Being Civil

You can get by with some web Help from your friends...

Gotta try with some web Help from your friends.  Anybody hear Ringo Starr's voice yet? 

So our great Tech Pubs team, who brings you the Civil 3D Help documentation, has now made it available on the web!  Should help when doing web searches, and of course you know it includes tutorials and workflows, etc.  Want to review some things but you aren't on your computer with Civil 3D installed?  No problem, now you've got Help, if you need somebody, Help, not just anybody, Help, you know you need someone...Help!  Okay, Beatles on the brain, but they are a classic  Check it out..

www.autodesk.com/civil-help

Odd Corridor Behavior with TrenchPipe3 Subassembly

The TrenchPipe3 Subassembly can be used for building a trench for your Pipe Network, giving the option to target both a Rock Surface, as well as an Existing Surface.  This is great for allowing steeper side slopes when blasting your trench into bedrock, but then keeping milder slopes above that, in natural ground. This is a new Subassembly, and I don’t think it is being used all that much.  But I noticed some odd results from a user recently.  It is an easy fix, but one that can easily be overlooked.  Here is what the Corridor looked like, in it’s incorrect form.

Notice how the Corridor is split up into many sections and not daylighting correctly.

The Art of Troubleshooting

This weekend while I visiting my parents, my Mom asked me to give her bicycle a quick tune up.  While taking it for a spin, I kept hearing this noise on each rotation.  I like my bikes to be super quiet, so this immediately got my full attention.  And after all, it was Mother’s Day.  I started testing.  Big ring?  Small ring?  Was it the front wheel or the back?  Loose spoke?  A creaking bottom bracket?  It took me a few minutes but I finally found the cause. 

This got me thinking about what it is exactly that we do here at Product Support, how we resolve cases, and the process of troubleshooting issues.  Regardless of the issue, there is a often a common theme of troubleshooting that can be used. 

Undocumented Commands Can Make Your Drawing More Stable

Before the phones started ringing this morning, I was catching up on some early reading.and ran across this article by Donnie Gladfelter. Donnie is a great friend of mine, and I am one of the people that he worked with a few weeks ago on his perfect storm issue. I had to call him this morning to talk about this article, as one of his links was a tiny bit outdated and not very easily found during a normal search of our knowledgebase. We discussed it, and I told him that I would write this as a supplement to his already excellent article to explain a bit more in-depth what was happening.

Civil 3D User Interface, Part IV - Searching

On this last post in the series, let's have a look at some of the tools related to searching - for potential commands and Help information.

The Menu Browser - this tool (pick the drop-down arrow under the red "C") will help new users and users transitioning from Land Desktop.  You can search to find command possibilities, for example, a search on "elevation" returns with:

In the Communication Center post, I showed this image, but didn't mention the Info Center searching capability:

As stated, type in a word or phrase.  What are you searching in?  Select the drop-down arrow to set your search criteria.  You can simultaneously search a range of documents (even add your company standards doc for indexing) and search the online knowledgebase too!

Civil 3D User Interface, Part II - Communication Center

OK, so last post we reviewed the useful links built into the Help menu.  Now let's have a look at the Communication Center.  This is another area which I find many users don't explore (especially the long time veterans!)

While seeming quite unobtrusive when you have Civil 3D open, click on the icon in the upper right:

 

What a wealth of possibilities!

You can select the area in red to customize what you wish to see in the Comm Center.

You can subscribe to several pre-set RSS feeds AND you can add your own.

For those of you on Subscription, you have direct links to log Support Requests with us; no need to hunt around, we are just a few clicks away.

Enabling notifications is very useful - this way you will be alerted when new Updates or Hotfixes are available.

In a networked environment, it is possible for a CAD Manager to control some of this functionality, and even to enhance it with unique, company-specific material.

Civil 3D User Interface, Part I - Help menu

Hi all, I am in Las Vegas attending Autodesk University this week.  I assisted in a pre-AU session yesterday for those new to Civil 3D, presented by the very talented trio of Jerry Bartels, Angel Espinoza and Dana Probert.  It is always great to see peoples' eyes light up when they realize how much they can automate out the tedious drafting part of projects with Civil 3D and focus on design - the fun part! 

Jerry reviewed some basics of the user interface which bear repeating, as I'm sure even some veterans out there haven't taken the time to leverage things like... the Help menu.

 

This is great stuff!  No hunting down the appropriate sites on the web, it's all there for you.