Being Civil

Civil 3D 2010 System Requirements

Today was/is supposed to be a house-work day.  As much fun as scraping and painting the living room windows sounds, I just can’t seem to break free from the computer and get started.  All the more reason to use this time to put up some more 2010 content here.

With all the buzz of the upcoming released, I have been getting this question for the last couple months: “What are the system requirements for 2010?”  While it’s now final and can be viewed on the Autodesk site, here.

Create an RSS feed for Support and Updates!

My manager, Chris, reminded me of this great tool and I wanted to pass this along.  With Civil blogs, friend blogs, music blogs, geek blogs, and cycling blogs, it would be impossible to keep up on this huge amount of information without an RSS Reader.  I rely on it so heavily I can’t image trying to keep up without it!  Brian talked about RSS feeds last week, and here is one more that you can add.

This tool will let you pick your application(s) and it will automatically update you on new Knowledge Base content, Hotfixes and product Updates.  Staying up to date has never been easier!

http://tinyurl.com/adskrss

Have a great weekend!

Vault’s got a point!

Beside many other things Vault is good for, it can also store your points. The workflow is very similar with the workflow used when working with vault projects and drawings. There are two components worth mentioning in here. One is vault FileStore and other is local copy, which is equivalent to checked out drawing being worked on from Working Folder. So checking out drawing or point means that copy from vault is created to Working folder. If you open Working Folder and browse to the project you will notice that project directory has two .mdb files (PointsGeometry.mdb and PointsStatus.mdb). These are the two files that store the information about the points and their status in vault and all work is being performed in Working Folder. When edits are done and drawing/points checked in, program creates another copy which it saves in the Vault.

Assuming that your drawing contains points and is added to the vault project we can begin doing different things with points and vault. Adding a drawing with points to the vault does not automatically create points in vault. Points from the drawing must be added to the vault manually.

2010 Survey Preview

Maybe it was Jason’s last post on creating a traverse, or maybe it was the meeting with Rob Todd on the upcoming release, but Survey functionality has been on my mind as of late.

If you have heard any of the rumors, then you know that there are some big changes in the Survey functionality of Civil 3D 2010.  We will go into much more detail as time progresses, but I do want to give a quick peak at the changes to Linework coding.  If you go to the Survey Tab of the Toolspace, you will now see something called "Linework Code Set."

A Little Goofy, But…

It’s been a long day. So when I finally got everything installed, I looked in my program folder and saw this. I know it’s geek goofy, but eerie if you think about it...

Yes, when the calls aren’t coming in, I play geek scrabble…I can hear the groans from across the world :)

Creating a Traverse for Adjustment

So your survey crew went out and located data and you want to adjust their traverse. The problem is, they didn’t define a traverse in the data collector, so the traverse does not show up in the survey database. In this post, I am going to show you how to manually enter this information so that you can adjust your traverse.

What is an RSS Feed, how do I subscribe to Being Civil?

So you have probably noticed on the right side of our blog you have a button () for RSS feeds.

I realize some of you may not know what this means or how to use it. The value is that you can set up a subscription so you don't have to remember to come directly to our blog to see what's new.  I have created a permanent link on the blog (look to your right) to a page which will tell you what RSS is and how to subscribe.

 

I use a great site called CommonCraft, which has videos giving very simple explanations on all kinds of useful stuff, here is their YouTube site.  There is even an explanatory video on zombies, one of my favorites!

Another visual aide - viewing your Profile in 3D

Justin's post last week on Visual Tracking got me to thinking about another visual aide you may or may not have noticed, the 3D Chain item in a Profile Style.  When you create alignments, they are 2D objects, so in a 3D view with a surface, you see the alignment down below at zero elevation.

If you create a profile for the alignment, either from a surface or a design profile, you are adding that Z value, the elevation data.  You can create a profile view but what about visualizing the alignment in 3D with the additional profile information?