Friday, March 24, 2006

Wow!

I just watched the weekly webcast in which Autodesk introduced Civil 3D 2007. The first thing that amazed me was the number of attendees. I noticed the peak at about 9:20 of over 980 attendees. Awesome.

OK, on to the important stuff.

Dave Simeone and Anthony Governanti did a great job of very quickly (they only had 1 hour) demonstrating some of the new capabilities. Much of it had already been described, here and in other blogs, but to see this live is very different.

I few memorable items for me were...

Labels with masks
Labels with expressions (formulas)
Labels that referenced multiple objects and object types
Generic Note with intelligent layout viewport resizing
The entirely revamped Help documentation
Better surface elimination of flat triangles
Quick Profiles
Inclusion of base feature line in Quick Profiles
Many new Grading Feature Line tools
Autodesk Vault to manage projects
Added project support for Pipes
Survey functionality (similar to Survey add-on to Land Desktop) in the box
Graphically edit Corridor model regions
Immediate creation of corridor surface in Prospector
Ability to graphically modify individual sections that affect corridor
Profile can contain fixed, floating, or free constraints (similar to horiz aligns)
Annotate Vertical Curve info in plan view
Interference checking for pipe networks
Import LDt pipe runs
Part Builder documented and exposed in UI
Replacement of VIZ Render with native AutoCAD tools

Whew!

They suggested that we all begin preparing for the arrival of 2007 which they stated will begin shipping in April.

Lastly, they answered eight and one half pages of questions asked via an input window.

Lots to process.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The meeting was fast paced and covered quite a bit of ground (ha ha). My feeling is that we were just shown the highlights of the highlights. One thing that I saw flash by during one of the demonstrations was what appeared to be a new style, "corridor styles". I have been trying to figure out how to better control corridor feature line settings at corridor creation in 2006 but have not had much luck. I hope this new style will be the answer.

Now for something completely different. Do you know when ADT 2007 will be released?

Anonymous said...

Something was said regarding the enhancements to the project management functionality and how it will positivly affect not only users within a team environment but also the "one man or woman shop." I do not know if it was Dave or Anthony that mentioned this but it got me to thinking what the best practices are for the stand alone user. Much is said about how the functionality can be used in the team environment but is it worth it for the single designer to setup a project? I suspect that for certain objects (EG surface) it would be to the users advantage. Your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

It all depends on the situation; but generally, all users can benefit from the new projects and data management features. Without getting into too many details (come see next week's webcast for that) you can setup the projects and Vault to run "locally" so that a single user can take advantage of the referencing and versioning of data. I'm sure Angel can add plenty more vaule, but that's my two cents.

Anonymous said...

Anthony,

Wow, an answer from the man himself!

I look forward to learning how the project environment benefits all users next week at the webcast.

Angel, I value your opinion and would love to hear your ideas on this issue.

Angel Espinoza said...

Hello Chuck, Clearly, this will need a more detailed explanation in the future, but here is the penny version. With Vault we can, as Anthony indicates, keep track of design versions and have an easier referencing ability. Additionally, we can rollback a design version, rename file(s) and the vault will maintain links to file(s), archiving of a group of files easily or more simply open files via the vault. Some of these capabilities may have been available via separate utilities or programs, (i.e. the Reference Manager, Sheet Manager) here it is all together.

I hope this helps a little.