Wicked Cool Stuff

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• Getting the most from your Community experience - Part 1

  Posted 09/27/06 by Anthony Governanti

  I'd like to take a moment to share some tips and tricks for maximizing your civil community experience. First off, if you haven't become a member of the Civil Community yet, go here now to get started. Once registered, there are several things you can do to get a more rich experience as a member.
  
  Build you profile
  The first thing you need to do once you're in is complete your extended profile. Your profile is an integral part of being a member of the community for several reasons:
  
  1. It communicates to other members more about you, your job, and where you are in the world
  
  2. The site uses the information in your profile to help build your network of other users that share common interests and background
  
  3. The site also uses this information to keep you informed of events and resources that are available to you in your area or product interests.
  
  At the time of this posting, there are just over 1000 registered members in the civil community, but unfortunately, less then a third of those members have completed their profiles. So take a couple of minutes to edit your extended profile and fill in the data, it will be worth it.
  
  Build your network
  Now that your profile is complete, you can begin to build your network of peers. The site has a great system for being able to quickly search on other members, and quickly add members to your network.
  
  A couple of things to do:
  
  1. From the home page of the community site, once you've logged in, select the My Network tab on the top menu
  
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  This will show you the members that are in your network, as well as members that have you in their network. Since this may be your first time, you won't have anyone in the network, don't fret though, its easy to add them.
  
  2. Search for other members by using the Search Network feature. This works like a typical search engine, and allows you to quickly find other members based on simple criteria. Here I've searched for other members that live in New Hampshire (NH), my home state in the US.
  
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  3. Add peers to your network by selecting a member from the list and using the Add member to network link. Notice that I can also send this member an endorsement. Endorsements are used to give a "shout out" if you will for other members, and if they approve the endorsement, it will be shown in their profile to other members.
  
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  In this case I may want to say that "Paula is a real cool person who knows her stuff when it comes to technical writing." This helps to build community, and Paula can in turn choose to endorse me, and now we've built a connection through the site that other members can see and get involved in. Also note that you can recommend a member to someone else making it easy to build a network of peers that share interests or common backgrounds.
  
  Create or join a group
  You can also create a group, and invite members of the community to join that group. These groups can then be used to have public or private discussions, where you can meet and discuss topics within the community. I created a group for Civil 3D Gurus, but you can see some of the others that are in use at the time of publishing this post.
  
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  Ok that should be a good start to getting the most our of your experience in the community. Do these things, and I guaruntee you'll enjoy the experience more, and will want to keep coming back for more. Next time I'll explore tags and how they are important to you as a member.
  
  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG

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• Continuing Education

  Posted 09/25/06 by Anthony Governanti

  So I've taken the plunge back into the world of education and have enrolled in the University of Phoenix to complete my undergraduate degree. I'm studying to get my Bachelor's degree in Business Management, and my first class begins tomorrow. I'm very excited, but also trying to be honest with myself about this commitment, as I'll need to fit at least 10-15 hours a week of study and class time into an already over-booked schedule. But on the upside, even though my background up to this point in my life has been highly technical, I feel that having some business experience will help me understand the other side of this industry a little better.
  
  Ok, so I don't think I mentioned this in my Bio, but somehow I've managed to get to where I am today (granted, its probably not as far as I'd like to think it is) without a bachelor's degree. I currently have two associates degrees in applied science from Vermont Technical College. The original plan was to get just one, in Architecture, but I quickly realized at the time the my passion for CAD and my under-developed art skills really didn't point to a successful future designing buildings (I found myself having heated debates with my drafting professors about the merits of manual drafting, and they often ended with me saying something like "just give me 15 minutes with AutoCAD, and I'll give ya perfect lettering", and me throwing my Leroy template across the table and storming out for some fresh air!). But, since the two programs at VTC were very similar (they shared a lot of core classes) I decided after my freshmen year to make the switch over to Civil Engineering Technologies.
  
  So now you're probably thinking - what the heck does this have to do with CIvil 3D? Well, not much to be honest, but then again, not everything I post up here will be. In this case I will tie this bit of information into an Autodesk related story by explaining exactly why I wound up getting both degrees.
  
  See at the time (1996) AutoCAD had released R13, the first release on Windows (no comments on that one please, we all lived through those dark times, and its something better left alone). OK the exact date might not be correct, but this is when my school made the switch anyway. The powers that be in admissions at the time had it in their head that any of the CAD classes I had during my freshmen year would not transfer from the Architectural degree to the Civil degree because of the new version. This meant that I would have to take the Freshmen CAD classes again, only in the Civil track, and that meant a third year of classes in order to get everything in synch. So since I already had one year under my belt for the Arch degree, why not just finish it off AND go ahead with the Civil classes to get that degree as well.
  
  SO there you have it, Autodesk was in my destiny even back then, when I had no idea what my future would hold, and how things would circle back to Autodesk playing a role in my life again.
  
  Well, enough of my rambling for now, but I hope you find it interesting; its one of those fate things, you never realize what an effect a decision like that can have on your life; for me it was a pretty monumental thing, because if it weren't for me switching to that Civil Degree, wouldn't have started working for civil engineering firms, where I eventually met my wife, I wouldn't have gotten a job at Autodesk in Civil support, and I wouldn't be here today blogging about my Civil 3D thoughts and opinions.
  
  Pretty cool huh?
  
  Till Next Time,
  Cheers,
  AG
  
  

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• Light up your world - adding 3D symbols to a design

  Posted 09/19/06 by Anthony Governanti

  This is a tip that I briefly explained on the Discussion Groups the other day, and I thought it was worth digging a little deeper into for clarification. Many users out there have begun to really adopt the "3d way" of thinking. They've started to use 3D views of their models to better understand, communicate, and check to see if there are problems with a design. I went over some of the techniques used to visualize a design in this weekly webcast, so I'll refer you to that for more detail on visualization in Civil 3D.
  
  
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  The question that was posed in the discussion group was the need to add a 3D symbol of a light pole to a corridor design, and have these symbols show up at the proper elevation. I'll go through the steps I use to add 3D symbols to a road model below, but please note that this method can be applied to any type of design.
  
  Establish your points.
  First step is to create or group the points you want the 3D symbol to display on together. In this case, we don't have any points in the drawing to use, so we'll create them from an Alignment. The light poles for my design will be placed along the right hand lane of the road, using a 4 foot offset from the top of curb. I begin by creating an alignment from the top of curb feature line in my corridor.
  
  - From the Corridor menu, select Utilities > Alignment from Corridor
  - Select the back of curb feature line
  - Name the alignment and assign styles as desired
  - Check on the option for Creating a profile
  
  
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  When creating the profile, sample from the finished ground surface from your design, in this case the corridor surface. This is how the points will pick up the correct Z elevations when we create them in the next step.
  
  There are many ways to create these points, but in this case, we'll use the alignment as a reference, and use the measure command to create them at a certain interval along that alignment.
  
  - From the Points menu, select Create Points
  - Select the Measure Alignment command (third set of buttons, third down on the drop down menu)
  
  
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  - When prompted, select the alignment, then choose the profile
  
  
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  - Select the starting and ending station, then enter an offset of 4
  - Enter an interval, I used 50 for this example
  - Enter a description like LP for Light Pole (make sure to assign something here, as we'll use this description in the next step)
  - Select enter to run through all the points until all are created.
  
  Get a 3D Symbol
  Many of you may already have the 3D symbol you want to use, but in my case, I need to find one before I can move on. Luckily, Civil 3D ships with a small library of 3D blocks (called MVBlocks) that I can quickly browse to find what I need. i do this using Design Center (that's right, I'm actually going to use an AutoCAD command - see you can teach a new dog old tricks).
  
  - From the standard toolbar, open the Design Center
  - Browse to [\install directory]\Autodesk Civil 3D 2007\Data\Symbols\MVBlocks\
  - Select the Street Light folder
  - Drag and drop the Light Pole 01.dwg from design center into the drawing
  - Accept the defaults for insertion when prompted
  
  
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  Now that we have the 3D block definition in the drawing, we can use this as a marker for our points.
  
  
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  Assigning the symbol to your points
  We'll use this new symbol as the marker for a new point style. There are many ways to create the style, but I'm going to do it from the Point Group Properties dialog, as it will save a couple steps. First we need to create a new point group that will collect the light pole points together.
  
  - From the Prospector window, right click on Point Groups and select new
  - Name the group appropriately, and then go to the include tab
  - Use the Raw Description option, and enter the same description used above when creating the points, in my case LP
  - Go to the Information tab, and set the label style to none
  - Create a new Point Style from here, and name it Light Pole, or as appropriate
  - Go to the Marker tab, select the option for Using an AutoCAD block
  - Scroll the list of blocks, and select the 3D symbol, in my case I_MISC_LIGHTPOLE_M
  
  
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  - Set the size options to use a fixed scale, and the orientation to Object
  - Go to the Display tab, and make sure the marker is turned on in BOTH the 2D and 3D view directions
  - Select Ok to save changes
  
  
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  Now we have points that will use the new 3D symbol, and a point group to use to manage the points. You may notice the markers aren't aligned at every location as needed, so you can use the point group to edit the points and assign the proper rotation to each point. This is a little tedious, but once its done, you are all set.
  
  Now when you move into a 3D view, you'll have the 3D symbol showing up, and its at the proper elevation because we created the points from the alignment and profile. We can now continue to create powerful visualizations with Civil 3D.
  
  
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  Hope that sheds some light (pun intended thank you very much) on how to add 3D symbols to your Civil 3D models. Pretty cool huh? One might even be tempted to say that it is Wicked Cool Stuff.
  
  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG
  

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• New Blog - Pete Kelsey's The Dirt

  Posted 09/18/06 by Anthony Governanti

  I'm very excited to let you know that Pete Kelsey, the new Autodesk Technical Evangelist, has started his own blog on all things Dirt. So take a moment to check it out, and get a unique perspective on the Infrastructure world.
  
  Welcome to the Blogsphere Pete!
  
  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG

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• Code names – The early years of Civil 3D

  Posted 09/14/06 by Anthony Governanti

  Ok, you’re back again, which means you are either really interested, and I have a captive audience, or you stumbled onto this page while searching for a license key for that old version of DCA you found in the back of the desk drawer. Either way, this will be the third and final segment of the Civil 3D history lesson, as told by Da Govna.
  
  We pick back up on our timeline in the early 2000’s when LDT was quickly growing into a strong contender in the Civil Engineering CAD market. About this time is when I became a member of the Autodesk family. Up to this point, i was working in the industry, but quickly grew tired of the “move-copy-rotate” routine of the typical CAD tech in my area, and after a couple job changes in a very short time, was lucky enough to land a job in Support at the ’Desk.
  
  Man, this was cool; to walk the hallowed halls of the mother ship – where it all began. Unfortunately they kept us Support techs pretty confined to our desks, with a chain cleverly disguised as a phone head-set. Every now and then I’d fake indigestion or a bad cough and could slip away from the phones long enough to roam the halls of the development areas. It was here that I’d overhear weird conversations that didn’t make a lot of sense, mainly because they were speaking in a tongue few outside of the walls of Autodesk can speak. I later found out that this odd dialect of English was know as “code names” and was practiced by an indigenous species of programmers who seldom saw the light of day, but when they did, would use these code names to confuse and startle the enemy so as to not give away any secrets of what was waiting in the wings and was to soon be unleashed to the public!
  
  The first code name I was aware of was Olympus; this was the first time you had an installable product that could create data, manipulate objects, create a design, and stuff like that. Then shortly after that it was renamed to better align with our Mapping brethren to Vine (a play on words, since the Map being developed was code named Hollywood, and the overall project of for the two applications was called Crossroad – so that when and if the products were built together, you’d have Hollywood and Vine. Pretty clever huh?! (insert sound of crickets chirping here)).
  
  So Vine was slated to be the first release of this thing that had been nurtured along and growing in the shadow of LDT for a couple years. One problem though – its gotta have a name! Well, that part has been covered by James already, so refer to him for that story; bottom line; Civil 3D was the choice that was made, and Civil 3D it would be. That brings us to the fall of 2003, and the first release of Autodesk Civil 3D; it could have been a fairly momentous event, the only downside is that we choose to release it as a preview of the product. What does that mean? Well a preview is a chance to get an application into the he hands of our customers without charging any money for it (hmm, giving away software – what’s so hard about that – well its something that the government and the SEC has made very difficult to do if you are a publicly held company) and allow users to get their hand on it and start to put it to the test.
  
  We had a lot of great feedback in those days, and I personally had a lot of fun showing 2004 to eager audiences (I became an Applications Engineer wit the Civil sales team at Autodesk at about the same time) to give a glimpse of what was coming down the pipe. Anyway, the preview lived for about a year, and if my memory serves me right, I even think we had a Service pack for it. Then in October of 2004, we released the first commercial version of Civil 3D, code named Dozer - I think a much more apt name considering it’s a program that deals with moving dirt, but the real reason for the name was the movie The Matrix. All the AutoCAD based product were given a code name after characters from the movie.
  
  We had Neo (AutoCAD), Trinity (Map), Tank (LDT/CV/Surv) and some others that I can’t remember. Anyway, since I was a huge fan of the movie, I was quite pleased with those code-names.
  
  So Dozer was much more of a momentous event; at least for us here at Autodesk, and for a bunch of subscription customers who received the first shipment just in time for the holiday season. This was also the beginning of some really fun times for me; I used to demo LDT to audiences, and right in the middle, would switch over to Civil 3D and show them some parcels being edited graphically, and let them watch all the annotation and table automatically update! That was cool – but the best reaction I received was when you would change the scale of the drawing, and all the labels would automatically resize – that always got the biggest oohs and ahhs – even from the project managers and owners in the room! Anyway, I digress again, but I can’t help getting a little nostalgic.
  
  Soon, and I mean very soon, we then released Macallan (Civil 3D 2006) and for any Scotch drinkers out there, I think you can see where the motivation behind that code name came from. It was April of 2005, and in just a mere 6 months, the Manchester crew, along with an extended team in China, was able to turn around a full release of the software and still include some great new functionality. This is probably where most of you starting becoming aware of Civil 3D as more then just some experiment by Autodesk, but as a real-world engineering application. This is when I made the move over to my current position in marketing for the Civil team, and again really started to have a blast. I was one of a handful of folks who taught a Civil 3D based class at AU that year, and was enjoying touring the globe training our internal sales staff and partners on how this thing worked.
  
  One more year in the books, and that brought us to where we are today – Fenway (Civil 3D 2007) so named after a great run to the World Series by the Red Sox (who play at Fenway park in Boston MA for those not up on America’s favorite past time). Well that’s it, your brief, or not so brief history lesson on Civil 3D and how we got to where we are today. I hope you enjoyed the tale, feel free to ask questions or post comments if you like, and thanks for tuning in!
  
  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG
  

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• What the heck is Kriging?

  Posted 09/10/06 by Anthony Governanti

  So a lot of the tips and tricks out there right now are for things that most users may run into on a day to day basis, and that's all well and good - but what about the stuff that you don't even know is there? Well I thought there isn't a better candidate for my first wicked cool tip then to talk about a little known surface editing tool called Smooth Surface.
  
  So basically, smoothing a surface allows for two things. One, quite obviously, you can smooth out the data in an area of a surface to help create a more pleasing set of contours, and I recommend this for all you LDT users who are used to the Contour Smoothing option for contour styles.
  
  The second and less obvious use is that you can interpolate for and fill gaps or holes in a surface where data doesn't exist using something called the Kriging method. The Kriging method enables you to extrapolate data beyond the extents of a surface based on statistical trends in the existing data across the surface. Now I'm not going to pretend that I understand any of the theory or mathematics behind the Kriging method, I don't have the IQ or the time to get into that much detail. I have however played around with the settings and tried it on several different surface conditions, and I must say that I'm quite impressed with what it can do.
  
  So, with that said, let's give it a try on a surface I have and see what kind of output we can get. The scenario with this example is that the Surface I'm working with has a large U-shaped gap in the middle of it, and the road I wish to design will run close to the edge of this gap. In order to be sure I have enough room for daylighting my corridor design, I want to add some data to the left side of the U, as seen here:
  
  
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  So the first thing I'm going to do is establish two areas of interest with closed polylines. The first one is the area I wish to fill with extrapolated data, shown here as the red polyline:
  
  
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  The second polyline is the area I want to sample the data from to use for the extrapolation, shown here in yellow:
  
  
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  With these two areas defined, I can now run the Smooth Surface command. Its important to note that I don't have to have these polylines done ahead of time, as the routine allows me to define the areas from either polygons, rectangles or just drawing a shape while running the command.
  
  From the Prospector tab of the Toolspace, I expand the Surfaces collection, then expand the surface I am working with. I then right click on the Edits collections under Definition, and select Smooth Surface. We get this dialog:
  
  
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  There are two methods for smoothing as I mentioned above, and they are specifically called Natural Neighbor Interpolation and Kriging. I'll select Kriging, since its the one that will fill gaps or holes in a surface. The Natural Neighbor option is used for simply smoothing an existing area of the surface. Once selected, the options for the Kriging method are now editable. I'll activate the value column for the Select Points row, and pick the button with the three dots which prompts me to select the sample region. This is the area that it will use to extrapolate data points from, so I select the yellow polyline shown above. As the dialog comes back, I can see that the bottom view is filled with a picture containing a series of dots which represent the extrapolated points from that area of the surface.
  
  
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  This is the cool part; as we select different semivariogram (Ok I can't even pronounce that word, much less explain what it is, so check out the link to get an idea of what it means, if you're into that sort of thing) methods, we'll see different best-fit lines projected on those points. Simply pick the method that gives the best best-fit line, in this case I'm using the Gaussian method. (See we don't have to be geniuses, we can just look at a pretty picture and choose the one we like!) Ok, now we setup how the extrapolated points are added to the surface to fill in the gap using the rest of this dialog. I choose to use a grid of points, and set the output region using the red polyline I defined earlier. One thing to note, the smaller the grid you define, the more points that are added and the more processing the command will need. I used a 10 unit grid, which for this surface is probably too tight, but let's see what it gives us. Once the output region and grid is setup, I select Ok and let it run the calcs. It may take some time, but I can use this opportunity to have a snack or something.
  
  Here are the results.
  
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  Not too shabby huh?
  
  Now before you go off and say 'but that's not real data, how can you have more surface where you don't have data?!' I want you to realize that this is an extrapolation of trends across a given area, and not a replacement for real data. So keeping that in mind, let's realize that this isn't as accurate as sampling real field data, but in those situations where you can't get good field data, this is a great tool to help fill in areas of need that will be pretty dan close.
  
  I'll leave it up for discussion as to the merit of its use, but for me, this is Wicked Cool Stuff!
  
  
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  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG

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• Civil 3D; A History Part Deux

  Posted 09/08/06 by Anthony Governanti

  So to recap where I left off; we had set of tools that started from humble roots to grow into a great civil program, an acquisition, and a couple somewhat new programs given great names that fit the TLA standard at Autodesk. These were my glory days, as I gracefully exited college with two associates degrees in hand, and that innocent and somewhat naive outlook that I was about to take on the world and do great things as a CAD Technician. Then I started working..testing dirt; so much for all that CAD training, but that's another tale for another time.
  
  Anyway, back to the history lesson; sometime in the early days of the Autodesk/Softdesk relationship, a grass-routes effort was undertaken to develop the 'next big thing' for Civil Engineering software. Some of this effort did see the light of day, and as I've been told (unfortunately, I was out testing dirt on a hot job site in the middle of nowhere NH at the time so this is a story being retold, so please excuse the second hand information) there was a program called AEC-X.
  
  
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  This was a mysterious piece of code that was shown by none other then Dave Simeone with Carol Barts at his side at some big Autodesk event back in the day. It showed an alignment being edited on the fly, and the profile built from that alignment automatically updating! Wow, that's cool stuff, but surely it must be parlor tricks or smoke and mirrors; well, yes and no. It certainly wasn't an application you could design a real project with, but then again it wasn't meant to be.It was an experiment to see what could be with the right know-how, and more importantly, with the right investment.
  
  Now I get to the part where ADT fits in. Part of Autodesk's reason for acquiring Softdesk was for the Civil engineering software, and part of it was for the Architectural software Auto Architect. So a decision was made early on after the acquisition that investment and resources would be pushed towards the architectural side of the house first, and that investment grew into ADT, which represented a significant rework, if not a complete rewrite of the Softdesk architectural code. What this meant for us civil folks is that we got LDD (now LDT) which was a more scaled back approach at 'integrating' the Softdesk code into an AutoCAD desktop application. Several releases of ADT went by, and finally the day came to set 'those civil folks' loose on some R&D money and time! A significant effort was undertaken, and the roots of Civil 3D began to sprout from the minds and hard work of some very talented and very determined folks in Henniker/Manchester (there was a move in 2000 to a new facility in ManchVegas). This will bring us to the beginning of Civil 3D, and probably the biggest chunk of the history lesson...in my next post.
  
  Till next time,
  Cheers,
  AG
  
  
  

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