Today is Blogger Day here at the AEC headquarters in Waltham Massachusetts. Autodesk locked a few of us in a boardroom with the likes of James Wedding, Dana Probert, Dave Simeone, and David Mills. Then we were force-fed all of the new features and allowed to BLOG about it before the official press release.
Read on for the details…
One of the main benefits of using object based design is having the ability to make the “drafting” a much more efficient task or bi-product of the design. A basic drafting entity shown on plans is the location of concrete pipe encasements. These encasements are usually required when utility crossings don’t allow for enough vertical or horizontal separation or if the fill height is too shallow and may need structural support. A typical concrete encasement on a sanitary pipe is nothing more than a concrete poured surrounding, a minimum of 6 inches thick around the pipe, for a required minimum length. When they are needed to be shown on both plans and profiles, I see many users taking a lot of time to draft these concrete encasements “manually”.
Civil 3D gives us users another, (not so obvious), option. In this post, I’ll share with you an idea of using the Pipe Network tools to give us a better, (I think more fun), way to add these encasements to your projects.
It is not a stretch of the truth nor is it a new find that managing styles, settings, and templates has been daunting with Civil 3D. Then with each additional release there are improvements made to the existing styles and settings and new styles and settings added. Actually with Civil 3D 2010 SAP there were new styles and settings added MIDSTREAM!
One of the most frequently-asked questions in the Civil 3D discussion groups has to do with how scaling works for Civil 3D labels and tables. The question usually comes up phrased as “How come my text looks good in modelspace, but is huge (or tiny) in paperspace?” or “How come my Table columns overlap in paperspace?”
At first glance, Civil 3D labels and tables seem to scale much like Annotative Text. However, Civil 3D Labels and Tables were capable of their auto-sizing behavior long before AutoCAD got Annotative Text, and do not use the Annotation Scale at all. Instead, Civil 3D Labels size according to their own rules. Read on for more…
We recently had a client request that we display the Latitude and Longitude of Cogo Points formatted as degrees and decimal minutes. This format seems to have become a standard display format of many hand-held GPS units. Unfortunately, Civil 3D does not contain a built-in option for formatting Latitude and Longitude in decimal minutes. No problem, I thought… I’ll simply use some expressions. But it turned out to be a much more difficult task than I expected… Read on for the details.
