Autodesk Releases Subscription Advantage Packs for Many Software Titles

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!