Being Civil

Converting Land Desktop Points and Preserving their Layers

With the release of the 2013 products we see Land Desktop finally becoming an upsupported product. I know many of you have already made the jump to Civil 3D in years past, but if you are still moving your older data forward you may come across this issue again.

When using the command CONVERTLDTPOINTS you may notice the option to "preserve the original point layers". What you may not see is the fact that you need to set the "Disable Description Keys" setting in the command settings to TRUE. By default this is set to FALSE. You can find this command setting in SETTINGS tab>POINT>COMMANDS>CreatePoints, right click on CreatePoints and select EDIT COMMAND SETTINGS:

How to Import Description Key Sets?...

I have been asked this question before and I thought that it will make a good post…

How can I use Description Keys from other drawings???... Can I import Description Keys on my drawing???... When I try to drag and drop them, it doesn’t work…

Sure it is way, just open one of your drawings that has your DescKey Set on it in Civil 3D 2010 or any older version, make sure that you delete all the information on it (for this call the ERASE (E) command from the command line and type ALL, please check that all your layers are ON, THAWED and UNLOCKED before doing this) and PURGE the drawing, do a save as just in case, so you don’t damage or overwrite something…

Now open your Civil 3D 2012 and insert the drawing that you just created and clean in 2010 or any oldest version using the INSERT (I) command.

This will bring any styles and also the Description Key set to your drawing in 2012 that you can save as a template or work on it.

Here is a short video that illustrates what I am saying, just in case that you are like me…

“If I can see it, I can recreate it”

How to Import Description Key Sets?...

Hope this will give you some ideas...

From the Grid to the Ground–a Conversion Walkthrough

Let’s talk about points, the grid, and the ground. Why not? All the surveyors are – everyone wants to project their grid points onto the ground, or vice versa, and so many users think that they’re doing the right thing when they’re really accomplishing nothing. Let’s take a look at the complete process for making this happen. Follow the link to read on…

Rotate Point Marker and Label Independently

Ability to rotate point marker and label independently in Civil 3D was customers’ wish for a while.  With Civil 3D 2012 that wish has been granted.  You could have read about Rotating Labels on Being Civil site. You may also remember how tedious this task was in previous versions. Our own, Seth Hall blogged about it before in his Rotate Point Marker Independently of the point Label post; but new way is easier, more elegant and does more. The following post goes one step further and explains other options available with this tool. If you click on the marker symbol of a point, you will notice options which would allow you to move point, rotate marker and rotate both label and marker altogether.

Clicking on upper grip (rectangular) will give you options to do move or rotate label as well as “Toggle sub item grips”. With this option you can grip edit individual pieces of label and position it the way you want it.

If your point marker and point label are already rotated you may notice some more options. Reset all will bring point marker and label to its default position. Others are self explanatory.

Enjoy! 

 

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.

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 New Feature–Rotating Labels

This tip falls into the “you asked for it, so you get it!” category. I frequently hear users request the ability to rotate point labels. Well, now you can – once the point is selected, you can hover over the label grip to see what options you now have, as seen below:

Selecting Rotate Label and then graphically swinging the label to the desired location is all it takes – now you have a rotated point label!

 

Cannot Edit Points In A Drawing

You may be having whole bunch of points and point groups in your drawing and for the most part they look and behave OK. But there will be a time when you want to do that final tweaking to make them look all right. If you were doing that task you may have seen this issue. The issue is that some points show up grayed out in Panorama view if you try to edit them. Off course, you checked to make sure they do not show as locked, no crossed pencil icon in the panorama. This may be an old data that you just don’t remember how the points were collected. So what is the reason your points are not possible to edit?

If you take a look at the panorama view you may notice that the grayed out point icons look different then the others. This should ring a bell.

Another way to check what is going on with these points is to use LIST command and list their properties. This will tell you that the points are originally from Survey database. Survey points (for reason) come by default as locked.

Editing survey points must be done within the survey database itself. Your other option is to unlock points in the drawing (In Survey tab, right-click on network and choose Points>Unlock in drawing.

Now you can edit your points.

 

Final step would be to update your Survey Network to write these changes to your Survey Database. To update go to:

1. Survey tab and expand Networks node

2. Right-click on network and choose Update Network and/or Import>Import points from drawing.

3. This would update your survey database.

Importing Points with the Subscription Advantage Pack with User Defined Expressions

This post was originally intended to be a description of the new Point File Import Wizard in the Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, but it has morphed into something a little different.

You might be wondering what is so special about the Point File Import Wizard in the Subscription Advantage Pack – I know I was when I first saw it. It didn’t really appear to do anything that the old dialog box did except give you a preview of your points that were going to be imported. However, it is just a little smarter than I gave it credit for. Here’s what it’s supposed to do: You select a point file – you don’t open it to look at the format, you just select it for import. The wizard (appropriately named – the thing is magic!) scans your point file, then it scans the point file formats and matches them up! Not only that, but it shows you the nifty preview at the bottom.

However, today I ran into a problem with it – and with the help of quite a few people, found out the reason and the temporary workaround. Follow the link to find out more.