The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show
Dan Philbrick and Dave Simeone add their colorful and insightful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Civil 3D and the civil engineering marketplace.
About Daniel About DaveLatest Post
- posted 02/12/08 by Dave Simeone Civil 3D Wish List on AUGI
- Did you know that there is a Civil 3D Wish List where AUGI (Autodesk User Group International) members can submit and vote on improvements that they feel will make Civil 3D a better product? The first Civil 3D Wish List and was presented to our team by AUGI at this past fall's Autodesk University and we’ve been able to use it validate and, in some cases, adjust our product plans to better reflect your priorities.
AUGI Members can access the Civil 3D Wish List at the following URL:
http://www.augi.com/civil3d
Note that there is no charge to join AUGI so join now and get us your feedback on where you think we should focus our development resources. Fel free to nominiate big ticket items that change the way you work or small enhancements that make a specific command that much easier to use. The nice thing is that the broad AUGI civil community will help us rank the most important things.
Thanks in advance
Dave S
Beloiw is a screen shot of the Wish List ranking...
1 comments In The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > All
Add to Bookmarks
Previous Posts
-
Calling all students!
Posted 02/08/08 by Dave Simeone
Here’s something interesting… We recently launched a student design competition for engineering students. This is part of our global effort to help energize students about civil engineering as a profession and to do our part in getting them ready to enter the work force. This contest is part of a larger initiative of integrating AutoCAD Civil 3D into the civil engineering curriculum at universities and schools from around the world. The Autodesk Student Community portal is in its second year and it continues to pick up momentum. Since last September we’ve averaged close to 11,000 student downloads of Civil 3D per month. This is a student version of product that students are now using as part of their Civil 3D-based course curriculum! Yup... this means we should start seeing the first wave of Civil 3D trained graduates entering the workforce this spring.
Anyway – here’s information on the Student Design Challenge. Anything that you can do to help get the word out would be greatly appreciated. It’s in your best interest as it’s these folks who’ll eventually be joining your organizations. For me, I’m in a hyper competitive mode since the Patriots lost and I want to see more civil entries in the competition than Architecture, Mechanical or any of the other categories in the competition! That’ll give me at least a little joy.
Autodesk Student Design Challenge
"You are the designers of the future — here is your chance to get your designs in front of an international panel of industry experts. Find out more about the great prizes and how to submit your work to the Civil Engineering and Sustainable Design categories today!"
URL: www.autodesk.com/buildsomething
-
My how time flies
Posted 12/10/07 by Dave Simeone
OK, I’ll admit – I’ve been away from this blog for a bit. The bright side of this is that it gives me a chance to look at some of the cool things that have happened in the past few (ok, a bit more than a few) months.
Some things that I’m particularly excited about…
The term BIM is being used in the civil industry
Civil 3D adoption has skyrocketed worldwide
We’ve acquired an incredible Storm water design solution
I finished off the inside of my garage (sort of, anyway)
Civil 3D downloads from the student community site have increased dramatically (15K+ in Oct!)
We had more than 1700 Autodesk University attendees in the Civil/Survey track
I want to discuss a number of these changes over the next couple of weeks… Today, however, I’ll talk about BIM in the Civil market. One of the things that we’ve been discussing internally (and to a lesser degree externally) is how we talk about dynamic modeling in the civil industry. The term BIM is well established in the world of building development, but less so with us civil folks. It’s that dang “building” word. Frankly, I was skeptical that we in the civil space would be willing to latch onto the term, but the more people we talk to, the more people are open to the idea. Rather than the B in BIM meaning “a building”, people are thinking of it as “building something like a road or site”.
I got my issue of CE News the other day and they’ve got a nice article that explains what BIM is all about and how the approach is moving quickly into the Civil space. It also confirms that a pretty good chunk of the folks in our industry are acceptant of the term. It’s a quick read…
Civil Engineering News - BIM and civil engineering
Key takeaway… I get to meet with all types of folks. The concepts that are discussed in BIM – single centralized model that persists through the life of a project, integrated project delivery, parallel work process, etc – is something that comes up in EVERY executive briefing I sit in. Your management team is actively thinking about how to move into this new way of working. My suggestion is that you learn as much as you can as quickly as you can and become an active participant in driving this change.
-
New Version of the Survey Extension for Civil 3D
Posted 10/09/07 by Daniel Philbrick
As you may have seen, Nick posted a link to a new version of the Survey Extension for Civil 3D. I would also encourage you to download this updated version.
A few months ago I posted some information on the CIP program. This program allows us to track command usage for the purpose of understand how Civil 3D features are used. Another metric which the CIP program gives us is information regarding clean exits from the software. We also carefully monitor the CER reports (Customer Error reports). In analyzing the data from CIP and CER, we found that many customers were running into a crash or program exception during shutdown, after the drawing had been saved. Nick solicited input on the newsgroup and this was very helpful. In the end, we have found and fixed several situations which could result in this error. One problem was in the Survey Extension, the other resolved cases will have to wait for the AutoCAD Civil 3D SP2.
Speaking of the Civil 3D SP2...It will not be long.
Dan
-
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 SP1 Available!
Posted 07/25/07 by Daniel Philbrick
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 service pack 1 is now available for download from the Autodesk website. Please refer to the readme file prior to applying SP1 for information on installation. Here is a good one - You no longer need to use CTL-Click to select a parcel segment labels. Please refer to the readme for the entire list of resolved issues.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/index?siteID=123112&id=2334435&linkID=9240698
Dan -
The Corridor Section Editor
Posted 06/27/07 by Daniel Philbrick
View/Edit Corridor Sections – The “CSV”
Internally, we refer to the command Corridor -> View/Edit Corridor Section as the “CSV”. In its first incarnation, it was a viewer, and the editing came in a later release. The original tool was called the “CSV” and we continue to use that name internally. This feature was invented and developed Kumud Vaidya who is our Corridor UI guru. Early on in Civil 3D, he came up with a concept of a Corridor Section Viewer. As the feature matured, editing capability was added. Recently, we have been reviewing this tool and are defining additional requirements for a future release. If you have specific functionality that you would like to see implemented in the “CSV”, please send me an email.
One topic that I would like to discuss is the concept of overrides when editing the corridor. When you build a corridor, you can use the CSV to modify the geometry at specific stations. There are 2 types of edits which can be done. The first is a “Geometric Edit”. In this case you are specifically manipulating the geometry via a graphical grip edit. The second type of edit is called a “Parameter” override. This type of edit involves changing one of the input parameters of the subassembly at a particular station. These edits can be propagated down the corridor using the CSV Toolbar. Once you have overrides on the corridor, you can clear the overrides via the Corridor properties and clearing the overrides on the following dialog.
The CSV is a very useful way of making design changes at at specific stations!
Dan
3 commentsIn The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > Corridor Design
-
Civil 3D and Borehole Data - Part II
Posted 06/21/07 by Daniel Philbrick
I missed completing the Part II of my borehole data post during both the Stanley Cup playoffs and the NBA playoffs. At least I completed it before the World Series.
For review a quick review of Part 1, there are two ways to model borehole data in Civil 3D. The first method is done through User Defined Property Fields and I covered that in Part 1 of this series. The second way of handling borehole data is via an External Point Database. This is the method which I will discuss today. In this method, you override the point elevation based on the values in an external database. To demonstrate this, I have first created an Access database with fields for PNO (Point Number), BH_1 (Borehole Elevation 1), and BH_2 (Borehole Elevation 2).
In this example, we have a database which has 2 elevation values for each point number. Next we are going to override the elevations by creating an External Data Reference which will point to a field in the Access database. The External Data References are created by going to the setting manager, right clicking on the External Data References node, and selection New. The following dialog will appear.
On this dialog, you need to select the external database, and then map the fields in the database to the External Data Reference to be used for the elevations in the drawing. In the previous dialog you can see that I mapped the Point Number (PNO) and the Borehole Elevation value (BH_2 in this example).
Now you need to override the elevations of the points with the elevations defined in the External database. This is done by creating a point group and selecting the “Overrides Tab” . For the elevations, you want to override the elevation and select one of the external data references you created. The following dialog shows the Point Group override for the BH_2 external data reference.
That completes the steps. Now you have a point group where the elevations are being overridden and they are being established from the value in an external database. The key difference between this method and the User Defined Properties is that the External Data Reference data is external to the drawing. When you use User Defined Properties, you need to import the data into the drawing and populate the Property fields.
Using either method, you now can create a surface based on the overridden elevations. Therefore, you can have one point number that has an arbitrary number of elevations assigned to that point. The last step is the create a surface based on the appropriated point group which represents the borehole strata of interest.
Dan
-
Customer Involvement Program - CIP
Posted 06/12/07 by Daniel Philbrick
Are you participating in the Customer Involvement Program? If not, I encourage you to enable this by selecting Help->Customer Involvement Program... You will need to select "Yes" on the following dialog:
You can read more on this program by selecting the following link.
This program is going to provide us with very useful data regarding how you use Civil 3D. Have you ever wondered what is the most commonly used command in Civil 3D? We now have some preliminary data. I cannot share that with you at this point, but we can start a contest to see who can guess the most frequently used command!
Dan
-
Diagnostic Tool - DbView
Posted 06/09/07 by Daniel Philbrick
The Ducks ended that series with Ottawa before I even had a chance to finish the Borehole "series". I was hoping for at least a 7 game series.
Before I get back to describing the second method for managing Borehole data, I wanted to share a diagnostic tool that you may find useful at some point. During Friday's webcast someone asked about a message ” *Warning* Multiply owned object, handle "XXXX". Himanshu Gohel (Software Engineer, Civil 3D - I am sure you have seen him on the Civil 3D Newsgroup) suggested that we use the tool called “DbView” which is an arx utility that lets you type in an object handle and find out what the entity is. Shaan Hurley posted this utility on his blog. This utility will give you some guidance as to the type of object that is reporting a warning.
We were able to narrow down the search to some of the label styles. I have seen that other users are running into this on the news group so we’ll continue to research and determine the root cause of this warning.
Just wanted to repost a link to this utility – at some point you may find it useful.
Dan
-
Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets
Posted 06/06/07 by Daniel Philbrick
There is a new document supplement called "Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets" available at this location:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8777904#section8
This document presents detailed advice on how to configure AutoCAD Civil 3D and your drawing templates for greatest efficiency in large projects, and also how to most effectively manage the project data.
There is also a section in the document on enabling the "3 GB Switch". By default, the Windows operating system limits the amount of physical memory available to applications to 2 GB. It reserves the remaining memory for the operating system itself. However, if you have more than 3 GB of physical memory, it is possible to increase the amount of memory available to Civil 3D to 3 GB.
The following link takes you to a detailed solution on how to enable the 3 GB Switch:
http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1071001
We have done some prelimary testing of our large benchmarking datasets and we have found improvements by using this option.
To complement the sections of data managment, there’s an updated version of the Civil 3D 2008 Project Management Using Autodesk Vault white paper available here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8777438
The Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets paper was written by member of the Civil 3D Project Team. On behalf of the Civil Development team, we hope that you find this material useful.
Dan -
Siteless Alignments
Posted 06/05/07 by Daniel Philbrick
Before I get back to Borehole data, I thought I'd bring up something about Sites and Alignments. I'll get back to Borehole data during the next game of the Stanley Cup....
If you have started using Civil 3D 2008 you will notice that there is an Alignments node in the Prospector tree. In the previous release, the Alignments are located within a named Site. The following image shows the Prospector tree with the Alignment collection in Civil 3D 2008.
When you create alignments in ‘08, every alignment creation dialog lets you select "None" for the Site:
We made this change because we found that many users put all the alignments in the default Site 1. This sometimes resulted in undesirable behavior such as parcels being created when the Alignments formed closed areas.
In 2008, this behavior can be avoided by putting the alignments in the "None" Site. If you then need have interaction between Parcels and Alignments, you can select "Move to Site" to move the Alignment object into a Named Site. You can also "Move" alignments to the "None" Site.
If you have an existing drawing with a number of alignments in a named site, you will find a hidden command called RemoveAlignmentsFromSite which will take all the Alignments in a Named Site and Move them to the "None" Site. If you run this command, you will see the following dialog.
This is an unsupported command, but we did want to make it available in case you had a drawing with a number of alignments in a Name Site. Make sure to make a copy of your drawing before running this command!
Dan