Do you need to model pressure pipelines in Civil 3D, show a design profile, and represent the crossings on other Profiles and on Cross Sections? If so, you have come to the right post. Check out the two short videos after the jump for a quick and simple process that gives you a complete and dynamic solution.
(P.S. Sorry about the use of YouTube. The videos were too large to upload to this site.)
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.
With C3D, it seems that the big push is toward the NCS layer naming system. What is NCS and of what benefit is it to you? The following is written using NCS 3.0 as the basis. Find out more after the jump.
Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis is a Civil 3d 2011 Subscription benefit. It requires that either AutoCAD Civil 3d 2011 or Map 3d 2011 be installed and it is a Stand-alone product that requires you to leave Civil 3d to launch. If you want to launch SSA from Civil 3d, add the SSA program path to the Working Path of your current profile, and add a command macro button on your Ribbon that uses the following command macro;
(startapp “StormSanitary.exe”)
For example; for Windows XP, add the following path;
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\SSA Stand-alone 2011\
The path for Win7 64 is; (SSA is a 32-bit product)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\SSA Stand-alone 2011\
Note: This works in Civil 3d 2010 as long as you meet the installation requirements of SSA. SSA can read and write the Hydraflow STM file format to allow you to use 2010. There are other reasons why you may want to push 2011 out to your corporation.
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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