Importing Shape Files

For some reason I’m supposed to be really happy about Civil 3D. I don’t quite get it since even doing simple tasks is a pain. Take for instance Importing Shape Files.

Do you see the option in the Insert Shape Files in the  ribbon above? I don’t. You will find the option to import the information from the Planning and Analysis Workspace. But I just want to import a Shape file.

Guess where I need to go? I see three places where it’s possible from the Planning and Analysis Workspace. Well I don’t know it from looking at the ribbon options under data. You’ll need a PhD in Ribbonology to figure out which button you’ll want to use. Thankfully Autodesk has made this really hard in finding how to import a ShapeFile. You’ll notice the file type isn’t listed in the Import From Files. If you look under the Connect you will see the option for a SHP file, but good luck trying to figure out how to attach the data from that sparsely confusing user interface. It always takes me a good 2 to 200,000 thousand million tries to get it to work.

So if you want to import a SHP file. Type MapImport at the command line. Select the SHP file some misguided GIS technician sent you with the assumption that you’ll know how to deal with it.

Press OK.

So now you are presented with a dialog box. Of course your importing in a shape file, the last thing you’ll want to do is attach object data to it so Autodesk will turn that off by default. Select the Import polygons as closed polylines if you so choose. Don’t forget you’ll need to do a super dupper clean up job on imported parcels, if that’s what you are importing. Autodesk Parcel programmer’s can’t seem to filter duplicate objects out for you. After all you weren’t supposed to find this feature anyways.

Then in this dialog box select Create Object Data, the table you want to use and then any of the data you want to import using the Select Fields button.

Then press Ok, up to three times, to get the shape file to import. That's it.

Workstations

It is that time of the year where Dell announces a their new industry leading workstation releases. This years release appears to be a focus on an offering for the low end of the market with the T1700 and the high end with the R7610 rack workstation. 

The T1700 is designed to be priced at about the cost of a desktop machine and provide a smaller footprint compared to Dell’s larger workstations. The workstation comes with support for three monitors, with optional support for four monitors. If you are still living with one monitor it might be time to make the jump to four monitors. this way you can have two instances of Civil 3D running with the palettes residing on the other two monitors. This way while you wait for Civil 3D to complete the tasks you can work in the other session. Eliminate some of the dead time Civil 3D creates by not using the full processing power of a workstation by artificially making the software use multiple processors at the same time.

The workstation also comes with Dell Precision Performance Optimizer. While not supported for Civil 3D currently, it might in the future. This feature helps adjust the workstation for the program’s needs. this is definitely something Civil 3D could use as indicated in these tests by Stanford University. Additionally the workstation comes with the option to have Windows 7 installed. Autodesk seems to have been caught by surprise that Microsoft was releasing Windows 8 and doesn’t appear to have done any preplanning before the new OS was released.

The Dell Precision R7610 Rack mounted workstation is the product I’m most intrigued by. I travel quite a bit and work where ever I am. It might be advantageous to be able to connect to a workstation at the office and use my workstation where ever I happen to be. The workstation may contain up to 256 GB of memory as well as multiple professional video cards. I wish my clients that I work with remotely had this capability. This way I could work on their network directly without having to transfer files back and forth. Plus this workstation can be used by multiple people. The connection when you are in the office is a small Dell Wyse P25 Zero Client leaving more monitors and plan space.

Learn more at dell.com/precision

Creating Alignments With the .NET API

This post is about creating alignments with the API. I’ve decided I suck at getting code to show up correctly in Blogger, so I’m going to use pictures from now on for the code.

The first example creates an alignment from a polyline.

The code gets the default settings and then creates an alignment from the polyline. It also checks to see if the alignment name already exists. If it does exist then it appends a number behind it, just like Civil 3D does.

I’m going to call my AlignmentNameExists my secret sauce, so I’m not going to share it. It should be easy to figure out, just go through all of the alignments in the drawing and see if it exists. If you are for sure the name doesn’t already exist you can skip the code.

I was going to go through some of the other options, but noticed I don’t have any code handy for the other methods. They should be fairly easy to figure out since they follow the same pattern as the code above.

AutoTurn

It looks like Transoft has released an update to their software for AutoCAD 2014 products. Their press release is below:

Transoft Solutions, developers of productivity enhancing software for the transportation engineering community, has just released version 8.2 for AutoTURN and AutoTURN Pro 3D, the world’s leading vehicle swept path software.

The newest version of AutoTURN includes compatibility with Autodesk® AutoCAD® 2014, Microsoft® Windows® 8 and Server 2012 along with an impressive list of updates to the vehicle libraries. Along with updates to design vehicles in AASHTO 2013, Caltrans 2012, Florida PPM 2013 and Wisconsin DOT, Transoft engineers added functionality for our overseas clients as well. The Israel Department of Transportation contacted Transoft regarding several of their unique vehicle needs. The engineers extracted the key specifications for the Israeli vehicles and they are now part of the AutoTURN 8.2 software package.

In direct response to customer requests, AutoTURN 8.2 also features the capability to automatically share standardized load and sight line specifications between different workstations in a network installation. Christian Milne, Software Development Manager for Transoft Solutions says, “We strive to take our clients’ requests and put them into action. The vehicle libraries within AutoTURN have always reflected the needs of the transportation and engineering industry and the latest version of the software continues that tradition.”

To get more information on AutoTURN 8.2 or to sign up for a free demo please visit: www.transoftsolutions.com

Bloat

I’ve spent the past two days dealing with Autodesk’s bloat. Well actually it’s been the past six years since I’ve been using Civil 3D. With a new release the bloat doesn’t appear to be a topic Autodesk feels it’s worth dealing with. I guess for 2014 it continues with the monstrous 12 GB download for the Infrastructure Design Suite which turns into a rather large expanded file size, of which I haven’t figured out how big it is. For I’m still waiting for the install file to download after 8 plus hours. I’ve heard rumors just to install the package it tops out at over 45 GB of hard drive space required. Only want to install Civil 3D and another item and not the rest of the package? Well you’re out of luck since you have to endure downloading, unzipping everything, and then choosing what you want to install. I’m fairly certain I’ll never have a need to install plane Jane AutoCAD when I have Civil 3D and Map 3D installed.

I recently was programming the creation of an AutoCAD table and adding blocks to the table in a drawing. In order to separate my software development from my drafting work I utilize Virtual Machines with a reduced amount of RAM available. Still a healthy 3 GB, but not necessarily enough for Visual Studio and AutoCAD Civil 3D to coexist on such a machine. I run out of memory when modifying the cell height of the table, which promptly crashes AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Now you might think it’s a huge file that I’m using that causes the program to crash. Well it’s not. It’s an empty out of the box Civil 3D Imperial template with nothing else in the drawing until I create the table. Not quite sure what’s using up all of the memory. Now I thought it might be my program, except before loading it AutoCAD Civil 3D is already using 200 MB from opening the program.

Bad things start to happen when a computer starts to run out of RAM. I know I’ve lived the past six years of living through it.