Being Civil

Drawing Cannot Locate the Project

One of the most entertaining features for me in Civil 3D are certainly Data Shortcuts. I like the fact that they are very useful but because they can be easily broken if not played with properly, they are fun to troubleshoot. This may sound strange, but I find it cool and challenging to look for what may be broken. Data shortcuts are, as the name suggests just shortcuts to the object residing inside of other drawings. This is where similarity with XREFs stops, so don’t expect them to behave like XREFs. They may be other similar things but I would stop here.

Data shortcuts, unlike full blown XREF, which links the drawing with another drawing, could pick one or more objects from other drawings and allow you to insert them into your main drawing utilizing different styles. One thing that’s often a misconception is (and believe me I have seen my share of questions about it) that once they are in the main drawing they can be manipulated as they were part of the drawing. NO - These are references from other objects residing inside of other drawings. If you were to open a data shortcut XML file, you would see that there are only a few lines in it basically stating little more about object and the drawings from which they are created from.

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!

 

This drawing was created with a newer version of Civil 3D...What?!

I have seen this more than handful of times but I have to admit it, long time ago. This morning I got a phone call asking what the reason for this message is. Customer was running the latest release of Civil 3D (2012) and when tried to open one drawing got a message saying:

 "This drawing was created with a newer version of Civil 3D. All entities created by Civil 3D within the drawing are in proxy state. Additionally, all commands, settings, and displays of Civil 3D are disabled for this drawing." It does look prettier in the form of image, doesn't it?

 

Now, what could be newer than Civil 3D 2012 in August of 2011. Nothing really...but see if after the jump.

Assembly Types and Superelevation

While working on a complex corridor design for testing in Civil 3D 2012, I noticed something a bit new upon creating my assembly – what is the assembly type? What does this do, and why do I need it? Since the online help file wasn’t public at the time, I couldn’t simply go look at it – so I sent out an email to our worldwide development team, and finally figured out what this does – and why it’s important. Follow the jump to find out just what the assembly type does for you when designing your corridor.

 

Problem Importing Points? Are Your Point Numbers LARGE?

Sorry for the all caps up above, I was trying to prove a point. This one is short and sweet – have you ever had a problem importing points from an external file? Did your point numbers happen to be pretty high? I mean high as in the 4 billion range – that’s a 4 with nine zeroes after it. I haven’t – until a few days ago. A user sent in a point file with really high numbers, and they wouldn’t import. I had a hunch that the high numbers had something to do with it, so I spoke with some members of our development team about it. I’m about to get into a detailed math discussion, so you might want to learn more after the jump.

Cannot Save Part in Partbuilder–File is Read Only

Have you ever been working in Partbuilder and tried to save a part that you had been working on only to get a message telling you that the file was read only? I’ve seen this case twice – the second time was with one of our partners – Robert Rien of Kelar Pacific.

This issue seems to happen only with Windows 7 x64 – during the first case I had regarding this issue I went in and compared almost every operating system setting that we could think of, and everything (including permissions) were set exactly the same – or so I thought. There was something that was different, and Robert pointed it out to me. To see how easy this one is to fix, follow the jump.

Mirrored Images When Draped Over a Surface

I had a customer log a case recently with quite an odd problem – and an even more odd fix. When you import an image and surface from Google Earth, the image is draped over the surface as a render style when you view the surface in 3D. However, a particularly annoying thing can happen – the image becomes flipped for some odd reason. Follow the jump to see what I’m talking about and how to fix it!

The objects in this drawing are approaching the size limits…

Recently we had a case escalated to us from our customer from Brazil. Beside few things that went wrong with his drawing he was also getting  “The objects in this drawing are approaching the size limit…” message.  What they tried to do is very common scenario. In their office they use multiple versions of Civil 3D and wanted to save the drawing created by Civil 3D 2011 to an older file format to be used with Civil 3D 2009. As I said, pretty common request from Civil 3D. But there are few things you should be aware of. See them after the jump.