Approximated Profile

Sometimes projects don’t demand full surveys. One instance maybe the replacement of a water line. In that case the survey information for the entire roadway may be overkill and only spot elevations above the pipe may be required. There are three ways available of accomplishing this task.

Way 1

• The first step is to create a feature line representing the survey shots of the survey (Pg. 613, of Mastering Civil 3D 2012).
• This line may then be offset to either side of the original (Pg. 616, of Mastering Civil 3D 2012).
• The feature lines may then be added to a surface as breaklines (Pg. 122, of Mastering Civil 3D 2012).
• A surface profile may then be created representing the existing grade over the existing pipe.

Way 2

• The first step is to create a feature line representing the survey shots of the survey (Pg. 613, of Mastering Civil 3D 2012).
• Next project the feature line to a profile view using the elevations of the feature line (Pg. 246, of Mastering Civil 3D 2012).

Way 3

• Look at the Create a Profile without a Surface posts on this blog. Although there would be quite a bit of work to get it to work in Civil 3D 2013.

Subassembly Composer–Surface Link

Subassembly Composer can be a bit confusing sometimes. I’ve run into a problems creating shapes with them when one of the links uses the Surface Link from the Advanced Geometry Tool Box. The problem is caused by the Surface Link not being abled to use points to determine the start and end point of the links. Instead you provide the Start and End X values. You can do this via a Points X value or Offset Targets.

When you attempt to create a shape, it won’t work. It won’t work because SAC doesn’t think the points connect, even if they have the same X, Y values. In order to fix this you need to add a link between the Start Point of the Surface Link to the Point referenced in Start X, and the same for the end. Once the short links are connected for the start and end points then shapes can be created.

Dell Precision Tower

Today Dell announced a new line of Dell Precision Tower Workstations. Dell was nice enough to invited me to San Francisco last week to attend the event. The new line appears to have some great new features.

Over the years many products have been optimized for maintainability and assembling. This new lines incorporates many of those tried and true features in some of the components that users commonly remove and replace. For this product the main parts are the hard drives and power supply. The hard drives have doors at the front of the unit to provide easy access. Open the door, pull out the hard drive, and then slide it back in. While not a feature I could see used commonly with Civil 3D, I could have used that feature when I traveled between office locations at my last regular office job. The company had mostly standardized the computers, instead of dragging around a computer I could just bring my hard drive and slide it in and start working with the workspace that I’m accustomed to.

If you work in a large office the easy exchange of the power supply might come in handy. Just pull the unit out from the back and slide a new one it. No extended downtime waiting for the IT person to replace it. Another feature is the ability to store the tower workstation in a rack. This feature could be useful in your office if you start to do renderings in 3ds Max. Create a server farm when people go home, and have a central place to make sure all of the workstations are on. Save some time of not having to wander around the office to make sure the machines are on before you go home for the night.

The price points of the product are fairly reasonable for a workstation.

Pricing and Availability:
The Dell Precision T1650, T3600, T5600 and T7600 workstations will be available for purchase worldwide starting in May. Pricing for the T1650 will be available in May.

• The Dell Precision T7600 pricing starts at $2,149 USD
• The Dell Precision T5600 pricing starts at $1,879 USD
• The Dell Precision T3600 pricing starts at $1,099 USD

One thing of note, besides the product launch was some of the items talked about. With lower prices of computers and devices we can have multiple devices to fit the type of work we are doing. A tower at the office, a tablet in the field, and a smart phone as we travel between meetings. I feel it’s probably a fact that I have been overlooking with the drop in prices of devices.

The Intel representative talked about computing power. He mentioned how we aren’t using all of the power in the devices that we do have. He talked about one case where a relatively small amount of code change, around 15 lines of code, provided a large reduction in the time to process the data. This is definitely true of Civil 3D. I can see many instances where multithreading could improve the performance of Civil 3D. Think how much quicker a drawing could be opened if the graphics card and 8 cores could work together to make sure all of the labels in a drawing are up to date.

Since I purchased a Dell Precision laptop last year, I don’t see a Tower in my future. But I’ve been happy with my existing laptop and would look to purchase Dell products in the future.

Upgrading to Civil 3D 2013 (Programming)

With Civil 3D 2013 comes some changes in the API. Many of the various items have been combined to streamline the API. This also will create some headaches in doing some additional work to upgrade.

The first thing you may want to do (probably have to do) is to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010. You can use the free or pay version.

Next double click properties and open up the Application tab. Change the Target framework to “.NET Framework 4”. It will make you restart the project, so press the yes button.

Next we need to change the references from 2012 to 2013.

You can change the reference in vb.NET from the properties or in c# in the Solution Explorer. For the AeccXLandLib and the AeccXUiLandLib you want to not use them any more. You will want to use the preassembled Civil 3D version which may be found in:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013

For 2013 you will also need to add accoremgd.dll as a reference.

For 2013 you will need to change PointEntity to CogoPoint.

Next you will need to replace all of the instances of Autodesk.Civil.Land, Autodesk.Civil.Pipe and the similar typed names. Remove the Land and Pipe liked parts and it should work as long as you aren’t using some of the methods that have changed. If there is you will have to figure out how to change them.

Profile View Bands

I’m working on a top secret project. One of the tasks is modifying the profile view band labels to show information from a surveyed point’s description. I was having a bit of trouble finding were to grab the profile view band labels. The bands are a part of the Profile View object in .NET, but that only controls how the band shows the information.

In order to get the Profile Band Label Groups one has to use the GetAvailableLabelGroups static method (for 2012, in 2013 the updated method is called GetAvailableLabelGroupIds .

ProfileView profView = ssResult.ObjectId.GetObject(OpenMode.ForWrite) as ProfileView;

RXClass profDataBandLabelGroupRXClass = SystemObjects.ClassDictionary["AeccDbProfileDataBandLabeling"] as RXClass;
ObjectIdCollection profBandLabelsObjIdColl = ProfileBandLabelGroup.GetAvailableLabelGroups(profDataBandLabelGroupRXClass, profView.ObjectId, false);

Once I have the Label Group I can then use the information to modify the labels. The RXClass information I got from the Swamp.