Civil 3D – SAP Roundabouts

Back to SAP – Point Clouds

Previously I discussed being invited to watch a preview of the Civil 3D 2010 Subscription Advantage Pack, and had been quite surprised at the features.  We discussed the Point Clouds, and today we’ll peek at the Roundabout Layout.

Roundabout Layout

This was cool.  Dana Probert showed us how easy it was to start the tool, pick incoming alignments, preset standards, and a variety of options to include, like offsets, widths, standardized markings, etc.  The configuration pages were huge, but most had presets available, making it easy to run through typical layouts.  Yes, that’s paint and signage shown in the image, and it updates well.  All the additional alignments are created automatically.

The edits were probably the best part.  The incoming alignments were edited, and the Roundabout would keep up.  Dramatic changes with no tip-toeing at all (Civil users know exactly what I mean).  This thing is sick. You can even add incoming alignments after the fact. There no vertical profiling at this time, but perhaps in the future it will be available. For now you just have to add that yourself.

This was my favorite part of the SAP.  Sadly I have no roundabout designs before me, but I’ll be a lot happier to tackle them in the future.

Civil 3D – SAP Point Clouds

Autodesk released the Subscription Advantage Pack recently, and can be downloaded at he subscription site.  I’ll summarize some of the items that we were shown during the preview.

Point Cloud support

• New point cloud objects
• Control display density, thematic display control
• Ability to snap to points in object

The point cloud utility is included in this SAP to prepare the market, and to stage future integrations into other applications.

Dana Probert added a 1 gig dataset of the Manchester office, and showed us some properties that included dataset count limitation (she was at 500K), and styling (which included display size and categorical coloring by elevation range). While the main dialog was up, I noticed that multiple sources can be used to create the cloud.

It looked awesome.  You could see every detail.  Imagine being able to walk the site, preplan your storage and parking, and see vertical problems that might not have been noted on a survey.

I am concerned about the impact the dataset will have on a processor and RAM.  There is no way currently to thin the cloud density.  Subsequent discussions with co-workers has brought up various scenarios for the use of the tool, but also many reasons not to.

I think that as Autodesk enhances the toolset, and broadens the scope of it’s adaptation, we will see many more demands for this type of data, and many uses we have not yet conceived.

 

Next is Roundabouts!

Civil 3D – Subscription Advantage Pack

Recently Autodesk hosted a blogger day invitation to preview the new Civil 3D subscription advantage pack.

I missed the meeting.  I had formatted my machine, and had no updates or email for a few days.  David Mills was kind enough to get me up to speed.

The SAP contains numerous tools, but here are the highlights:

• Point Cloud support
• Roundabout layout
• Visualization and Analysis tools
• Transportation productivity tools
• Survey productivity tools

Dana showed us the layout of the SAP, which shows up in your toolbox located in the Toolspace.  Each category is contained in the familiar tree view containing Alignment, inquiry, Point Clouds, Points, profile, Roundabaouts, Surface, and Visibility Checks.

I’ll cover various topics on this over the next few days, and add some screenshots as well.

You can download this from the subscription site.  You must have Civil 3D SP2 installed before attempting this addon.

Civil 3D – Lost Corridor Targets

Recently I was trying to work around more an more missing EG data, and trying to retune my corridor to get a early preliminary plan out.  I was so in such a hurry to get thing out, and so frustrated in how things were going, that I failed to retune my corridor after adjusting the assemblies.  I thought it might be a good post.

I am using some lame cross section colors; EG ad FG are the same red.  Sorry.

Notice below that the daylight in the template really isn’t trying.  Where it does cross the FG, the telltale intersection marker is not there.

Think methodically.  The daylight is carried out by following the instructions in the assembly.  Double check the assembly, and we find everything is ok.  We just changed it.

Then the daylight instructions are carried out in accordance with the targets passed down by the corridor.  Check the corridor.

A review the target assignments leads us to the problem.  It can’t daylight if it is blind. 

When we remove and replace an assembly daylight, that old corridor component link is gone, and with it the instructions of what to target.  When the new link comes in, there are no target instructions either since it’s new to the corridor.  So we reassign the targets and rebuild the corridor.

Now the corridor responds properly.

Civil 3D – FileDia Switch

A buddy of mine took 2 subscriptions of Civil 3D home, while brooding over the need to reinstall his Civil application.  2009 or upgrade…. The rest of his project team are on 2009.

It appears as though the whole platform was fouled, because every time he tried to open the non-default drawing, Civil 3D would crash.  I was neck deep in an overdue project, so he went on his way.

This morning he reported to me that before wiping everything, he set his FileDia switch back to 1.  That’s the switch that initiates a dialog for file operation such as Open, Save, etc.  Without the switch, you just get command line options.

I like command line, but not that much…

Lo and behold, everything perked right up.  He was able to recover his drawings, and open anything from Civil, inside or out.

The moral to this story is before you reinstall due to crashing while opening a DWG, try checking your FileDia switch first.  Just type “filedia” at the command line, and set it to1.

Civil 3D – Rotate/Translate selection of Points

In Land Desktop rotating a selection of points was a piece of cake.  Well….if you had Lisp code, and we had tons of it.  Since writing about solutions (and actually solving them) takes more time that writing code, my group doesn’t really have a great deal of new code turned out, and use mostly native AutoCAD/Civil commands and features.  I’d love to finish .NET’ing all my old LISP, but I just don’t have the time and money.  I tried to get dirt on fellow coders, but coercion and blackmail will not work on Christopher (he is a clean cu chap), so I guess I am stuck with work-arounds.

The situation in the image below is nothing new to anyone dealing with Point data coming in, especially when it is fill for an existing design.  The backsight is wrong.

If you don’t have a survey network loaded, then you may be scratching your head.  There are no tools to select a group of points and modify them using standard AutoCAD tools.  You can get a group, but you still can’t affect a group with the touchy feely interface that you understand.

Identify the group of points that are wrong, and make a Point Group, and position it at the top of the Group List.  Set both of it’s styles to be Standard.  Then take the ‘All Points’ Group, and send it just below the new Group.  Set it’s styles to be ‘<none>’ for both styles.  No big Mystery here, just filtering out the problem points.

Now the key is how you have organized your Object Layers.  Mine are all “PNT-*”.  So I go to the command line and lock all layers, and unlock the Point layers. “-la lo * unl pnt-*”

When I window the area, only the visible points will be selected.  All the rest of the entities are locked by layer.  Here a simple rotate by reference command gets me going.

We used to have a really nice tool written by Dexter Lundy, that selected LDD Points by Description, Point Range, and Elevation Range.  That will probably be the next tool I recode.  It wasn’t possible to get it in 2007 when I last investigated it, but I believe it would be a cinch to get working now…..hint hint.

Civil 3D – Find *Bug*

I was correcting a mistake that went out on one of our drawings.  It’s across the Alabama border, and Florida always gets left somewhere on a drawing.

So I used one of my favorite tools – _Find.

Really, none found.  Ok, good. Then I can count on being safe from that embarrassing issue, because I was prudent enough to check.

Civil 3D – Update 2 aftermath

I did not reboot after update 2.  Perhaps I should have?  I saved as for version control ‘d’.  I crashed a little while later.  The autosave is there, but not saved as dwg.  This is not funny.  I saved as and purposefully saved again.

Hopefully reboot will fix this, if no my VAR is getting a phone call.

Civil 3D – Update 2

The Diva tipped us off that there is an update for Civil 2010 (not Civil 3D) released yesterday, 9/23/2009.

Civil 2010 SP2 direct download

Readme

Matt Anderson posted a link to the Civil 3D 2010 Update 2.  Apparently got it emailed to him after going through the post-lunch crashes we all get, even though everyone helpful (like my IT guy)pretends the phenomenon doesn’t exist.  I think it’s at lunchtime on the west coast.  Not certain about that.  …or when Eastern Europe starts getting online after supper??

Matt’s Civil 3D 2010 SP2 link

It’s not online yet, but probably will be soon.

POST UPDATE!

Civil 3D Update 2 went without a hitch.  You will need Install CD2.  A possible disaster if you cancel because you did not have he install CDs.  Get them ready.

Civil 3D – Part Builder Context Solution Part 2

Part Builder Context Solution Part 1

Ok, at last, the end of the journey.  We covered getting the model values out of an existing part.  The remaining issue lies with what to do now that we have a mandatory context added to the structure type.  Each time we create a new form of that structure type, that variable will be added to the Part XML file with all the other OEM required variables, such as "SHBTh".  This would not be a problem except that we still cannot get our non-OEM variables forced into the part model parameters.

As you may recall from earlier discussions, adding an existing catalog parameter to the model parameters is verboten.  Consequently without some assistance, each new part would require yet another context parameter to be created in the list.  Eventually the list of copies of the same variables would be ridiculous.

What we did figure out is that we can link a required context parameter that is created in the part XML, to a parameter we used in the model parameters. 

The basic outline is as follows:

• Create the new part, using the proper structure type. 
• Validate the part and save it.
• Create the model to its completion, adding any model parameters as needed.
• Configure the Required Context Parameter to be a range or a list as desired.
• Save the part and exit.
• Edit the Part XML, and change the MODEL parameter’s equation to equal the Required Context Parameter.
• Save the file and perform a catalog regen, and a catalog validation.
• Check the part validation file to confirm all is well.  If it says there is a duplicate parameter, return to the Part XML, find the parameter definition that is a duplicate, and delete it so that only one parameter definition remains