Subscription Advantage Pack – Divide Crop Surface

Looks like this week product promotion week. Today I’m promoting the Subscription Advantage Pack. I’m sure you saw my notes from the presentation. I didn’t want to forget where I put the notes, so I decided to put them on the blog as a reminder.

One of the cool new features is the Divide or Crop surface tool. The tool takes a surface and lets you crop or divide the surface into manageable sections. This way you can take a large surface and break it up into smaller pieces and share it into other drawings. Any changes to the original surface will show up into the divided surface. The divided surfaces may be modified and added to in the new drawings, but the changes don’t reflect back into the original surface. I could see this feature helpful in trying out alternatives for a design or having using for phased projects.

With the phasing you could have phase I of the project and then crop out the area where phase II would abut the first phase. You then could build the phase II project on the cropped surface. The benefit of this over creating a datashortcut is that the data from the portion of phase I that you don’t need in Phase II wouldn’t be part of the surface. Currently, with a datatshortcut, you’d have a bunch of surface data that you don’t really need, which causes the Phase II surface to be bigger than it needs to be. Hopefully this would create quicker rebuild times for the Phase II surfaces. Any changes to the Phase I surface would show up into the Phase II surface.

All of this is conjecture on my part since I haven’t test driven the functionality, but this is one way I expect to use the tool.

Other than hoping to get invited to future events (maybe an invite to the Civil 3D industry-specific session at Autodesk University 2010, since I won’t be an official attendee), I’m not getting compensated for this post by Autodesk. I don’t want the FTC coming down on me for not disclosing information.