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.
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- posted 05/29/07 by Daniel Philbrick Grading and "Grading Best Practices"
- If you have not had a chance to work with Grading in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008, I encourage you to start using the new version. We have made significant improvements to the robustness and functionality of the feature. To support your use of Grading, we just released a documentation supplement called “Grading Best Practices".
There are 2 versions of the document. The CHM version contains a number of links to 3D DWF files which I think you will find very useful in visualizing some of the concepts in the paper.
This paper was writing by members of the Civil 3D project team so you are getting the information right from the source. On behalf of the Civil Development team, we hope that you find this material useful. We have another paper in the works which I think you will also find beneficial. Please stay tuned for more information in the near future.
Dan
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Autodesk Civil 3D 2007- ADMS 2008 Support
Posted 05/21/07 by Daniel Philbrick
The following link will take you to the Civil 3D Services ∓ Support page where you will find a service pack which will allow you to connect to the ADMS 2008 server from Civil 3D 2007.
Please refer to the readme for details about this support.
Dan0 commentsIn The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > Project Management
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Kaprun, Kitzsteinhorn, and Corridor Sections....
Posted 05/14/07 by Daniel Philbrick
Jack Strongitharm had a good summary of the EMEA Tech Camp - check it out! You may also be wondering why we have our laptops open on a nice sunny afternoon at the conclusion of the training event. If you could see the screen, you would see the topo of a fine set of mountains in the town of Kaprun, Austria. In fact, here is a 3D DWF file of that region viewed in the Autodesk Freewheel Viewer (Click here for more information).
The highest peak is called Kitzsteinhorn (3203 m). Yes, we are geeks and we were using the Google Earth data to generate this terrain model. There was a rumor that snow could still be found lurking high in the hills. I was trying to convince my Tech Camp friends that they should stay one more day and we would go see if we could find some snow. We were in the process of cutting some profiles down the slopes! That is when Jack got scared.
Jack claimed that he had a Giant Rabbit that he had to get home to feed. Now I have heard a lot of excuses but a Giant Rabbit? He even sent me a picture of his Giant Rabbit. That rabbit does not look that big to me - some water and a dish of food and we would have been off to Kitzsteinhorn.
Onto more important topics...
Sectioning the Corridor through an Xref!!
The new plan production feature is a great tool for generating plan sheets. There is another related gem in the Civil 3D 2008 release and that the ability to section a corridor through an Xref. This allows you to keep your Corridor Section plan production drawings separate from the Corridor Model drawings. As a result, edits to the corridor are not impacted by the display of the sections. Let's take a look at how this works.
The first step is to create a Corridor. Next you are going to need a Shortcut to the Alignment so that you can create sample lines. You can do this via Vault or by using the Data Shortcut UI.
Now comes the fun part. Create a new drawing and Xref in the Corridor drawing. Next create a Data Reference to the Alignment. Now invoke the create sample line toolbar and you will see that you are given the option to sample the Corridor and Surfaces which reside in the Xref drawing. Be aware that you will see surfaces listed from both the Xref drawing and the drawing you are working in.
The final step is to plot the Multiple Section Views. For this step, you get all the same options for styles and labels that you have had in the past. This has also been improved by allowing you to change the styles or labels for a group of sections. This is available by selecting one of the Section Views, right click, and select Section View Group Properties. This dialog will let you change style or labeling properties for the entire group of Section Views.
The key benefit of this feature is the Corridor and the Corridor Sections can be distributed between multiple drawings. If the Corridor changes, the Sections View drawings will be notified via standard Xref notification. Once the Xref is reloaded, the Corridor Sections will be up-to-date.
Dan
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Command for Tracking Cursor Position (Where did it go!)
Posted 05/05/07 by Daniel Philbrick
This week I have been is Salzburg, Austria assisting in training the resellers on Civil 3D 2008. Great things happening in Europe with Civil 3D, but that is the topic of another post. Several of the European users who were involved in the Civil 3D 2008 Beta asked about the new feature which let you simultaneously visualize the cursor’s position in plan, profile, and section views. They did not see it in the released version of 2008!
The feature is still there, it is just not documented. We still have more work to do to refine the behavior, but we still wanted to release the functionality in ’08. Here are some details on the commands.
When a tool tip for a horizontal alignment can be computed, and one or more profile views for the same horizontal alignment are in the drawing, a temporary line is drawn in each profile view at the station defined by the orthogonal projection of the cursor onto the horizontal alignment. The temporary line is drawn to the full height of the profile view, and moves as the cursor moves.
When the cursor is within a profile view, a temporary line is drawn orthogonal to the horizontal alignment at the cursor’s station. As the cursor’s position changes in the profile view, the temporary line’s position is redrawn at the new station location.
When the cursor is within a cross-section view, a temporary line is drawn orthogonal to the horizontal alignment at the station of the cross-section view. Additionally, a vertical line is drawn in each profile view that is a child of the horizontal alignment. The vertical line is drawn at the station of the cross-section view.
There are three new commands that control this feature:
HideDrawingTips – turns the feature completely off
ShowDrawingTips – turns the feature on for the current view port only
ShowDrawingTipsFull – turns the feature on for all view ports
This is a per drawing setting, so one drawing can have them turned off, and another can have them active.
You will notice a flicker in the frame of the windows if you use the ShowDrawingTipsFull command. This is something that we are aware of and would like to resolve before making it an “official command”. If you have feedback on this functionality, please let me know.
Dan
