Being Civil

Implications of Rotating a Surface

There may be times where you need to rotate some Points you got form your survey crew.  However, these Points have already been used to create a Surface.  What is the best way to go about this?

Well, first thing to know is that you only want to rotate the Points, not the Surface.  If you grab both, it will end up doubling up the rotation of the Surface.  So make sure you are only rotating the definition of the Surface and then simply rebuild your Surface to see the corrected location.  But wait…there’s more!

Description Key Wildcards

I have worked with many Land Surveyors over the years.  Each had their own method of doing things.  Methods that may seem odd to some, work completely for them and their field crews.  So when we got a request regarding Description Keys, using a method that I had never seen, I had alternatives to offer – but alternatives weren’t going to cut it. 

Vault: Upgrading COGO Points

Weekend is coming up, Support is climbing up corporate ladder (moving from second to third floor), it's raining in Manchester (again), everybody is packing stuff (and I should be too), Justin is fighting with phone connection, Jason is on the road.. pretty idyllic. I thought now is just perfect time to throw another tip before saying good bye to my cubicle.

Have you ever encountered a problem when adding drawing to a project in Vault just hangs (and never crashes) while “Upgrading COGO points”? During add-in program copied all files correctly to Working Folder but file was still missing from File Store and not visible in Prospector or Vault Explorer. So there is something clearly that prevented copying of this file to the Vault. Hanging in “Update COGO points” indicated that it has something to do with surface and/or points.

Now, investigating surface (3D ORBIT or Object Viewer are great tool for troubleshooting, by the way) I have discovered that surface had some points with zero elevation and program triangulated it so it became visible in 3D orbit. It looked something like this image shows.

As you can guess, after this point, all I had to do was to remove this offending point, remove triangle lines (In Prospector tab>Surface>’Surfacename’>Definition> right-click on Edits and choose delete line) and rebuild the surface. After this point we were able to add drawing, check it out and do other things with it.

Have a nice weekend, all!

Point Elevations wrong when exported into point file

What I like about this job is that almost every day I get challenges to resolve issues and also learn a great deal from our customers so I can pass it back to others. Then on blogs like Being Civil I get a chance to share it with the rest of you. This cycle is both satisfying and helps us enhance our skills. Anyways, few days ago I received a phone call by one customer asking a question why points are shown with one elevation range in a drawing but when exported to a point file elevations are quite different. First thought is, off course, that units settings may be not synchronized. Confirmation came when we both confirmed that all these elevations differ by the value of +/- 3.28. So we immediately knew what to troubleshoot. To share it with you, I am showing three settings that are best describing this issue:

Getting 3D elevation when snapping points to 3D objects

I was chatting with our Specialist in Munich, Christian Bauer the other day and he mentioned an issue that pops up now and then.  When you want to create Civil points on 3D objects, we have a number of ways to do so, as highlighted below in the red box.  However, only the last option "Polyline Vertices - Automatic" will create points that take their elevations from the polyline selected; all the other options create points at zero or your pre-defined desired elevation.  What if I want to place spot elevations on some 3D objects and have it automatically assume the 3D elevation of the object?

Using 3D Blocks for Point Marker Styles

This one has popped up twice on my radar this week, so I figure maybe someone else may be wondering how to do it. What happens when you want to use a multi-view block for a point marker style for visualization purposes? Chances are, you tried this and it didn’t work, so you abandoned those plans. When this popped up a little voice in my head spoke up and reminded me that I’ve seen this one before (that little voice says that a lot…) So I browsed through my IM list and found that Dana Probert was online, and that little voice reminded me that she and I have talked about this before. So I bugged her (we do that often throughout the day) and she refreshed my memory.

Reapplying Description Keys to Points

As I have been digging deeper and deeper into Civil 3D 2010, I have found a few hidden gems, and have been slacking just a tiny bit about sharing that information. Today’s post is a preview of something a small feature that will make a world of difference to some people. It’s not a very long and in-depth demo, just one screen shot, but I think you’ll like it anyway.

Have you spent a lot of time setting up description keys in your template only to find that your survey crew fat-fingers a point on the data collector and it doesn’t come in correctly? Have you repaired that point description only to find that it didn’t automatically pick up on the correct description key? This worked fine in Land Desktop, but description keys in Civil 3D have always only been applied at the initial import process. That is, until now. No further explanation needed, because a picture speaks a thousand words:

Point Blocks Independent of your Point Marker

One wish that I’ve heard quite frequently with surveyors who are using Civil 3D is that they miss the functionality in Land Desktop that allowed them to have a separate point block and point marker. I’m not going to jump into the argument about legalities of moving field-located symbology just to make the annotation look better, that’s for a different website entirely. However, after brainstorming some ideas, I think I have found what could be an acceptable workaround. I do need to point out something, though – I discovered this (remembered this is more like it) as I was writing this and had to come back up to edit. This will work for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2006-2009, but requires you to touch each and every point that you want to do this for, so how is it different from just dropping in a block…anyway, I digress – this is automagic in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010! I’m so excited I could…well, let’s just see how this works, shall we?