A Few Housekeeping Items

No More Twitter. Twitter makes me crave Zanax. It's like a crowd of people shouting into a room and only a few of the Tweets are worth the bytes in the universe they take up. It makes me insane trying to weed the major crap from the less crappy. You can't say anything of technical value in 255 characters or less.

Blog May be Quiet for a While. The next few weeks I'm gone and have presentations and training up the proverbial wazzoo. Then I'm headed to San Fransisco on vacation for a week or so in June.

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Accidental Discovery

Last week when I was teaching about extracting profiles from the surface, one of my students discovered something I've never tried before: You can sample multiple offsets at once by separating the values with a comma. How about that!

My Layers are Not Listed Alphabetically...WTF?

MAXSORT is an AutoCAD system variable that most people never run into. Civil 3D users tend to run into it more than average because the number of layers that Civil 3D uses and creates. ESPECIALLY if you're using layer suffixes in your drawing settings.

If you find yourself with more than 1000 layers, you've maxed out the number of layers that ACAD will alphabetize.

Type in MAXSORT and set it to a larger number, such as 5000. You'll never need it again.

Faded XREF in 2010? XDWGFADECTL

So, I made some Plan and Profile sheets in Civil 3D 2010 for the first time yesterday. This is in the Output tab, on the Plan Production panel*.

When I created sheets I sent the new layouts to a new drawing, as I tend to do. (If you don't do that, I highly recommend it - keeps the file sizes down and allows you to work faster.)

Anyhow, since I created the sheets this way, the original plan drawing gets XREF'd into the P&P sheet drawing. There's a new setting in 2010 that makes the XREF appear faded out by default.

Write this down:

XDWGFADECTL

This setting can be set from 0-90 (90 representing a 90% fade). You can set this to a negative value if you find that you are switching between faded and non-faded frequently. For instance setting this value to -55 will NOT fade out the XREF but is a handy "reminder" if you often want to get back to 55 without digging through the Post-it notes at your desk.

Note that the XREF will not plot this way. It's just a handy way to visually recognise which elements are from an external reference.

Thanks to Esteemed Colleague Russ for helping me with this.

Have a great weekend!

*Oh, by the way: I am ALL ABOUT the ribbon panel for Civil 3D 2010. It was a well-executed implementation of the technology. Once you get the feel for where stuff is, it is SO much faster than digging through menus. LOVE IT! BE the ribbon.

SQOTD: Corridor Boundaries are Driving Me Nuts!

Q. Is there a better way to stop the finished surface boundary at the edge of the corridor than using the daylight line?

When the proposed profile changes so does the daylight line and I need to re-extract the daylight featureline and turn it into a polyline. This is really annoying!

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A. When it comes to the surfaces created by corridors there is good news on the horizon. Civil 3D 2010 has a tool that makes what I’m about to tell you a moot issue (Civil 3D 2010 has an option “Corridor Extents as Outer Boundary” for corridor surfaces). However, in 2009 creating a surface boundary takes a little more finessing.

When you are in your corridor properties, go to the Boundaries tab. Right click on the name of the surface. If you have Add Automatically, use it. However, you won’t see that option in a corridor with an intersection, if you are using generic links or one with more than one baseline. However, you will see Add Interactively. It can be time-consuming to set up initially, but it is worth the effort because it will change as your corridor changes.

Once you click Add Interactively, you will be shot back into the drawing. Snap to your daylight featureline. A dialog box will pop up asking you to verify which daylight line you were aiming for (Daylight, Daylight_Cut, Daylight_Fill) - highlight Daylight, and click OK. Now you will trace the daylight line.

As you move your cursor, you’ll get this thick red line following the path of the Daylight line. As you pan and keep tracing the line may stop at the region boundaries. If it does, click again on the Daylight line and verify if you need to.

Essentially what we are doing with this procedure is spoon-feeding Civil 3D the location of the daylight line. You’ll need to click to jump across the street, any time you change baselines or anytime you encounter an assembly that created a different line from Daylight. Trace around the entire corridor and when you’ve looped around back to where you started, type C for close (similar to a polyline).

It may seem like a pain in the neck at first, but once you’ve created a corridor surface boundary this way, it will prevent those overruns even if the corridor geometry changes.

Hope this helps!