Design Review 2010 – Add Leader

I just noticed it today that one can add a leader to a callout in Design Review 2010. It may have been possible in earlier versions and I didn’t notice. It’s really easy to do too. When selecting or creating a callout press the D key and a new leader will be created and one can place it, once placed it defaults to create another new leader. This way you can have one callout pointing to multiple items without resorting to using lines. One can even remove the leader using the V key.

Before:

After:

Input Wanted – Post Style

I’ve been working on a routine that will allow you to add a command to Civil 3D that will allow you to right click on a selected point and add the selected point to a point group. The command was in LDD and probably should be included in Civil 3D. So far the code is getting quite extensive and long. I usually add commentary as I modify and add to the code but am not sure if it is worth it. I’m thinking about going to a method of posting code that is similar to method used in Through the Interface. Through the Interface uses a few paragraphs describing what the end goal of the code is, without explaining the minutia of the code, and then shows the code on how it was completed.

What’s your opinion? Should I stick with what I have been doing, or should I go with the abridged version? Or did you just find the site via search engine and don’t really care? For the 10th responder I’ll give a copy of Mastering Civil 3D 2009. No responses will be shown until the 10th response is received.

Civil 3D User Group – Central Coast

Date: Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: San Luis Obispo County Government Center
              1055 Monterey Street, Room 361
              San Luis Obispo CA 93408
Topics: What’s New in Civil 3D…a closer look at Civil 3D 2010

Here’s the flier if you want to attend.

Extract Feature Line From Corridor

In a previous post I went over how one could use the API to create 3DPolylines from a corridor in one step rather than selecting them one at a time. In this post I’ll show how to turn them into feature lines. As a starting point I’ll be using the code from the previous post. I’ll be adding the code to the spot indicated below:

The fist thing I need is to get the site I want the feature line added to. To do this I need to get the Site object I want the feature line to go to. I’ll use the code that comes with the samples to get the drawings database and add it as a new module.

I’ll now call the function within the code to get the g_oDocument assigned and use it to get the first site in the drawing to assign to the created feature lines to. I’ll also get the first feature line style in the drawing’s list. Finally the 3DPolyline will be used to create a feature line.

I probably don’t want to keep the 3DPolyline so I’ll delete it.

And now when the code is run it will create feature lines from the corridor based on what the user types in.

Pipe Label – Dimension Look Part 2

In the previous post I started creating a pipe label that looked like an AutoCAD dimension. I now have Civil 3D 2010 up and running and can finish the post.

Next an expression will be used to set the elevation the pipe label should go to. In this case I’m using an elevation of 640. Using an expression will be useful since all we would need to do is change the elvation of the expression to adjust the placement of the pipe label.

 

Now that I have the elevation placement, I need to calculate how far to move the pipe label. I’ll use the Pipe LabelElev expression above and subtract the average of the centerline elevations and then divide by the Drawing Scale Conversion and multiply it by 10. 10 is the profile exaggeration, if yours is different then change the 10 that matches the profile.

So now I’ll use the above expression in the Start Point Y Offset for the horizontal lines. Then anchor all of the label components to that line component.

The label should look something like the one below. I’ve labeled adjacent pipes to show that they line up in profile.

As you can see above I’ve got everything done but the vertical lines. I could add it to the pipe labels, but I like having the vertical lines equidistant from the bottom of the manholes. The only way I’ve found how to do that is using a structure label. The first is the an expression to set the elevation the label should go to.

Next create an expression to determine how long the line should be.

Then add the length expression to the label.

Depending on the command settings for the structure label placement, you may have to adjust it. The labels should look something like this.

A drawing containing the styles may be found here.