Being Civil

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.

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. 

 

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.

Raster images and surfaces

I'm sure you are all familiar with the seminal post by Justin regarding Raster Troubleshooting.  I thought I might add in a few more thoughts on factors that can impact raster usability, especially now that 64-bit operating systems are becoming prevalent. 

• FDO vs. Insertion: An inserted image (via ImageAttach, MAPIINSERT, or IINSERT) is similar to an XREF in the way it behaves – on opening a drawing that contains an inserted image, the entire thing will be scanned in, which can really slow opening time.  An FDO connected image (DATACONNECT or MAPCONNECT, then the FDO Raster Provider) is just linked by a pointer to the file, and only the necessary area for display will be polled/queried and displayed.
• Number of pixels: there’s no hard and fast limit, but any time that you can keep your image below a billion (1,000,000,000) pixels you’ll have better luck, especially for inserted images. FDO can handle large images more efficiently.  You’ll hit a billion pixels faster than you expect – one square mile at 6 inch resolution (6 inches per pixel) is about 111 million pixels.  Bump that resolution up to 3 inch, and you are at 446 million pixels.  That might sound like really high resolution, but remember that LiDAR posting can be about that resolution, so creating a surface at that scale could easily be attempted.
• Pyramid layers: these are images that are multiresolution, such as MrSID.  That means that if you imagine the different resolution layers as forming a pyramid, the original, full scale imagery is the bottom layer.  As you move up, each layer contains fewer and fewer pixels, but still gives enough information at the right scale to determine what you are looking at, until you get to the top layer, which is basically a thumbnail of the base layer.  It would look terribly pixelated zoomed in close by itself, but for the view from space, it’s just fine.  Another fairly common multiresolution format is JPEG2000, and some software packages support external pyramid layers, which are generally saved as .aux files with the same file name.  Generally, when printing there’s no benefit to pyramid layers, as the bottom layer will be referenced, regardless of the layer displayed on screen.
• Compression: this can be a double edged sword, as good compression can drastically decrease the size of the image while maintaining visual fidelity, but in some instances, like printing, the computational overhead of decompressing can be significant. If you are having trouble, it’s always worth saving an image out as an uncompressed tif to see if the behavior changes.
  • As for the type of compression, you have lots of options: both the MrSID and JPEG2000 options above offer compression in addition to pyramid layers. 
  • ECW has a great reputation for their compression algorithm and its performance.
  • JPEG compresses very nicely, and even TIF images can be created with compression.
  • Important note: even with Raster Design, you can’t save to MrSID or ECW formats due to their proprietary nature (you can insert or connect to all of them).  Most free image software, such as Irfanview or XNView will allow you create uncompressed tifs, JPGs, and many other file formats.  If you look, there are even free tools that will do size limited exports of the proprietary formats and open source projects for other formats.  Those, and the free tools referenced above, are, of course, use at your own risk.
  • FDO imagery has an option to refresh that is independent of REGEN – right click the layer in the Display Manager to get the most appropriate display for your view scale.

Have fun!

 

(thanks to MassGIS for the image above)

 

 

Image Insertion With Civil 3D 2012 and Map 3D 2012

This is another short post, but full of good information for people installing the new 2012 products. Have you been looking for the AutoCAD Raster Design Object Enabler to install for your users but can’t find it? Do you desperately need access to Mr.SID imagery? Well, fear not! Whereas in the past you had to have the ARD OE installed to get access to certain filetypes (DOQ, ECW, JPEG2000, and MrSid, specifically,) this is no longer necessary. Access to these filetypes is built in to the 2012 products! So go on and insert your SID imagery and don’t worry about installing anything extra!

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!

Raster Design 2010 Hotfix for Licensing and Civil 3D Feature Update Released

The Raster Design 2010 Hotfix for Licensing and Civil 3D Feature Update has been released. It addresses the license issue and allows AutoCAD Raster Design 2010 network licenses to be installed with supported standalone AutoCAD 2010 applications. The hotfix will not allow a standalone AutoCAD Raster Design 2010 installation to install with network deployments of host applications.

Download the the readme and read before installing, please. You can find the download for both 32 and 64 bit operating systems here.

Draping images 101

I am currently working with a customer on a problem he is having with draping images.  However, despite his specific issue, the process is really quite simple, but I don’t hear that people are using it very much.  I wanted to give you a quick overview of the process, as you might find this useful on your projects.