Crossing Profile Label – Almost done

I’ve been working on creating a crossing profile label that is dynamic to a pipe. If the pipe moves the label will move to the invert of the crossing pipe in profile. The video below shows the label reacting.

Unfortunately I was unable to use a profile view label since the location of the label isn’t exposed in the API. In it’s place is a MLeader. As the label is updated the contents of the pipe label is changed based on the station and elevation of the invert and the inner diameter of the pipe. I’m having a problem with the labels updating when the data shortcuts are involved. If the source file has changed it doesn’t always reflect the change as shown in the screencast above. Have any suggestions for improvement? Send me an email or leave a comment.

Adding Points at Center of Circles

Have you ever had the need to add a bunch of points at the center of a circle? Well if you have then this Civil 3D Reminders widget may be for you. This widget lets you select circles and then it adds a point at the center of the selected circles. This screencast shows the macro in action:

The code uses a filtered selection set and then goes through the selection set and adds a point to the center of the circle. If you want to build your own you can check out help or past posts from this blog. Or if you just want the functionality you can purchase the widget using the Buy Now button below. The widget is for 2010, if you need another version let me know and I can make it.

Thanks

Add Points to Center of Circle Widget

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Day 2 – Dynamic Profile View Label

I’ve been thinking about the dynamic profile view label quite a bit lately. Evidently the Civil 3D API doesn’t provide the location of a Civil 3D label. This makes it difficult to figure out where in the world the label is at in the drawing. Instead of utilizing a profile view label I’m going to have to go to a mleader to label the pipe. This provides additional complexity since I will now have to check to see if the profile view has been modified and update any station/elevation information in the mleader. I think I’ll work on this today after sending an email to a reseller I met at AU who has a client who is hiring locally in the solar panel industry.

I’ve also added another listing on eBay, Brooks & Dunn Waitin’ on Sundown. I’m not quite sure if the economics work out on selling CD's on eBay. It seems the company that gets the best deal out of it is shipper.

And for those of you who like to read the articles from a feed reader, like the Kung Fu Drafter, I’ve truncated the posts in attempt to drive some traffic to this site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Day 1 – Underemployed

In reality this is about day a lot since I’ve been working 32 hours a week for quite a bit, but just recently I’ve been downgraded to 0 hours a week. I haven’t been officially laid off, but 0 hours a week is pretty close to it. I’ve noticed that lots of blogs go dark once the blogger gets unemployed such as the The Civil Chick,  Stream Restoration Engineering with Civil 3D and Civil 3D Question and Answer (and probably others) Although some have posted recently. I think that its not the time to dark, but to continue to post to see if work leads present themselves or possibly some side jobs to supplement my income until I get a regular paycheck again.

In the meantime I’ve spent some time signing up for an Ebay account to sell some items, anybody interested in a Jeff Foxworthy comedy album?

Today I’ve also gone and found a old copy of my resume that I need to update.

And now for a Civil 3D tip. When finding the horizontal distance between points you don’t have to set the point style to not have elevation, you can use the Inquiry tool, the CGLIST command or the CGSLIST to get the horizontal distance. The hard part is getting out of the habit of using the dist command to find the horizontal distance.