the Map>Tools>Import.

In 2007 and below, I always had to manually assign the input coordinate systems.  Map didn’t seem to want to automatically find the .PRJ (projection) files for me like the FDO did.  This was a bit tedious, especially when importing a collection of .SHP files that each had a different coordinate system.

Click more to find out what I discovered in 2008.

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So you have SID/MrSID.  You know, an image with a *.sid file format.

And you could SWEAR you used to be able to import them into LDT or Map using the Map>Image>Insert command.  But now, *.sid is not on the list.

Other bloggers may have talked about this, but it comes up SO MANY times on the discussion groups and with client visits, I figured I would take my decaf tea break (the joys of gestation) to tell you how you can get .sid back on your supported image list.

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