Being Civil

AutoCAD Civil 3D New Feature: Other things about Subassemblies…

Hi everyone! Last but not least, regarding new functionality for Subassemblies on Civil 3D 2013.

Now we can:

• Insert a subassembly between two existing subassemblies.
• Replace an existing subassembly with a new one.

The CreateSubassemblyTool will display as soon as you select an assembly on your drawing and select a different one on your Tool Palettes. At that point you will tell the software if you want to (I) Insert it or (R) Replace it.

Also, how many times you needed to modify a parameter on a subassembly that is in your drawing? More than ones?! Before we needed to do it one by one, but now we have Select Similar Subassemblies

This will allow you to select and modify any parameter in all the similar subassemblies on your drawing at the same time using the Properties Palette.

Hope you will find this information helpful.

AutoCAD Civil 3D New Feature: Naming Assembly Groups and Subassemblies now easier than ever!!!

Hello everybody … As I mentioned on my last post we have lots of new functionalities regarding Assemblies and Subassemblies on Civil 3D 2013.

Renaming groups and subassemblies is really an important task, because they facilitate all our target mapping inside the Corridor Properties. It's always been a lot of work and it consumed a lot of time getting into the Assembly properties and renaming all of them one by one. Civil 3D 2013 gives us the ability to name groups and rename subassemblies and the moment that we are inserting them using Assembly Group Name Prompt and Subassembly Name Prompt.

You can access this option under CreateSubAssemblyTool command (Setting tab -> Subassembly -> Commands -> right click on CreateSubassemblyTool -> Subassembly Options).

Assembly Group Name Prompt

If this property is ON, each time a new assembly group is created, the Assembly Group Name Dialog Box is displayed giving you the option to keep the same name or rename it at this point.

 

Subassembly Name Prompt

If this property is ON, each time a new subassembly is created, the Subassembly Name Dialog Box is displayed. Now, you have the option to rename the subassembly at the same time that you are creating your assembly.

…Stay tuned for more good things to come!!!

RESULTS FROM MULTIPLE STORM ANALYSIS

I had a user questioning – “My SSA model runs fine, however it would not provide me any reports; all the reporting tools are grayed out, the time series plot does not contain any elements and the profile plot does not show HGL & EGL and no reports in the table below. The Excel Report contains only the input data.”

Figure 1. All reporting tools are grayed out after the analysis.

There are two options to obtain the results from Multiple Storm Analysis in SSA. The first option is to select the required design storm for the program to generate the reports immediately after performing the analysis (likewise performing a single storm analysis). One has to select the require design storm in the “Load output file:” at the bottom for the Storm Selection tab as shown in the image below.

Figure 2. Selecting the design storm to be loaded after the analysis.

The second option is to manually load the solution file for the required design storm you wish to analyze. Below is the pictorial instruction on loading the solution file within the Time Series Plot.

Figure 3. Manually selecting the solution file to be loaded for analysis.

I hope these little tips save your precious time wondering what is going on with the program. Keep tunning in for more.

Raster Design - Standalone/Network

The licensing options for Raster Design changed a little a few years ago.  Since it's a frequent topic in support, I'd like to direct you to this TS that spells out the details:

http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS18566069.

but the summary is:

Network Raster and Network AutoCAD: OK

Standalone Raster and Standalone AutoCAD: OK

Network Raster and Standalone AutoCAD: OK

Standalone Raster and Network AutoCAD: Not OK

Cannot Remove Selection with SHIFT+Pick

There are hundreds of small things and settings in AutoCAD that make drafting lot easier, but when some of them accidentally get turned off or on, sometimes it’s really a major effort to look for them and set the settings the way we wanted. For instance, using Shift-pick for selecting and de-selecting… When selecting multiple objects in a busy drawing often some things get selected by accident, so instead of starting over, we want to be able to just deselect the item and keep selecting more. I also have a habit of using SHIFT to select/deselect objects when I have selected too many.

That’s what Shift+Click is good for. Off course, this all work pretty nicely until there was a change in setting introduced for any reason or by conflicting settings in Raster Design that may be installed on the same machine. Our user reported that suddenly the SHIFT+Pick stopped working after a crash. If you have raster Design installed and configured on AutoCAD Civil 3D and your SHIFT key stopped working for "Shift+Pick" to remove objects from selection sets, or "Shift+Pick" to make multiple grips hot, then this might be the solution.

Without further ado, I will go ahead and provide you two usual suspects.

• MAPIOPTIONS settings
• IOPTIONS settings

Please do following:

1. In command line run the IOPTIONS
2. Go to the User Preferences tab
3. Uncheck the toggle Shift+Left Click Image Select

Also

1. Run MAPIOTIONS command
2. Go to General tab and uncheck “Shft+Left Click Image Select"

 With these two selections unchecked program should work like before. 

 

They Did It Again! Unhandled Exception in acmgd.dll ARX Command

I was struggling with an error message that kept on happening when launching AutoCAD until I came across this post written by our friends from Up and Ready blog. Again, they hit it right on the nail! I thought you would appreciate seeing it on Being Civil. It is about notorious error that's realy hard to troubleshoot. See it on the link.

“Exception in acmgd.dll ARX Command - Unhandled Exception E0434F4D (e0434f4dh) at address 7c81EB33h”

Great job guys!

 

Installing Plotter via LPR Port

There is something I learned years ago that I thought won't be needed anymore given what I am doing day-to-day for the last 5 years. But as many times before, I was proven wrong.  Recently, my co-worker got a question where customer was unable to install a plotter and was unable to see it in the wizard. That got me an idea to revise what I have done before in my CAD management days working with Windows XP. Off course, lots of things have changed, such as that most of us live in Windows 7 era, which makes some things obsolete. Some things got moved around with the introduction of Windows Vista and Windows 7 but essentially the logic still reminded the same. See it after jump.

Why Do I See Difference in Time Series Plot And Output Results / Analysis Summary?

A lot of times, SSA users find that there is a slight difference in the results seen in the Time Series Plots and the numbers seen within the Analysis Summary in the elements Property dialog as shown below:

Figure 1.0 Different results seen in the Time Series Plot and Analysis Summary

The Time Steps section within the Analysis Options is the key to resolve this difference seen in the results. It establishes the time step length to be used for the runoff computations, routing computations, and results reporting. The Reporting and Routing Time Step is the most important thing for network analysis.

SSA uses a default Reporting time step of 5 minutes and Routing time step of 30 seconds. In most cases users tend to use the default and define only the Start and End Dates to perform the analysis. A very important thing to note here is that the Output Report or Analysis Summary within the element properties windows shows the results based on every routing time step whereas the Time Series Plot is generated on the Reporting time steps defined. This is where the difference emanates.