Being Civil

How much of my MEMORY RAM is my drawing really using?

Hi all.

Have you ever wandered about the amount of RAM memory that your drawing is really using?

Maybe you are one of those that don’t like to relay on your Windows Task Manager.

Here is a quick tip, open the biggest, baddest dwg that you have and type STATUS on the command line.  It will show you the amount of RAM that your drawing is using alone with the complete statistics of the drawing.

Developing on an Autodesk Infrastructure product?

If you are developing a product or tool that will work on an Autodesk Infrastructure product, be sure to check out http://adndevblog.typepad.com/infrastructure/ - the Autodesk Developer Network Infraststructure experts have tons of great content there!  Just on the fiirst page I see tips for Map 3D, Civil 3D, and Map Server.

 

For even more infrastructure goodness, be sure to also visit our Geospatial Evangilist's blog: http://geospatial.blogs.com/

Add Reset User Settings in Civil 3D 2013

As many of you may have already known, Almas wrote this great post for Civil 3D 2012 which streamlines the process to reset your user settings when troubleshooting user specific issues. To simplify this for the new release I am posting the updated steps and paths for 2013:

1. Go into C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Autodesk\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013
2. Right-click in it and chose New and Shortcut
3. In the next dialog paste following text (including quotes) "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013\AdMigrator.exe" /reset and click Next
4. Then type Reset User Settings (or anything you wish) for a name of this shortcut and hit Finish
5. Now go to Start>All Programs>Autodesk>AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 and note that Reset User Settings is listed
6. Now go ahead and run it if you wish

You can even create a little desktop icon like I did, which makes it even more accessible as I often run this utility to bring me back to stock settings.

Thanks again to Almas for the great original post!

 

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. 

 

I want my settings back in Civil 3D 2012…

It is my great pleasure to introduce some of the bloggers that will be posting in the future on Being Civil. When we started back in the fall of 2008 (Brian Kling, Jason Hickey, Justin Ziemba, Seth Hall and I) we were concentrating on Civil 3D and its core functionality. Our goal throughout this entire period was to help our customers and share some of what we know with the rest of us. In order to bring it all to the next level we decided to bring more power to the team of us so that our readers could get a different perspective to the issues we all are facing daily.

In the previous period some people moved to other roles while some others came to replace them. Now, 413 posts and almost 500,000 page views later, have what we are now – Being Civil blog, supporting our infrastructure users around the globe. You can read our posts on Facebook or Twitter or receive them via RSS feeds. It's just a small milestone we have reached and we thought you needed to know about it. We see your support every day and we hope it will continue to grow in the future. If there is something you would like us to blog about please drop us a note and we’ll be happy to help.

You already had a chance to get some of the Map 3D perspective from Nathan Moore, as well as to read some posts about Storm Sewer Analysis (SSA) from Matt and Anurag. Now we are introducing Tatiana Machado and Phil Borycens and I am sure you will be able to get more from them in the nearest future. To learn more about our new additions please visit their own pages on the left (About the authors section). Today it will be Tatiana’s first post on Being Civil. Please join me in welcoming Tatiana and Phil.

                                                                                                                         - Almas -

 

This will be like the second part of Add Reset User Settings in Civil 3D 2012 post from back in May of this year. We had some user asking, “OK, I just saved my custom setting... but now what can I do with the ZIP file that is created before resetting my setting and how I can get my settings back?” Well, you would need to do a similar procedure to the one that you did before to create your reset user setting shortcut.

I am one of those that think that an image is worth 1,000 words, so here is a short video that you can follow to get this done.

Migrating Your Custom Settings

If you remember my last post about Reset User Settings you may got familiar with AdMigrator.exe utility inside of AutoCAD. The whole story was to use it for resetting user settings or how we called it (reinitiating secondary installer) to get your (corrupted) settings to the default state. The same utility could be used (without /reset switch) and have program display the dialog which would allow you to move your customization between different versions of Civil 3D.  This will not move your Survey Settings, custom tool palettes and assemblies, parts catalogs, templates or other Civil specific settings. This will also not resolve all the migration issues, but could be a good tool to move you forward. Note that some tools may be available in new release but not in the old one, hence a possibility that you may need to take special caution and set your expectations straight. If you get stuck in one of these tasks feel free to visit Being Civil to find some of the tips we already published or submit a Service Request or Forum question. Click continue to see how.

Civil 3D Landing Page?

What is Civil 3D landing page you may ask? Our friends from Content Management team have provided us with a page that can serve as a portal for many Civil related questions and issues starting from product information to troubleshooting.

On this page you may see some training materials, videos, general information about products, useful documentation, recent downloads and technical solutions…pretty much all you need to know to start your Civil 3D journey if you are a novice Civil 3D user. Users tips and tricks if you are seasoned user, or some help troubleshooting and searching our knowledge base or a quick access to forums if you have years of Civil 3D use under your belt - all from the same spot neatly organized and frequently updated. The landing page can be accessed from here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/index?siteID=123112&id=3571865&linkID=9240697

Believe me, if there is one page about Civil 3D you would want to have bookmarked this would be the one. 

 

New Things to Being Civil Blog

If you are reading this post you may have already noticed few things different to this Blog. With growing popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as our world wide presence we decided to add few cool features to help the message get out there quicker and stronger.

 

On the top right you may see a Google Translate bar. All of our non-English speakers may appreciate this tool. Please look at Google Translate as a work in progress tool. Some languages or articles are spot on, while others are not so much. The tool is getting better every day and maybe in the future will be good enough to do an error proof translation. But, until then use it to get the sense and better understanding of the topic we are are covering in the post.

Right below the post you may now see a star rating for the post. This way you can give us your instant feedback. With this tool we will be able to report the topics of your interest and learn from it. Off course, the more popular subject and rating is the more similar areas we will try to cover. Other way to look at it is to virtually “tip your server”. If you are happy with what you are getting please tell us so.

Slightly below the Star rating widget, there is another tool that basically link the post to a similar previous posts. I have to admit, I am not sure how the linkage is being determined, but suspect there is some smart gremlin running inside, reading the post and deciding what links to what. If you have better explanation please share it with us.

Even further down, there are few buttons which allow you to tweet (Twitter) the post or Like (Facebook) the post. If you like it or you think it’s worth sharing, then don’t be shy. Just click it!

Unlike other “Like” under post, the Like at the left side is used if you like Being Civil Blog Facebook page. Yes, we do have Facebook page! Please use these addition and help us spread the word. Help us get the cool tips and ideas get further than our closed community. Evangelize and educate!