Being Civil

Line and Curve… Curve Delta (∆) symbol Label issue…

Hi everybody… This one has been around for a little while. When you use a Line and Curve Label over a curve the delta symbol will not display. It will show as "D" but when you drag the label it will show the delta symbol. You can get in the label style composer and no matter what you do the delta symbol will not show. So now, how do I make this work?

Here is a little trick to make the impossible possible...

First you need to:

1. Go to the Setting tab -> Parcel -> Label Styles -> Curve, select the Delta over Length and Radios labels.

2. Right-click on it and choose Edit to get into Label Style Composer

3. In the Label Style Composer's Layout tab, select the Delta component. and click on Contents

4. Go to the Text Component Editor - Contents, highlight the component of the label and Copy it (CTRL + C)

5. Then cancel all out.

6. Now edit the Distance - Radius and Delta label for Line and Curve:

7. On the Layout tab, select the Delta component.

8. Go to the Text Component Editor again.

9. Paste the content that you just copied from the Parcel label; this will add an extra component on the properties of the label that wasn't available before.

10. Make your changes and adjustment for Precision and Format.

11. Save the label.

This will fix the delta issue. In case that you get lost trying to follow the steps, here is a video so you can see how to make it work.

Civil 3D Opens Then Immediately Closes

We occasionally see reports where AutoCAD Civil 3D opens and then immediately closes with no message displayed. Typically, the described behavior could be happening when the program is not able to get its license; but there may be some other reasons for it. After you have confirmed that program in fact is able to ping your license server (if network) and that your license is valid it’s time to look somewhere else. In the next few paragraphs I tried to highlight a few places where you should look for clues. There are more, I guess, but these are most commonones I am aware of.

To begin troubleshooting I prefer to ask myself many questions and then I try to answer it as much as I can. I’d suggest you do the same. Here are some of them.

MAPCLEAN: Order Matters

Although Almas has previously written about the Drawing Cleanup Tools (MAPCLEAN) in a post way back from 2009, I thought that these two words could be very helpful in using this tool: Order Matters. The order in which you send your Cleanup Actions over to the Selected Actions can produce different results when running the Cleanup.

The tool will run the first Action until completion, then run the second Action, third, forth... you get the picture. For example you run the following Actions in this order:

1. Zero Length Objects
2. Break Crossing Objects
3. Simplify Objects

The tool will run and address Zero Length Objects until completion, then proceed on to Break Crossing Objects. The part that gets tricky is the fact that if the Break Crossing Objects action creates any zero length objects they will not be addressed because that function has already be run, as it was first in the list. Running it a second or third time should address all the actions.

It would appear at first glance that the tool is not working correctly, so this should be something you need to be aware of when using Drawing Cleanup.

Error "IAeccSurveyDataMigrator ->CreateInstance() failed, please check server registration."

We witness that today very large percentage of e-mail traffic and also a significant number of web sites are infected by malicious code that may attack your system. These days, it is hard to imagine any serious system without some form of virus protection running. Things like Trojans, worms, spyware, denial of service attacks (DOS), etc. are very common. I guess that may be one of the reasons virus scanners and registry cleaners are invented - to fight those attacks and to keep intruders away from the system. So this is pretty common knowledge, but not everybody is aware that settings in virus scanners and registry cleaners could be adjusted not to be so aggressive towards all services that may be running.

These scanners/cleaners basically scan each incoming package of code and if they notice something suspicious they may block some of them or even remove them. That may cause some other issues such as that your program suddenly could stops working or you may see some error messages. Sometimes turning the scanner off or running AutoCAD in diagnostic mode may reveal if there is a conflict with third party apps which scanners basically are - third party applications. 

 

Civil 3D is not responding when switching between Model tab and Layout tabs...

Hi everybody... This is something that we have had seen a lot lately (Civil 3D is not responding when switching between Model tab and Layout tabs). It can happen for multiples reasons, a corrupted drawing, video card issues, network problems, to name some of them.

Every one of you is unique on your own environment, even if you have to exact computer they can behave differently and what it could work for you it may not work for someone else...

Here are some things that you can try.

System Variables

1. Set the WHIPTHREAD to 3, this SV controls whether to use an additional processor to improve the speed of operations such as zoom, redraw or regenerate the drawing.

One thing to keep in mind, when multithreaded processing is used for redraw operations (value 2 or 3), the order of objects specified with the DRAWORDER command is not guaranteed to be preserved for display "but is preserved for plotting".

Go to Options -> System tab, under Layout Regen Options and select "Cache model tab and all layouts", click Apply and OK; or set the LAYOUTREGENCTL to 2. 

This option regenerates the drawing the first time you switch to each tab, the display list is saved and regeneration is suppress when going back and forward between them...

Hope this will work for you...

Profile Views Have Gap in Grid

This is a quick post that can easily go into a category of “A-ha”.  An image is worth thousand words-they say. This one is not worth that many but it will surely show what the issue is:

 

If you take a look at the Profile View you quickly noticed that something is not right. The profile view has a gap in the middle of it. To see how to fix this gap, click on continue.

Unable to Save Changes Made in Part Builder

This issue seems to be a hot topic lately so I thought I would write a quick post on the subject. Have you been  experiencing issues when you try to add new part sizes or make other changes in Part Builder? In most cases this is a permissions related issue, so if you are experiencing this, please read on.

First step is to select the Civil 3D icon, right click, and select PROPERTIES. In the resulting dialog, please select the COMPATIBILITY tab and check the RUN THIS PROGRAM AS ADMINISTRATOR, then click OK. After doing this please try launching Civil 3D again, and see if you are able to make and save the edits. You can also do this directly from the icon's right click menu, but that will apply only to that session of Civil 3D.

  
Even though you may have full administrative rights on your machine, I have still seen this issue occur, especially on Windows 7 machines. Another place to check would be to ensure that you or your users have full control of the C:\ProgramData folder as this is where the part catalog is located if running a typical install. Hope this helps!

Computer Slowdown or Program Shuts Down

Ever experienced some slowness when working with Civil 3D. I have recently had a customer who had the issue of program hanging and stopping to interact with Windows. In this particular case, it was an AppHangB1 (conflict may be different) message which is basically a message identifying some application conflict or that the application stopped responding and it is forced to close.

         Problem signature:

         Problem Event Name: AppHangB1

         Application Name: acad.exe

It seems that this time it is with AutoCAD as acad.exe may point out. In many cases, the computers in question were not connected to the Internet, but that may not be the only reason, because you may be behind a firewall or proxy server and there is no direct route to the Internet. The conflict comes because system tries to validate something called software publisher’s certificate (more about it on link). Basically, the program tries to connect to the Internet to obtain this Microsoft’s Certified Revocation List (CRL) certificate but is unable to. So, it may hang for a while or completely time out. And that is why we could see this slowdown, error or similar behavior. See how to resolve this after the jump.