One thing I’ve been hearing from my survey fans is the fact that it’s hard to easily input a deed in Civil 3D because of the lack of line and curve functionality. One of the major things I heard was the overwhelming cry for the old Lines/Curves menu from Land Desktop to come back. Well, that plaintive cry was heard in ManchVegas, because it’s here!!!

Hit more to see what it’s all about…

Well, there it is. A few of the commands are pretty self-explanatory – the add Line/Cuve label is standard. The curve calculator (why am I working my way up from the bottom???) is a much nicer version of the one that Peter Funk wrote to add in to Civil 3D 2007. It works two ways – 1) it can calculate information for a curve based off of the parameters that you give it, and 2) it allows you to pick an arc and display all the design data from that curve. Here’s a shot:

Next (hey, we’re moving up, aren’t we?), we see that we can attach multiple entities. This is a combo lines/curves command that lets you do both at one time. Pretty nifty, but nothing earth-shattering. What IS a bit more earth-shattering is the new best-fit entities command. This allows you to create best fit lines, curves, and parabolas. It allows you to create those entities from 4 different selection methods – from Civil 3D points, from AutoCAD points, from Entities, and by clicking on the screen. Here’s a shot of the lines command – the other two are similar:

If I select By Clicking On Screen and pick a few points, I get the following output:

Hitting enter will bring up a panorama window that allows me to select to keep certain points, throw points out, pass through points, and even shows a regression graph at the bottom to see how good I did statistically. Pretty slick – a definite improvement over the Land Desktop Best Fit Line and Best Fit Curve routine (but we expect it to be more slick, don’t we?)

Next is the curves menu – pretty standard, and what we were used to in LDT. It’s about time we got this back…

And lastly is the line menu – standard, nothing fancy here either. Just like a warm blanket, nice to have back.

Someone asked me the other day if they’d ever put the special lines command back into the program. I couldn’t see why anyone would want that – the individual entities created by that command drive me crazy. And with how easy it is to create a custom linetype, all of that is done with polylines for me. So, don’t expect to see that one…

More to come later this week – I’m buried with work, which is likely why I’m holed up in a hotel room typing this article on Sunday night…enjoy!