What You See Is Not Always...

Recently, I was discussing one of my site grading drawings with a group, some of the blocks that were in my drawing caught the eye of one of the participants. These particular blocks are called Multi-View Blocks. They are different from other blocks in that they have one appearance from one perspective/view and look entirely different from other orientations. He asked if I could share those blocks with him.

As it turns out every owner of Civil 3D likely has these blocks already sitting on their computer. By default they are located at in several subdirectories found here:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk Civil 3D (version number)\Data\Symbols\Mvblocks\...

There can be found blocks that represent vehicles, landscaping items, buildings, and more. The image show two types of trees a street light, and a fire hydrant.

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.

INSUNITS Changed!

John Rodriguez, a new co-worker of mine, pointed out that 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 version if you dragged-and-dropped via the DesignCenter.

If INSUNITS does not match what the current (destination) 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 INSBASE 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 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 it says:
INSUNITS - Specifies a drawing-units value for automatic scaling of blocks, images, or xrefs inserted or attached to a drawing.

AutoCAD 2006

Today in Orlando, with Autodesk, the Infrastructure Solution Division's (ISD's) focus was AutoCAD 2006. The main focus of this release, without question, is making drafting faster and easier. This is accomplished by the five following capabilities:

1. Much Improved Heads-up Design
2. Anntotation Improvements
3. Productivity Enhancements
4. Improved Blocks
5. Migration/Transition

Perhaps the most impactful for users with more experience is the "Dynamic Imput." This is the ability to see most of the user's interactions at the input location instead of the command line which is where we are used to seeing them. This NEW ability allows us to work without the command line visible. Thereby gaining extra drawing real estate. To be honest I do not miss the command line.

Lynn Counts Blocks

In her blog, Lynn Allen offered what I thought was a very elegant and easy way of count blocks in a drawing.

This is accomplished by using the EATTEXT command which brings up the Attribute Extraction Wizard. If we press the "NEXT>" button three times, to accept the defaults for the first three screens of the wizard, we end up at a table with all of the blocks listed and counted. Do not forget that you can size the dialog box to view more data at once.