Does it really pay to be an Autodesk Subscription Customer? After a brief review of the Subscription Advantage Packs released yesterday I believe the answer has to be a resounding, "YES!!!!!!!" The Advantage Pack for Civil 3D 2010 has many tools that will help increase productivity and efficiency. Let's take a look at some of the new tools that are in the Advantage Pack.
The tools are organized into groups in the Subscription Extension Manager on the Toolbox tab in Toolspace. The first category is for Alignments. There are 2 tools here. The first will allow the user to create a new alignment from an existing alignment and add data to the newly created alignment. (Think rail switches.) This tool can be used in other ways such as creating alternative alignments that have common tie-ins. The next tool for alignments is a routine that will create a best fit alignment from point data. Invoke the routine and pick a point group and you are off to the races! You will be shown a report of the best fit analisys.
The next category contains some inquiry tools for computing minimum distances between entities and surfaces and vertical distances between entities.
Next is Point Clouds. Finally Civil 3D has tools to allow us to harness LiDAR data! The Point Cloud routine will allow you to create a Point Cloud database (.isd format) from data in several different formats. Once the database is created you can recall the point cloud database using the same wizard from the Toolbox tab in toolspace. You can stylize the point cloud to show the information that you want to see and then you can also remove the Civil 3D settings from the point cloud so that the data can be used as a default subset of points.
The next group is for points. The new tool here is not really new, but there is a zoom to command here that allows you to input the point number without having to find the point in a point group first. The really cool thing is that this command can be run as a transparent command!
The Profile group has a routine for creating a best fit profile from COGO point data, surface profiles, feature lines or AutoCAD 3D polylines, points or blocks.
The next tool is for laying out Roundabouts. This routine has a wizard that asks for design criteria and then lays out the roundabout for you based on the alignment geometry and data input into the wizard.
There are some other tools that I will let you discover on your own. So, If you are a Subscription customer, go to the Subscription Center and download the Advantage Pack today. I think it is well worth it. While you are there, watch the video clip. It gives an overview of some of these tools in action. If you are not a Subscription member, call your Reseller today and purchase your annual Subscription to Civil 3D so that you can have access to these great new tools too!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
An Update to AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 and Windows 7
It has been a little over 2 weeks since upgrading my OS to Windows 7. So far I have not run into any issues when working in AutoCAD Civil 3D. The software seems to load quicker and respond quicker in most cases. I have had two crashes since installing OS. The first was a BSOD, but I was pushing the OS with Civil 3D, several Office programs, IE and a couple of Virtual Machines running. As best I could tell the crash was actually caused by a driver that I hadn't updated. After updating the driver the only other crash was actually in Civil 3D, but could be attributed to User Error!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Civil 3D and Windows 7
Ok.....I believe in living on the bleeding edge! Last night I decided to install Windows 7 and see what happened. So far, so good. The only thing that I found was something that has been going on for a while. If you prefer to use Firefox as your web browser, you will probably not be able to have the reporting feature in Civil 3D open directly in the browser. This is an old issue. I tried to set IE as the default browser and map .htm and .html files to Firefox, but I still kept getting an error. As soon as I deleted Firefox I was able to get the reports to open in a browser window. Not sure that I am happy about that. I kinda like Firefox. The other option is to create a shortcut on your desktop that maps to the CivilReport.html file so that you can run the report and then click the shortcut and have it open in Firefox. Just a couple of more clicks I guess, but I would like to be able to use whatever browser I choose.
Can you really see through Transparent Commands?
While working on a support call today, I derived a solution for a customer that included using a Transparent Command. That got me to wondering how many people actually use the Transparent Commands in Civil 3D. I know that I did not use them very often in past employment engagements. It was not until I started teaching classes on Civil 3D that I fully understood the power of these commands and how they could help me work smarter and not harder.
For example, at one of my past jobs I worked with an older gentleman who was very close to retirement. He was fairly proficient with vanilla AutoCAD, but almost completely illiterate when it came to Civil 3D. I am not knocking the guy, because he was good at what he did. He just did not see the need to learn new software while being on the verge of retirement. A typical scenario for one of his projects was that I would take the survey data and create the surface and then hand the drawing off to him. He would complete the geometric design and give it back to me to produce profile drawings. When I created the profile drawings, I would have to plot them at an exaggerated scale and he would break out his old HP Calculator, complete with card reader, and design the profile on paper.
Then he would had the paper copies back to me and I would input the data into Civil 3D and finalize most of the design before handing it back for his review. At the time, I did not use the Transparent Commands very much because I did not understand what they were. So to input his design data, I would create a layout profile and get the PVI's close to their desired locations and elevations. Then I would open up the profile editor and hand correct the stations and elevations.
Does this sound familiar to you? Well, after a while I learned that there were commands in Civil 3D that run "inside" of other commands and allow us to input specific data in that command. Instead of having to get the PVI's close, I could have used the Profile Station Elevation transparent command to specifically enter the station and elevation of the PVI without having to go back and edit.
Which brings me back to today's case. The customer was working on a paving project. A contractor had constructed a leveling course and the customer had sent his crew out to collect profile elevations at an offset left and right of the center line. He then wanted to show those offsets in his profile view. I didn't want to have to try and create another surface and extract the data from the surface when we already had the point information in the drawing.
I began looking for a Transparent Command that would let me harness that point information and apply it in the profile view. To both the customer's satisfaction and mine I found the transparent command that would allow us to do just that. The command was Profile Station and Elevation from a Cogo Point, or 'SPE.
To use the command we went to the Ribbon and selected Profile Creation Tools from the Create Design panel. Once we entered the profile name in the dialog box and set our styles we invoked the Create Tangents command and then invoked the 'SPE transparent command. We selected the profile view in which to draw the profile and began to pick the point objects we wanted to see in the profile view. Then the steps were repeated for the opposite offset.
If you have not looked into using Transparent Commands, I encourage you to look into them. They can definitely help us work smarter and not harder!
For example, at one of my past jobs I worked with an older gentleman who was very close to retirement. He was fairly proficient with vanilla AutoCAD, but almost completely illiterate when it came to Civil 3D. I am not knocking the guy, because he was good at what he did. He just did not see the need to learn new software while being on the verge of retirement. A typical scenario for one of his projects was that I would take the survey data and create the surface and then hand the drawing off to him. He would complete the geometric design and give it back to me to produce profile drawings. When I created the profile drawings, I would have to plot them at an exaggerated scale and he would break out his old HP Calculator, complete with card reader, and design the profile on paper.
Then he would had the paper copies back to me and I would input the data into Civil 3D and finalize most of the design before handing it back for his review. At the time, I did not use the Transparent Commands very much because I did not understand what they were. So to input his design data, I would create a layout profile and get the PVI's close to their desired locations and elevations. Then I would open up the profile editor and hand correct the stations and elevations.
Does this sound familiar to you? Well, after a while I learned that there were commands in Civil 3D that run "inside" of other commands and allow us to input specific data in that command. Instead of having to get the PVI's close, I could have used the Profile Station Elevation transparent command to specifically enter the station and elevation of the PVI without having to go back and edit.
Which brings me back to today's case. The customer was working on a paving project. A contractor had constructed a leveling course and the customer had sent his crew out to collect profile elevations at an offset left and right of the center line. He then wanted to show those offsets in his profile view. I didn't want to have to try and create another surface and extract the data from the surface when we already had the point information in the drawing.
I began looking for a Transparent Command that would let me harness that point information and apply it in the profile view. To both the customer's satisfaction and mine I found the transparent command that would allow us to do just that. The command was Profile Station and Elevation from a Cogo Point, or 'SPE.
To use the command we went to the Ribbon and selected Profile Creation Tools from the Create Design panel. Once we entered the profile name in the dialog box and set our styles we invoked the Create Tangents command and then invoked the 'SPE transparent command. We selected the profile view in which to draw the profile and began to pick the point objects we wanted to see in the profile view. Then the steps were repeated for the opposite offset.
If you have not looked into using Transparent Commands, I encourage you to look into them. They can definitely help us work smarter and not harder!
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