You Know You're an AutoCAD Geek When...

1. Someone asks you what your favorite color is and you say, "190".
2. You've rubbed off the letters in the ESC key.
3. ALL YOUR FRIENDS KNOW THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS JUST MEANS YOU'RE WORKING, NOT SHOUTING.
4. You ask your mom to "plot" the directions to your aunt's house.
5. You believe there is no such thing as too many monitors.
6. You think hand-drafted drawings are "adorable!"
7. You refer to cleaning your glasses as "doing a REGEN."
8. You create detailed floorplans before moving any of your furniture around.
9. They're not family photos, they're raster images.
10. You've ever worked on AutoCAD in your pajamas...or underwear.
11. You use the middle mouse wheel to pan & zoom everything (and have messed up a Google map doing so.)
12. Most of your Facebook friends you know from AU or techcamp.
13. You don't clean your house, you PURGE.

Sooner than Expected...Subscription Advantage Pack is LIVE!

Go get it!

If you are having trouble logging into the subscription center, contact your friendly neighborhood Autodesk reseller.

Yessssss! This beats the crap out of the Windows 7 release.

OMFG!!! Subscription Advantage Pack Coming Soon!

Merry Christmas Civil 3D 2010 users!!

Ok...for months I've heard rumor swirling that "some kind of roundabout" tool would be coming soon for Civil 3D 2010. Imagine my surprise today when I saw it in action plus TONS of other tools available only to subscription Civil 3D customers.

More details to come, but check your subscription account SOON for the subscription advantage pack (SAP).

Note: this is just the tippity top of the iceberg.

• 2D roundabout layout tool. Not as powerful as the intersection tool - but a good start.
• Point cloud support. Navisworks has always been able to see these, now C3D can too. Lots of different file formats supported. Don't expect a TIN out of this - but you no longer need 3rd party software to deal with this data. No weeding of this data either (yet)...but hello??? POINT cloud support! Snap-to, measure and color-code this data.
  
• My personal favorite tool comes in the form of the surface enhancements. Remember this post? Totally useless now. You can now import a surface direct from SHP file or other geo-database.
• More profile creation tools.
• More alignment manipulations tools.
• More supported survey formats.
• More visualization tools! (Tools that answer the question, "Can drivers see over that statue of the Fonze?)
  
• Better export to Microstation.
  
• More!!!

I'm going to try to scam some screen caps from Dana and post more here.

Look for these tool in about a week. I'll post when they are available.

Doing Lines

A few handy line variables to know:

LTSCALE - This is very straightforward. LTSCALE set to 1 draws your lines as defined in the *.LIN file. LTSCALE set to 0.5 makes it half as big. LTSCALE of 2 makes it twice as big and so on. This is a drawing-wide setting. If you change LTSCALE, all your lines will adjust accordingly, unless you've set the LTSCALE by object or if you used CELTSCALE.

CELTSCALE - Similar to LTSCALE, but does not affect lines that have already been created. Think of it as an alternative to setting line scale by object. Say you set your LTSCALE to 1, draw a bunch of stuff, and then need to draw more stuff with an LTSCALE of 10. But you don't want to whack out the stuff you already drew. Set CELTSCALE to 10 (leave LTSCALE alone) and draw your new stuff.

PSLTSCALE - you want this to be 1, which means the viewport scale will effect the scale of the lines. With this set to 0, your lines will look the same in paperspace as in modelspace, regardless of the viewport scale.

PLINEGEN - AKA "Linetype generation." By default this is zero, meaning that if a line segment is too short to show dashes, it will appear solid. What is happening is that CAD sees the short segment and starts the pattern over, centering the pattern at the midpoint of the segment. If you don't like that, you can set your PLINEGEN variable to 0, where CAD doesn't start over at each segment. In Civil 3D 2009 and earlier this comes into play when creating existing ground profiles (in Civil 3D 2010, profiles always act like PLINEGEN = 1).

PLINEGEN=0





PLINEGEN=1