Being Civil

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.

Got Layers?

As you all know, a lot of our ideas for content here in the blog come from real life cases that we solve on a daily basis. We’re always out to harvest information so that we may spread the knowledge to our users. This case started out normally enough – honestly, I don’t even remember the topic. But while working with the drawing, I came across something that made my hair stand up, and I figured you should know about it.

As with most drawings, I was searching for the problem area that the customer reported. This was one of those drawings where the entire design was in one drawing – I really hope I don’t have to tell you how bad an idea this is. Just as I expected, there was a LOT of “stuff” in this drawing – hatches, labels galore, etc. To make sense out of the confusion, I needed to clean it up a bit, so I decided it was time to turn off some layers. As I went into the layer manager, I found out part of the problem – almost 7,000 layers! No wonder the drawing was a bit laggy (that’s a technical term, by the way…) To see if I could reduce the number of layers a bit, I started investigating. My investigation turned up a common mistake that I used to make many many releases ago, so I’ll share it with you.

Follow the link to see what could have created this many layers, and how to avoid that issue in the future.

Add Reset User Settings in Civil 3D 2012

Now that the news is out and I’m sure you paid close attention to what we had to say in the last few weeks.  Pretty soon the sunny days will be over and you may nice that you either over customized your user settings OR messed up some of the command settings OR toolbars/ribbons (we all have done it, right?) OR something else. If you remember the mantra was asking you to perform “Secondary Installer” whenever you got stuck with a problem that only appears to be happening to you. You may also felt a little jealous seeing that your colleague was able to run the same program on your machine just fine. In those kinds of situation we often suggested that you reset your user settings to the out-of-box state. The procedure was pretty straight forward but since involved removing some entries from Registry, it was bit troublesome for some (especially) novice users. With the following procedure you will be able to make it run with just one click. It’s that simple. The trick is to add a shortcut to the startup menu. To see how….after the jump.

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!

 

 

Workspace Changes in Civil 3D 2012

I'm sure that I'm not surprising anyone when I remind them that Civil 3D is built on top of Map 3D, right? Do you know how to access the Map 3D functionality? Through Workspaces! Now, two things have changed with Workspaces in Civil 3D 2012 - the first is the location of the Workspace icon. It's moved up in the world and now resides next to the QAT, as shown below:

Once you select this pulldown, you will notice 4 Workspaces - Civil 3D, 2D Drafting and Annotation, 3D Modeling, and Planning and Analysis. As expected, the Civil 3D Workspace is for everything Civil 3D. 2D Drafting and Annotation and 3D Modeling is all plain AutoCAD work, and Planning and Analysis is where everything Map related is found. With this new streamlined Workspace, it's easier and more intuitive than ever before to find your Map commands on the ribbon!

Fixing the Rotated ViewCube

Have you ever opened a legacy drawing and seen that your ViewCube wasn’t perfectly straight with your screen? North wasn’t pointing up, which is counter-intuitive to what we know. Changing the view to the world UCS didn’t help, either. No matter what you did, your ViewCube still looked like this:

 

Yesterday, while perusing a few forums, I came across a rather simple fix to make the ViewCube look the way it should. Follow the link to find out how;

Parcel Preview in Toolspace

This comes up every so often.  And while it’s an easy fix, it’s also an easy one to overlook.  In the Toolspace, you have an option to see a preview of your Parcel down below, once you click on it.  It looks like the picture to the left.

So if you don’t see the preview, how to do add it?

Simply right-click on the Parcels header, and select “Show Preview.” 

 

 

 

2011 Quick Tip: PROSPECTOR and SETTINGS commands

You may or may not have noticed that the HOME tab>PALETTES panel in the Ribbon is now the host of 3  new buttons in addition to the 3 that were there in 2010.

Although the Toolbox button wasn’t there in 2010, the command TOOLBOX would toggle its display. New in 2011 are the PROSPECTOR and SETTINGS commands as well as the accompanying buttons. These will toggle the display of the Prospector and Settings tab in your Toolspace. Not only that, but when you hide these palettes the modules are unloaded from memory, thus freeing up some additional memory. This was added as part of the memory optimization changes made for the new release. So if you find these tabs missing from your Toolspace, don’t fret, they are a simple command/button push away!