Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Point It Out

Autodesk Civil 3D can create points by the following methods:

By an Alignment-
-at PC, PT, SC, Etc.
-Divide an alignment
-Mesaure an alignment
-Radial or Perpendicular
-Station/Offset
By a Surface
-Along Contours
-On Grid
-At Contours Vertices
-Random Points
By Importing a File
-Various combinations of PNEZD
By Miscellaneous
-Various manual placement commands

Monday, August 23, 2004

Dynamic Updates

Without question among the most compelling characteristics of Autodesk Civil 3D are the dynamic relationships.

Examples of this behavior are changes that occur to points automatically causing changes to surfaces built from the points, causing changes to contours based on the surfaces, and causing changes to profiles sampled from surfaces along alignments. Another example would be when an alignment is modified (this can occur by simply drag and drop), Stationing can be automatically updated and profiles would resample at the new location of the alignment.

The new processes eliminate the need for users to have to manually run the steps to make sure changes to one type of data are reflected in other data. This also eliminates the possiblilty of using out of date data.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Do It With Style

One of the most important aspects to Autodesk Civil 3D is the concept of styles. Styles control the appearance of "Objects". At a later point I will list all of the Civil 3D "Objects". There are many.

All a user has to do to change the appearance of an object is change the style applied to the object. For instance, a Point Object's appearance is controlled by two styles. The first style applies to the point marker. The second applies to the point label (the text). Changing one or both changes what it looks like.

Styles can be applied to points in various ways. Default styles will apply to all points at the moment of creation. Styles can be applied to a point group. Styles can be applied to individual points. This gives the user tremendous flexibility for controlling the appearance of points.

So, one of the more important goals in using Autodesk Civil 3D is to learn how to create, manage, and use styles for the various "Objects" within the program.

Thursday, August 19, 2004

What Does It Do?

Specifically Autodesk Civil 3D can do the following:

Data Management and Sharing-
-Import directly from Autodesk Land Desktop 2004 Project Data
-Import/Export via LandXML 1.0
COGO-
-Create points
-Point Groups
-Description Keys
Terrain Modeling-
-Create Surfaces
-Visualize Surfaces
-Analyze Surfaces
Sites-
-Create Parcels
-Create Alignments
-Generate Profiles
-Generate Sections
-Create Grading Objects

What it cannot do yet:

Road Sections-
Hydrology-

Pipes-
No Survey Module-

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

What is it?

Here is the official word about Civil 3D:

Autodesk® Civil 3D™ 2004 is the only civil engineering tool that creates intelligent relationships between objects so design changes are dynamically updated. The enhanced 3D interaction gives the user more design flexibility by making it easy to run and visualize what-if scenarios and to correct errors on-the-fly.

Note that the product is officially a preview release. This means it is not fully intended to be used for production yet. The intention is that user learn the new processes and begin creating styles for future production use.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Hello

I hope to be able to provide information and news regarding Autodesk Civil 3D.