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 06/27/07 by Daniel Philbrick The Corridor Section Editor
- 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 comments In The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > Corridor Design
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Borehole data and Civil 3D....
Posted 06/02/07 by Daniel Philbrick
I am a hockey fan and the only word I can come up with for this Stanley Cup series is “Boring”. I’d love to see Ottawa win (or at least be competitive), but it has not been the most exciting series. Speaking of “Boring”, there have been a few recent inquires about how to handle Borehole data in Civil 3D. I thought I’d take a break from this hockey game and write about Borehole data.
There are 2 ways setup borehole data in Civil 3D – User Defined Properties and External Data References. Both methods allow you to have more than one elevation per point object. The first method I’ll discuss is via User-Defined Properties. To use this method, you first need to create a User-Defined Property Classification and then create the User-Defined Properties in that classification. The following dialog shows the creation of a user-defined property for a borehole elevation.
Now that you have User-Defined Properties representing Borehole data, the next step is to import data into those fields. We’ll do this by importing from a TXT file with a format of Point Number, BoreHole Elevation 1, BoreHole Elevation 2 (tab delimited). A snippet of this file looks like the following:
Next you need to create a custom Point File Format which will import the data into the User-Defined Properties. You do this by going to the settings tree and creating a Point File Format. The following dialog shows this dialog with the Properties of Point Number, BH_1 and BH_2 for the properties.
The last step is to Load the data in from the TXT file. Go to the menu and select Points->Import/Export Points->Import Points. Importing the Point file (with the format created above) will populate the User-defined Property fields with the Elevations defined in the TXT file.
The hard work is now done. The last step is to create a Point Group and define the elevations based on the Borehole data. The key part of this is to create the point group and assign an elevation override on the “Overrides” tab of the Point Group Properties. This is shown in the following dialog.
Now that we have a Point Group a surface can easily be created. In the next post, I go through the process of modeling Borehole data using External Data references.
Back to the hockey game – Ottawa is up 4-3, this series is not so boring anymore!
Dan
