Wicked Cool Stuff
Dominick Gallegos, Civil 3D Technical Marketing Manager for Autodesk, shares his unique perspective and ideas on the functionality and use of Civil 3D for a range of different project types.
About DOMINICKLatest Post
- posted 02/12/07 by Anthony Governanti Hello from San Francisco and a Wicked Cool Tip
- I'm just settling into my hotel room here in chilly San Francisco where I'll be spending the better parts of the next two days talking to a worldwide press audience about the upcoming release of Civil 3D. I am very excited about this years release, but more on that in the coming week.
I wanted to share a quick tip that I've been using for a while now, and figured it was about time to share. It's not ground breaking, but should save you a lot of time when dealing with (blah) plain AutoCAD tasks.
Drag N' Drop copy:
A lot of times when I'm going through the layout for a design, whether it be a roadway, a parcel network, or a parking lot, I have the need to isolate objects quickly and use them for simple drafting tasks.
Let's take a set of parking curbs for instance. If I'm being a good Civil 3D doobie, and am converting my layout linework to Feature Lines so I can properly grade my site, I may loose some 2D geometry that I need for other things like visualization. So what I typically do is simple copy the geometry into a blank DWG, flatten it if needed, and then copy it back in to a new layer. It sounds dumb at first, cause you're probably thinking, why don't you use Layer isolate or one of the other hundred ways if separating out the geometry needed. Well, quite simply, this is the fastest way I've found.
1 - Create a new DWG using the same template or coordinate zone as the DWG you currently in.
2. Go to the Window menu and select "Tile Horizontally" or "Tile Vertically"
This will put both DWGs on your screen side-by-each. Simply select the geometry in the original DWG you want to work with so the grips show up, and then Right-Click-Drag the geometry into the new drawing. When you release the mouse button, you'll be given a shortcut menu. Choose the paste to Original Coordinate option.
View image
Now that the geometry is there, you can work with it in a clean environment and then simply reverse the order of steps to bring it back to the original DWG. Badda-Bing, Badda-boom.
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG
