Being Civil

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014 New Feature: Extracting AutoCAD Solids or Bodies from Corridor Models

The Extract Corridor Solids command provides functionality that allows you to extract AutoCAD solids or bodies from AutoCAD Civil 3D corridor model shapes and links.

These AutoCAD entities can then be used for analysis and visualization or with other applications that are unable to directly interact with the AutoCAD Civil 3D corridor model.

You can choose to extract several types of AutoCAD entities: AutoCAD Bodies, AutoCAD Solids and AutoCAD Solids (Swept Solids)

You can find this in the Toolspace -> Toolbox tab -> Miscellaneous Utilities -> Corridor Solids -> Extract Corridor Solids.

Project Blocks to Surface and Assigning Elevations

I have been meaning to write about this for a while now but for some reason the timing was pretty bad for me every time the thought crossed my mind....until, my colleague Phil (our Map 3D guru) asked for it. He’s got an issue where a user had a drawing with hundreds of points represented by blocks. These were not COGO civil points and they had no Z values (all were 0.00). His goal was to find the elevation for each point. Luckily he had a valid Existing surface. So basically he wanted to project his “points” to the surface. Here is how that can be done.

First let’s confirm that our blocks don’t have correct elevations by going into object’s properties

 

2. Select our Existing Surface and from Contextual ribbon expand Surface Tools and pick “Move Block to Surface”

 

3. The next dialog should pop-up showing available blocks. Let’s select our Tree and Utility Pole blocks

 

4. Finally, let’s check the object properties and confirm that our block now have some elevation values gotten from our surface

 

Note: This is also useful if you want to use visualization tools and use multi-view blocks during rendering. Also, you can then create Civil Points from it if necessary. Procedure is explained in this link: Convert Point Block References to Civil Points

 

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 New Features: Surface as a Hide Boundary

One of the new features added to Civil 3D 2013 is the ability to select surface and use it as a boundary for other overlapping surface. This one is not easy to explain so I will use one of the possible workflows to describe where you will most likely end up using it. At the same time we can review the workflow about adding boundaries. Two birds with the same stone, kind of a deal. Pay attention on step 4 but let’s go one step at the time.

Here is the scenario: When we created a corridor surface and tied it with Existing ground (EG) surface we often want to see how it all ties together. DRIVE command is very useful tool here because it shows us how the road looks and it looks pretty on the screen. But if we invoke DRIVE command we may see that there are some bumps along the road. These bumps are basically showing those cut areas from our Existing Ground (EG), so the corridor will be obscured here. The gray thing that looks like gray cloud is basically my quick rendering of Existing surface. It looks like the road will get into EG-not good!

You may choose to hide EG, and that’s OK- you can see the entire corridor, but you will not be able to see where it ties into Existing Ground. See how and what after the jump.

Rendering Trees in 3DS Max Civil View

Just recently a customer reported an issue when they went to insert trees into their Civil 3D design they had imported into 3DS Max via Civil View. When news of the Infrastructure Suites came about, I had the opportunity to sit in on some training and demos of the (very cool) functionality that is available between Civil 3D and 3DS Max Design. Ever since then I have been interested in this subject, and even put a short presentation on the subject together for a group of students.

Back to the issue at hand, rendering trees. There is one thing that I remembered from this training that was mentioned  in passing in regards to trees and rendering: You need to create a Daylight System before you can see the rendered textures of the trees. So if you do not have a Daylight System created, then the trees will appear white. This would be fine if you are trying to render a winter scene in blizzard conditions, but I imagine most clients would prefer it nice and sunny with good visibility.

 

Mirrored Images When Draped Over a Surface

I had a customer log a case recently with quite an odd problem – and an even more odd fix. When you import an image and surface from Google Earth, the image is draped over the surface as a render style when you view the surface in 3D. However, a particularly annoying thing can happen – the image becomes flipped for some odd reason. Follow the jump to see what I’m talking about and how to fix it!

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.

Another visual aide - viewing your Profile in 3D

Justin's post last week on Visual Tracking got me to thinking about another visual aide you may or may not have noticed, the 3D Chain item in a Profile Style.  When you create alignments, they are 2D objects, so in a 3D view with a surface, you see the alignment down below at zero elevation.

If you create a profile for the alignment, either from a surface or a design profile, you are adding that Z value, the elevation data.  You can create a profile view but what about visualizing the alignment in 3D with the additional profile information? 

Visual Tracking between Alignment and Profile

Hopefully, you all enjoyed Brian’s video sneak peeks at the 2010 Ribbon.  We have a few more of these videos in the works for different features in the next few weeks.  We are really psyched about the upcoming release and I’m sure you will be too! 

Today, I am going to show you a quick tip to help you track a station between your Alignment and Profile/Section View.  It is not mentioned in the Help Menu, so unless someone has shown you this, you may not even know about it! 

Using the ShowDrawingTips variable will turn on a display-only graphic that creates a tracking line on your Alignment as you move your mouse along the Profile.  It also works in reverse.  Move your mouse along the Alignment and you will see a tracking line at that corresponding station on your Profile View.

Try this out and hopefully you find this useful during your designing.  Below are the three variables that relate to this feature.  These are drawing-specific, so set them in your Template if this is something you will use in the future.

ShowDrawingTips – turns drawing tips on for the current viewport only
ShowDrawingTipsFull – turns on drawing tips for all viewports
HideDrawingTips – turns drawing tips off comletely

Enjoy!