Being Civil

My viewport always zoom extent when it's activated…

Hello everyone…. I was working with some cases regarding this and I thought that it will be good to share in case that you come across with this situation in some point.

You are creating viewports or copying layout tabs and when you double click the viewport to activate it. Because you need to change the scale, regen or zoom to a different location your viewport does an automatic zoom extend. If you have a lot of information on your drawing this could become a really anoying problem.

Change the UCSFOLLOW system variable to 0 inside the viewport.

The UCSFOLLOW setting is saved separately for each viewport, paper space and model space, when you create a new viewport it always maintains the setting use on model space.

Hope you will find this helpful.

Slow Joins

Join taking too long? Here are a couple of tips to increase performance:

1. Uncheck the Layer(s) you are trying to Join in Display Manager before Creating the Join. This will prevent AutoCAD from REGENing your geometry while the Join is running.

2. If one of your data sources is an Access DB (as is often the case), be sure to Join to an indexed field. Simply open the table in Design View in Access, and change the Indexed value for the column you wish to Join to Yes, as shown in the screenshot.

[Thanks to Warren at CAD-1 for the inspiration, and to Orest at Autodesk for the Access tip.]

Happy Joining!

How much of my MEMORY RAM is my drawing really using?

Hi all.

Have you ever wandered about the amount of RAM memory that your drawing is really using?

Maybe you are one of those that don’t like to relay on your Windows Task Manager.

Here is a quick tip, open the biggest, baddest dwg that you have and type STATUS on the command line.  It will show you the amount of RAM that your drawing is using alone with the complete statistics of the drawing.

"SSA Error message - ‘INF’ is not a valid floating point value"

The model has been setup completely, or so I thought. However, when I perform the analysis it generates the following error message - ‘INF’ is not a valid floating point value:

This error message caught me off guard and took a while to figure out the reason. If you have a Curb Opening Inlet located ON SAG with a Zero curb opening height, the program will generate the above error message.

SSA is expecting a height to compute so it will fail and the Output writes INF (Infinity – more or less a divide by zero error).

I hope this information saves your time. 

Workaround to clean and recreate corrupted drawing…

Hi everybody… Corrupted drawings…. This is an unfortunate situation that all of us have to deal with at some point.

Sometimes, we have a drawing that can give us a little headache, so here is a workaround that I use to recreate a drawing and keep all the information on it including your layout tabs. We are all familiar with the usual procedures when a drawing get corrupted - the RECOVER command, WBLOCK, INSERT to name some of them.  But what about all my layout tabs and regular ACAD stuffs (dimension styles, text styles, linetypes and others)?

Here is what you can do:

1. You will need to create a clean drawing (do not use your template if you have one) using the acad.dwt template for Imperial units or the acaiso.dwt for Metric.
2. Reset the Drawing Scales (SCALELISTEDIT) for Metric and Imperial.
3. Please make sure that if your original drawing has coordinate system assigned, you will assign the same coordinates to the new drawing as well.
4. Use the INSERT command and browse for the drawing with the problem.
If your drawing has CS assigned use the option “Locate Using Geographic Data”, if not use “0, 0, 0” and check Explode.
5. Now use AUDIT command, -PURGE (R) for Regapps and SAVE the new drawing to overwrite the old one, of course at this point this is entirely up to you.

At this point, we can do two different things:

5.1. You could use DesignCenter (ADCENTER), browse to your drawing location and drag and drop all your ACAD content... Or

5.2. Right-click on top of one of the Layout tabs and select the option From Template…; change the Files of Type to *.dwg and browse to the location of your original drawing.

5.3 Choose which tabs you would liek to insert and click OK

6. Do another AUDIT, -PURGE R and SAVE the drawing.

This seems like a long procedure, but it is really efficient and it will help you to recreate a drawing without losing all your data.

Map 3D migration hotfix

There's a new hotfix available for those looking to migrate settings to Map 3D 2013.  Take a look at the download page and grab it if you are going to migrate from a previous version or if you have experienced some unexpected exits after migrating.

Not sure if you need it? Here's more detail from the readme about what is addressed:

Map 3D might exit unexpectedly after doing the following steps:

1. Launch AdMigrator.exe (for example from C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCADMap 3D 2013)
2. Select Map 3D 2010 or Map 3D 2011 and click OK
3. Double click to launch Map 3D 2013

Line and Curve… Curve Delta (∆) symbol Label issue…

Hi everybody… This one has been around for a little while. When you use a Line and Curve Label over a curve the delta symbol will not display. It will show as "D" but when you drag the label it will show the delta symbol. You can get in the label style composer and no matter what you do the delta symbol will not show. So now, how do I make this work?

Here is a little trick to make the impossible possible...

First you need to:

1. Go to the Setting tab -> Parcel -> Label Styles -> Curve, select the Delta over Length and Radios labels.

2. Right-click on it and choose Edit to get into Label Style Composer

3. In the Label Style Composer's Layout tab, select the Delta component. and click on Contents

4. Go to the Text Component Editor - Contents, highlight the component of the label and Copy it (CTRL + C)

5. Then cancel all out.

6. Now edit the Distance - Radius and Delta label for Line and Curve:

7. On the Layout tab, select the Delta component.

8. Go to the Text Component Editor again.

9. Paste the content that you just copied from the Parcel label; this will add an extra component on the properties of the label that wasn't available before.

10. Make your changes and adjustment for Precision and Format.

11. Save the label.

This will fix the delta issue. In case that you get lost trying to follow the steps, here is a video so you can see how to make it work.

Coordinate System Resources

Coordinate systems can be pretty confusing, and there are a lot of options.  Luckily, when everything is configured right, your transforms just happen in the background like magic.  For those occasions when things aren't showing up where you expect them, here are a few good resources to look to:

• The help on Autodesk.com
• The Map 3D and Civil 3D forums (search before you post!)
• Spatial Reference (external site)
• This excellent explanatory article (external site)
• Wikipedia for a basic overview and good links (external site)
• A site with a fairly easy to read transform listing (external site)
• The EPSG guides have much of the source material.  Number 7 part 2 may be the most useful.(external site)

Have fun!