Alignments and Things........

Well, it's Friday again and it seems that this is when I find time to update my blog. I want to start a series of posts on some of the new functionality inside of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010. But first, a couple of weeks ago I recorded a webcast for our "What's New in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010" presentation. You can find it here. Just scroll down to the archives section. The recording is offered in 2 file formats, Windows Media Player and Adobe Flash.

Now let's move on to today's topic. Almost everyone that I have ever worked with went about creating their alignments in the same manner; lines and curves. Well, if you have been using prior releases of Civil 3D, you have had to take the extra step of converting those lines and curves to a polyline or use the layout tools to "trace over" the original line work that you had created. The 2010 release of Civil 3D has added functionality that will allow us to select the objects from which to create our alignments. Now we can use the Layout Tools, polylines or lines and arcs. The developers even changed the name of the command. Now it is called "Create Alignment from Objects." The command is found on the Home Tab of the Ribbon and by clicking

on the down arrow beside Alignment on the Create Design Panel.

Let's take a look at some other new features of Civil 3D alignments. Have you ever been working on a transportation project that had multiple lanes and transition regions all over the place? It has been a while since I was in that situation, but I do remember those days. We created our center line alignment and then used offset to create the edge of pavement and then created another offset for the transition region and applied fillets and tangents to tie them together. Alas, the boss comes in after a meeting with the powers that be and says that the center line is shifting and we have to have the changes by 9:00 am tomorrow morning. Time to hit the panic button, right?

The 2010 release of Civil 3D has several tools to help in these situations. Let's take a look at the Prospector Tab in Toolspace. As seen below, Alignments now have more categories or classifications. So, what does this do for us? Notice the second classification is Offset Alignments.

Now we can create offset alignments from our center line alignment and the offsets will stay dynamically linked to the center line. Can you think of any useful applications for this?

Another new feature for alignments is Widening. Using the widening functionality the designer or engineer can easily create a widened section in his 2D layout. widening works by creating regions along the offset alignment where the user can specify a different offset for one region to create a turn lane, for instance. On top of creating the widened section, the user can specify the geometry to use in transition between the two regions.

There is other new functionality associated with alignments. We will take a look at those next time.

MAPEXPORT in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010

Hey everyone! Happy Friday! I don't know how many of you are using the Map 3D functionality in Civil 3D, but something has been brought to my attention this morning. If you use the MAPEXPORT command in Civil 3D 2010 to create an ESRI shape file, the shape file is empty. The Export Dialog box is missing the portion for you to where you select the object type. Selecting objects on the screen won't work because the object type has not been set. So, what do you do? Well, go here. This link will take you to the page to download a new MapExport.ini file and will give you the instructions on where to put the file to fix the dialog box.

Dragged State Labels

OK.....I'll be the first to admit that I am slow sometimes, mentally that is. This is something that I probably should have found a long time ago, but i stumbled upon it today. I was playing around with some Point Label Styles in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 today when I got to thinking about how I would really like to use a Stacked Text format for my dragged state, so that I could change the attachment point of my leader to the label. Then it dawned on me that I could create this style.

So, let's see how we would do just that. First, I created a point in my drawing. I did not change the default settings so when the point was created all I got was the point marker. Next I applied a Point Label Style to the point. the screen cap below shows my point style and point marker style.


Next, I clicked on the point to activate the grips and drug the label up and to the right of my point as shown below.

From here, obviously, we need to edit the point label style. You can do this by clicking on the Settings tab in Toolspace and then expanding the Points node and then expanding the Label Styles node and then right-clicking on the style and selecting edit. Alternatively, you can right click on the point that you want to edit and in the Edit Points Vista, scroll to the right until you see the Point Label Style column. Clicking in the Point Label Style column will bring up the select label style dialog where you can edit the style by clicking on the button to the right of the style field.

So, we have obviously applied colors to the text components on the layout tab. But, as shown above the colors are changed to the "Byblock" default color for the Dragged State. Here we will click in the Text Contents field to bring up the Text Component Editor and we want to highlight the text in the right-hand side of the editor. Then we will click on the Format tab and set the color of the text.

We want to do this for each of the components in our label style. Then we will click on the Dragged State tab and make sure that the Dragged State Component Display is set to Stacked Text.

The results of our point label style are shown below. This is what the Dragged state would look like if we had set the Dragged State Component Display to "As Composed" also.

So, let's edit the point label style again. And this time on the Dragged State tab, let's change the attachment point of the leader to the Middle of the Top Line.

Click OK. You may have to regenerate the screen to see that the changes did take affect. You should be left with something that looks like the image below.

Now, here are a couple of hints for those of you working with Label Styles. The steps above will work for any Dragged State. You may want to create a Right and Left dragged state if you want a different connection point for the leader depending on which side of the object you are dragging the label. Also, pay attention to the order in which your components are created in the label style. The Dragged State arranges the text components in the order in which they were created!