Another Round with Dragged State Labels

Yesterday, while at a customer's office I noticed something that I had not seen before when it comes to dragged state labels, with points anyway. Take a look at the image below. I have created to random points in a drawing with the Point Marker Style for each set to Basic and the Point Label Styles are Point#-Elevation-Description and a style the I created with the coordinate information in it.

So, as you can see I have changed the colors of the text and added the coordinates. But then we looked at the dragged state for the point with the OOTB Point#-Elevation-Description Label Style. I was showing the customer how the label reacted when it was dragged out from the point. The customer asked the obvious question about the location of the leader in the dragged state and wanted the leader attached to the middle of the top line of text. This is where something interesting happened. When I changed the display of the dragged state from "As Composed" to "Stacked Text", the elements of the labels where rearranged. I had not noticed this in previous versions and that was probably because I typically used the Dragged State in the As Composed display mode.

I started digging in to see if I could deduce what had happened. The conclusion that I came to was that the Stacked Text display mode uses the order in which the label components are created. The next screen capture will show what I mean.

You will notice here that the component names are listed in the following order: Point Description, Point Number and Point Elev. And looking back at the label in a dragged state with the display mode set to "Stacked Text" we see that the label has been adjusted to match the order shown in the Label Style Composer.

To prove my theorem, I created a style the contained the same information and added the coordinate data. I was careful that I created the label components in the order that I wanted them to be displayed in the stacked text display mode. The result was as expected.

As you can see from the shot above, the the dragged state is what we would expect in a point label of this variety. Sometimes it is the little nuances of Civil 3D that make you go hhhmmmm.

Brought to You by the Fine Folks at Auotdesk Support

I was looking at different Civil 3D blogs a few weeks back and found one that is being written by the Civil 3D Support team at Autodesk. Not only do these folks do a bang-up job of helping all of us with our technical support questions, but they somehow find time in their busy schedules to blog too! The topics covered are very informative and take on a different perspective by approaching topics from the technical support standpoint. If you would like to check out their blog, click here.

These guys even find time to create the occasional video also. Here is one that covers just about anything you want to know about the Ribbon interface in AutoCAD Civil and Civil 3D 2010. Enjoy!

On another note, ALACAD will be on the road in the next few weeks presenting our Autodesk 2010 Discover Tour. Follow this link to our website and sign up for a city near you. Hope to see you there!

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!

The Joys of Parcels in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010

Hey everyone! I had the pleasure of doing a "What's New in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010" webcast this morning. I was pleased with the turnout, considering that this was my first attempt at this type of webcast. One thing that I was not so pleased with was the fact that I couldn't see the attendees. For what it is worth, I think that face time is better than computer time. But, with the state of things being what they are, we too are trying to be more frugal.

Anyway we discussed the new Ribbon Interface and the Contextual Ribbons that are exposed when you select a C3D object on the screen. We looked at the Quick Access Tool bar quickly and the and the Application Menu too. The meat of the presentation centered around the new design and analysis functionality that is included in C3D 2010.

I want to take a moment or two to talk about one of these features. Most of you that have met me know that my background in Civil Engineering is in subdivision design. I am not sure why I fell into that category, but it seemed that every consulting firm that I worked for put me into that position. Oh well.....what will be will be! So, for all of you subdivision folks out there, what was the missing link in lot layout using C3D? That's right frontage offsets!

C3D 2010 has you covered! Parcel layout is much better now with the addition of frontage setbacks and minimum widths for lots, as well as minimum and maximum depths as design criteria. The commands for laying out lots have been revamped a little also. In the past we have used the "Slide Angle - Create" command to create or lots with a particular angle at the ROW. This command has now been renamed to "Slide Line - Create." It is the same command, just renamed, as far as I can tell. The neat thing about the updates to Parcel creation is obviously the fact that we can specify a minimum lot width at an offset distance and a minimum width at the ROW. This is functionality that I have been looking for since I began using C3D 2006.

Keep an eye on the ALACAD website. A link to the recording of today's webcast should be posted in the next couple of weeks. While you are there check out the list of other upcoming webcasts for the 2010 products.

Now that my presentation is out of the way, I plan to be adding a few posts on C3D 2010 in the coming days.

Rehab this Rehab that

Hey everyone. In this post I want to talk about something that a customer of mine ran into a while back using some of the rehabilitation sub-assemblies in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009. The particular project was a widening and overlay job. So, we started looking at the available options. We put together our assembly and created the Corridor model along with our top and datum surfaces. Completing the process, we cut cross sections and created the section views.

Upon inspection of our cross section data we noticed something strange. The datum surface followed the points and links that we expected it to until it reached the inside of the widened section. Then it shot straight across the section to the inside edge of the widened section on the opposite side. This made for an area that the program considered a cut volume when we created our quantities.

I tired everything that I could think of to change the assembly and corridor properties to rid our cross sections of this cut area. Everything that I tried failed miserably. So, I posted a support request with Autodesk. I got a call on Friday of last week from the Support Technician on the case. He had found the answer to our problem. He started explaining a couple of things to me and then it happened, on of those "Eureka!!!!!" moments.

The solution was simple, but I am afraid we all tried to make it a lot harder than was necessary. All we had to do was go back to the surfaces tab in the Corridor Editor and add the Overlay Link to the datum surface, rebuilt the corridor and everything was depicted as it should have been.

I want to thank the folks at Autodesk for helping on this one. They did an outstanding job!