Monday, May 15, 2006

Civil 3D 2007 - INSUNITS Revisited

I received I call today that made me aware that we will soon be receiving calls from users that will be new to 2007 products that skipped the use of 2006 products. Why?
Do you remember the issue with INSUNITS? If you do not keep reading...

(Much of the following was posted last year, May 31 to be exact, but will certainly become an issue again for new users soon).

It is now VERY necessary to notice what the INSUNITS value is set to for any drawing that you wish to INSERT or XREF. This only mattered in previous versions if you dragged-and-dropped via the DesignCenter.

If the INSUNITS for a source drawing does not match what the current (destination/target) drawing is set to, a scale factor will be applied. This has left some users baffled as to why their drawings with the same base and coordinate location do not land in the same area when inserted or xref'ed.

The INSUNITS value and the factor that will be applied now appear in the INSERT and XREF dialog boxes in the lower right hand corner. Be aware of what they report.

The change can be explained with a quick look into how INSUNITS is defined in HELP.

In 2005 and prior it said:
INSUNITS - Specifies a drawing-units value for automatic scaling of blocks or images dragged from DesignCenter and inserted into a drawing.

In 2006 and 2007 it says:
INSUNITS - Specifies a drawing-units value for automatic scaling of blocks, images, or xrefs inserted or attached to a drawing.

Look at the system variable of INSUNITSDEFSOURCE (Sets source content units value when INSUNITS is set to 0) and INSUNITSDEFTARGET (Sets target drawing units value when INSUNITS is set to 0) also for how drawing can additionally behave.

No comments: