Friday, March 20, 2009

OSNAPZ, eTransmit and a Few Shout Outs

If I ever quit my day job to become a rapper, my stage name shall be OSNAPZ. Besides being a fly gangsta' name, OSNAPZ is an AutoCAD variable which determines whether or not Z is included when using object snaps. When the OSNAPZ variable is set to 0 (default) Z is picked up with object snaps. This can be problematic when placing pipe networks in a Civil 3D drawing, since usually you want Z to come from a surface. It also affects 3D Polylines and Feature Line creation. Setting OSNAPZ to 1 will tell AutoCAD to ignore the elevation of the object you are snapping to. It will use the XY location, but Z will be your active CAD elevation (which 99.999% of the time = 0) or in the case of placing pipe networks - it allows Civil 3D to use the surface for the rim elevation of structures.






eTransmit is a beautiful, beautiful command that is shockingly underutilized.

Say I have a Civil 3D drawing that I want to send to a colleague or a tech support person, and I want that person to see exactly what I see.

eTransmit picks up the drawing, XREFS, attached raster images, color tables and data shortcuts to package up in a neat little zip file. You can even create a transmittal that will automatically explode and save down the civil drawings to an older base AutoCAD format.



In Civil 3D 2009 go to File > eTransmit. In Civil 3D 2010 go to menu browser Send >
eTransmit.



























Finally, the shout outs: Dan H., Tod H., Scott "Scooter" C., Nicky, and Kent K. of Eagle Point. It was awesome seeing you last weekend. Let's get together for some dirty Irish dancing again soon!

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