Civil 3D Apps

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

All I want for Christmas is some feedback of the Apps I’ve posted to the App store and was wondering if you could help me out with this request. So feel free to leave a comment or post a review on the Autodesk Exchange App site, if you downloaded one of the apps. I am also interested in hearing how likely you are to purchase an App from the app store in the future.

Links to the Apps may be found to the right under the Autodesk Expert Elite Logo.

Like one of my old posts and want to see it turned into an App? Leave a comment and it might become a reality.

Data Shortcut Blues

There appears to be an issue in Civil 3D 2012, and maybe other versions of the software, where it won’t let you create data shortcuts. The prompt that comes up informs that you must save before creating data shortcuts. Unfortunately after a save one still gets the error message.

One such cause of this error is corridors doing something automagically that causes them to change there status right after a save. It doesn’t happen to all corridor objects, just some of them. To get around this error lock the layer the corridor exists on. This prevents Civil 3D from changing the corridor’s state after a save.

Toggle Surfaces

There’s a new App in the Autodesk App Store. The new App toggles all of the surfaces in a drawing from one of showing it’s self to one of not showing anything (or at least the surface with the list amount of things showing).
The app cost is a reasonable $2 and is available now.  http://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/CIV3D/Detail/Index?id=appstore.exchange.autodesk.com%3asurfacestoggle%3aen
Here is a video showing the command in action:

AutoTrack - Integrated Design

When I think about integrated design Civil 3D is far from what I think of. Autodesk appears to be focused on the bright shiny things which they think will sell seats rather then integrating the design tasks a civil engineer needs to design. It's refreshing to see a company approach a product through an integrated approach with the AutoTrack product. Here's a video of one of the features of the program, roundabout design.

Did you watch the video? Did you notice the striping changes with the grip changes? Did you notice the signs move and point towards the correct location? An integrated approach to design, where most of the linework to create a roundabout is created as you design. It is then directly linked to a corridor to build a surface. What's great is that you can modify the linework outside of the corridor, this way you don't have to wait for the corridor to get built to see the changes that will occur.

AutoTrack also includes features for turning analysis, rail, airports, and rail. The product works with AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Bentley products, and Briscad. I currently do not do much work projects of the size necessary for this tool, but if I did I'd definitely look at using this product to make me more efficient. http://www.savoycomputing.com/

Saving Volume Analysis

Icons are often times confusing, especially on dialogs you may not use everyday. One such place is the Volumes. On the palette there is a buttons to export and import volume entries from/to a file.

The buttons are easy to use. Use the export button to create an XML file to reflect your volume entries, and then use the Import button to bring them back in. This way you won’t have to recreate them each time you open a file. If you are standardized on the names of surfaces, you can use the XML file for all of your files.