TIP OF THE WEEK

Good evening everyone. I hope everyone is having a great xmas month so far. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I have lots going on with a second job now. Plus getting ready for the xmas and new years lol.

Anyways, the other day one of my engineers ask if the was simple way to remove Carlson points from base drawing but leave the tree description so he could send it to a client? Our Carlson point are cogo blocks displaying 3 attributes. (point number, point description, and point elevation) After a few minutes of thinking, I remembered the BURST command. For those of you that use Carlson cogo points for surveying, know that you cant just simply use the layer isolate feature to isolate the the point attributes. If you do all you will get is the point marker. You have to actually go into layer manager and turn on the description, point number, and point elevation layers. See image below.

Ok at this point, some of you might say “just simply explode the cogo points”. Well if you do that, you will lose all the attribute data. See image below.

To get around this problem, you will use the BURST command. What this does is actually separates your cogo point block attribute data into their individual layer. So it’s kind of like a explode and extract feature. After I typed my burst command and windowed all the cogo point, I was then able to use the layer isolate feature to isolate the point number and point elevation layer and delete from my drawing. My engineer was shocked after I completed this task within 1-2 minutes for home.

Anyways I just thought this was a cool command that everyone should know. I hope everyone has a great week.

Knowledge Base for November

Hi everyone. Sorry I haven’t posted lately. Here is Autodesk’s posted known issues. I will try to do part 2 of Civil 3D 2012 this week. In addition, I will also do a post on catchments and labels. Thank you all those that have emailed me about the training videos. I am currently working on the pipe network DVD first. I will have it done this week. As soon as they are ready to be shipped out, I will send emails out and post on here on how to order the training DVD’s. Because of the popular demand, I have decided to create a roundabout DVD. The DVD will basically be the city user group presentation I did few months ago. A handout will also be included with the DVD. Anyways, thank you all for emails and comments. Have a great week.

Delete Used Layers In Civil 3D

3rd party application, AutoPlant, is crashing

3rd party application, CADconform, is crashing

 

Civil 3D 2012 New Volume Dashboard Extension

Good evening everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the Halloween weekend. I know I did. I ended up dressing up as Goose from Top Gun lol. Anyways, I just wanted to share some cool information to all those Autodesk Subscription members. Autodesk just released the new Volume Dashboard extension for C3D 2012. This new C3D extension is basically a more advance version of the surface volume feature. Now you have the capabilities of analyzing surface volume for particular sections/areas of you project site. The volume dashboard extension will definitely come in handy for those that design subdivision. I already love it because it helped me balance my site. The new Volume Dashboard is compatible for 32 bit or 64 bit versions of C3D 2012. As of right now, the extension is only in English.  Anyways I have provided a short video presentation for yall. Let me know what you think. Enjoy

Civil 3D 2012 Part 1

Hi everyone. I decided to create a short video presentation over a few feature that have been incorporated into civil 3D 2012. I’m sure most of half if you have already installed C3D 2012 and designing away like crazy lol. This short video can be a refresher for some of you or a training video for some of you. This video will be part 1 of 4 videos that I will create. On top of that, I have decided to create my very own person training DVD’s for civil 3D beginners. Each DVD with have 25 videos. I will create 4 training DVD’s over pipe networks and labels, alignments and profiles, grading, customization and settings. Feel free to email me if you are interested in one of my DVDs. Enjoy the video

Tip of the Week: Fun with Character Map

Good morning everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend? I know I did watching the Texas Rangers win again. GO RANGERS!!! Anyways, the other day I was playing around with mtext and I was wanting to add some subscripts and basic math operations to my text info. Well after about an hour of messing around I found something very interesting and cool in the Character Map dialog box. Have you ever found yourself scrolling thru all the endless amounts of characters? Well I found an easier way to display characters by groups. What if you only want to display the math operation characters? Here are my steps on how to do this.

• Open the text editor and select the Symbol pull down and pick other.The character map dialog box will appear.

• Next on the Character set select Windows:Western.
• Then select the down arrow for the Group by and select Unicode Subrange.
• The Group By dialog box will appear. Here you will be able to choose from characters pertaining to that particular group. For example if you only want to see the math operation character you would select the Mathematical Operations group. Anyways I hope this information was helpful to you. See the short video for an example. Have a great week and GO RANGERS!!!

 

Tip of the Week

How’s everyone doing so far this week? I hope everyone is enjoying the week. Last week one of my engineers was working onquantity takeoffs and he notices that my profile pipe label length did not reflect the alignment stationing.  So I took a look at the label style that was create (before I became the CAD Manager) and noticed that the 2D pipe length Center to Center was 122.2. So why was the label rounding up? We typically use the normal rounding standards. So I went into the pipe label style and into the Text Component Editor. Here I found out why my pipe label was rounding up. The pipe length precision was set to Round UP and not and not Round Normal. Some of you may be thinking what’s one foot right? Well if you are designing large subdivisions with a large storm, sewer and water pipe networks, that 1 foot segment can turn into 10-20 feet. That in turn can cost the client an extra $500-$2,000 depending on the type of pipe and size.  Anyways, I hope this information becomes helpful to a few of you. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great weekend.

 

What Process Is That?

Good afternoon everyone. Wow how about those Texas Rangers!! Anyways, I would like to go over a few processes that Autodesk uses that you might see in the Windows Task Manager. I’m sure some of you are saying” what is this?. Well after doing some research here is what I have found. Feel free to add more information if you like.

Connect.Service.ContentService.exe.*32 = used by Content Explorer Service to allow advance searching, watching & sharing functionality for AutoCAD 2012 & Civil 3D 2012. It can also be used to sharing objects such as blocks, layers, styles …etc. across the network. I typically just terminate the process since I don’t use this feature or share my stuff through the network.

WSCommCntr2.exe = Autodesk InfoCenter which provides balloon notifications for live updates, RSS Feeds, Subscription announcements..etc. Sometimes if this process does not close after closing C3D it will not allow you to open a new session of C3D. You will have to close the process thru task manager.

raysta_3dmax2012_63server.exe*32 = rendering application used by Autodesk 3ds Max Design. If you are not currently using Autodesk 3ds Max Design you can terminate the process.

Aec32BitAppServer57.exe*32 = application that runs when using Storm and Sanitary Sewer Analysis software.If you are not using SSA you can terminate the process.

AcHelp2.exe*32 = Autodesk Help application. This process runs every time you hit F1 for the help menu.