Being Civil

Setting Up License Manager in 7 Easy Steps

I still remember the first time I was faced with a task of setting up License Manager. At first, I was little…worried, then I read some documentation and then I became little confused…finally I was little disappointed that it only took few minutes to do it and in my surprise it worked well from the first try. It was that easy!

Setting up a License Manager is fairly easy task and in many cases it’s one time deal. I trust that most of you CAD managers have done this many times and probably in slightly different way. For all of you that forgot how to do it and/or never were sure how to do it…this could be a quick refresher. Assuming that you have the License manager installed you can start with step 1. If not you may install Autodesk License Manager (ADLM) from your DVD (LMTOOLS).

Civil 3D & Civil 2010 Update 2 released!

Hi all, the Update 2's are officially released.  Remember, we have two products, named "Civil 3D" and "Civil" - make sure you pick the correct one!

• You can find Civil 3D Update 2 here.
• You can find Civil Update 2 here.

An easier way to make sure you get the right one is to use Communication Center (upper right corner in your product), just click on the "radar" icon and look at the bottom for Updates.  (You might have to wait say 5-10 minutes after startup to check)  I just installed mine so it says it's up to date!

A few further items:

1. Don't forget to read that thing called "README" - it really does help ;-)
2. To clear up any confusion - this time around our Update 1 did NOT include AutoCAD Update 1, but with this Update 2 you will get AutoCAD Update 1 included.
3. As Jason mentioned on an earlier post, verifying installation of the Update is a bit goofy - for Update 2, type "AECCVERSION" on the command line and you will see a list of DBX files, the latest version number should be "FileVersion: 7,0,1387,0" if Update 2 is installed.

Addendum:  After installing Update 2, Help > About will show this:

What are these…. phantom points called “Split Points”?

One thing that I like the most on my job (beside helping customers) is that there is almost no day that I come home without feeling energized with something new I learned that day. That also serves as a reminder how much more there is to be learned! In any case, while trying to figure out the best way to help one of our frequent and savvy Civil 3D customer, I came across a workaround that may be helpful for all of us. The issue described to me is that customer created some Feature Lines that crossed other Feature Lines which at the crossing points program created Split (Elevation) Points. At one point those points were very useful in designing process (User trimmed feature lines up to that point so that he can use these split points as starting points when creating new feature lines) but they became a problem when user needed to remove them.

Surface from Ellipses and Splines?

Today I got a customer’s question asking if it is possible to add contours to the surface. In fact, he received whole bunch of polylines, ellipses and splines to represent contours. When he started adding them (not surprisingly) all ellipses and splines were ignored. So is it even possible to add them to the surface definition?The answer is, off course, yes and no. No because Civil 3D will not be able to add them by default, yes because if we manage to make them behave as polylines that would be possible.

So in order to do that, we need to do some manual work and to adjust some system variable settings. Another thing is that if spline is created from polyline that will be easy to add to the surface definition just like any other polyline (In Prospector tab, expand Surface and definition and right click on Contours to add them). I would recommend doing following workaround before you attempt to add contours to the surface definitions and add these objects at once.

Deployment Basics, Part 3 (Updating an Image)

Continuing on with the Deployment / Installation posts, the new few are going to be a little short, but may save you some headaches if you aren’t aware of them.

Today is something you should already know if you read the Update readme (hint, hint).  So what is the process of updating your existing install, as well as the Deployment Image?  It is really important to remember that your installation on your workstation will always be looking back to the original Deployment when you try to install an Update.  If the Image is no longer there, or it has been modified, you will run into problems.

This means you must update your individual installations before modifying the Deployment Image.  Simply modifying your Deployment Image with the latest Update will not update the existing installations.  If, by chance, you didn’t do it in this order, you will receive a Windows error message (most likely a 1612).  At that point, the only way to resolve it is a complete reinstall of the application on that workstation.

I typically would suggest that you create a copy of the Deployment Image and update this one.  This will be used for any new  installations, while keeping the original untouched.  Of course, make sure you name them something that makes sense a few months from now, such as C3D2010, C3D2010_SP1, etc.

Open the Deployment folder and go into the /Tool folder.  Here you will see an icon for “Create and Modify a Deployment”  Click on this.  Here you want to select on the option to “Create a new Deployment using an existing as a template.”  See image below:

This is going to keep all of your settings from your original Deployment, making things a bit easier for you.  Next, click on the Image to use as a template, and then follow through the Wizard, adding the Update to this new one.  When all is said and done, you are going to have multiple Images.  The new one will be for new installs, and the original will stay there for all existing installations.

Enjoy!

Print Surface Properties

I’m back from my vacation and wanted to show my presence by sharing a tip with you. If you ever wanted to export Surface information and surface statistics you quickly realized that there is no export option. Fortunately, if you expand one of the nodes such as General, Extended or TIN you will get “Copy to Clipboard” option.

 

Then…all you need to do is to chose media where to paste it. That can be in the drawing, in Notepad, MS Word, …even MS Excel

     

  

Enjoy!

Map Export and Shape file

All right!…Before my daily craziness starts I’d like to share another tip with you. If you remember MapExport solution referred in TS1108047 supposed to address the issue with ability to select the objects type and produce ESRI Shape file. If this does not work for you, and you happen to be running Windows Vista you will still see the same dialog. In Windows XP replacing the file referred in the is enough to make it work.

 

1. (In Vista) go to C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010\AllUsersRoot

2. copy the MapExport.ini from and paste it in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2010.

3. Then restart MAPEXPORT command

4.your dialog should look like referred in the TS1108047.

Edit Default Surface Commands

It’s one of those days when you feel that you are working hard but not feeling very productive....Almost feel like running on a treadmill... So in order to put little balance and boost my moral I'm taking a break to share something most of you already know, but I noticed only when customer asked if it’s possible to do in 2009 version (Thanks, Pius, for forcing me to look).

Back in the old Civil 3D days and especially when moving those old Land Desktop surfaces to Civil 3D (I know… we should use LandXML when importing LDT objects) or polylines that once represented contours we were able to add those polylines to the surface definitions in quick and easy way.  If you remember it was also possible (just like it’s possible now) to set Weeding and Supplementing factors right before contours are added to the surface definitions. Unfortunately, back in the days it was not possible to control these values unless you wanted to set it manually for each selection.