Being Civil

Why can’t I remove my Profile?

Occasionally, you want to create a new Surface Profile from an Alignment that already has a Profile associated with it.  If you have multiple Profiles created, they will be listed below.  You may notice the “Remove” button down below, but why won’t this actually remove a Profile?

Well, it does remove Profiles, but only ones that are created while you are in that dialog box.  It is removing, not deleting.  So how do you actually delete a Profile, then?  Easy – find it in Prospector, right-click and then delete.

Of course, if you simply want to remove the Profile from the View, but not delete it, then you can uncheck the option to draw it, both at the time you create the View, or in Profile View Properties, afterwards.

Create Stakeout Points on the Surface

There is nothing better in support then when customer asks and answers the question in one call. This tip is coming from a joined effort from our dear customer Kenneth who asked this question and also came to resolution while we were discussing the approach. So I can only take a partial credit for it. But it’s definitely worth sharing with the rest of our global community.

This issue came when customer had a surface and would like to place a rectangular pool on the ground but wanted to get the points for each corner of the pool. The same logic can be applied for any shapes of buildings, too. If you would like to see the rest please click on continue reading.

Transfer/Backup/Restore Vault Files

In many times your vault files are good sitting on the server. But occasionally you need to move them around, move them from server to server or just transfer them to different location. First it’s important to understand the Vault Structure to ensure you are in fact moving File Store and database. FileStore is the location where your drawings with different versions, as well as other files associated with projects are stored. Vault Database is the database that stores information about these drawings, projects. In order for them to work correctly they must be synchronized.

Toolspace is Missing Palettes

I recently had a customer with the following error in the Command Line when launching Civil 3D: “There are currently no palettes to show in the Toolspace window.”  Not only are there no palettes, but the Toolspace won’t load at all.  So what is going on here?

For my customer, they had previously setup their company-specific Profile (.arg file) from a 32-bit machine.  The file was then stored on on a shared location, for new users/machines to grab.  The issue came to light on the customer’s new Windows7 64-bit machine.

We took a look at their support paths in the Profile, and found the issue.  It’s important to remember that since Civil 3D 2010 is a 32-bit application, it is installed into the \program files (x86) directory.  When brining over a Profile from a 32-bit OS, the (x86) folder will be missing.  You will need to modify these support paths to represent the change in the OS.

Specific to the Toolspace is the \autodesk shared\axui directory.  Without this pointed to the correct folder, the Toolspace won’t load, and you will receive the error message.

Hope this helps!

Control How Much Surface You See in the Corridor Section Editor

When manually editing or viewing your Corridor Sections sometimes it can be useful to see more of your existing surface. I had a customer ask this question the other day, and at first it stumped me for a bit. It turns out this is controlled by the Default View Scale in the Corridor Section Editor.

Depending on the design you are working on and the extents of your corridor, you may have portions where your daylight varies from say 50’ to 80’ and you may want to see what lies beyond your design. By default you may not see the entire extents of your design in the Corridor Section Editor. When first launching the Corridor Section Editor from the contextual corridor Ribbon tab, you will notice that the displayed elements will remain the same when zooming in or out. By default the scale for the Corridor Section Editor is set to 2.5, to get more of your surface to display you are going to want to increase the scale.

While in the Corridor Section Editor, you can control the default view scale through the Edit/View Options. This will launch a dialog that give you the control to change the options available for corridor sections.  As I said before this is set by default to 2.5, so for this example we will up it to a scale of 10. After changing the scale, click OK to dismiss the dialog. After dismissing the dialog, you will notice that nothing has changed in regards to how much of your surface is displayed. This is because the Corridor Section Editor much be closed and reopened in order for the changes to take effect. After doing so you can see the the desired amount of your surface is now displayed and you can go about viewing and editing your corridor sections.