Production Software Poll & Being Civil

On the left edge of the screen you should be able to see a poll that asks about your primary version of civil engineering design software. Please take a moment to enter your vote.


This poll will be active until August 28.


This is the same poll that you might see on the "Being Civil" blog. If you have not visisted that blog you absolutely should. There is lots of great info there. Like the post about a video titled:


"Understanding Performance using Civil 3D".


That is a 22 minute video with great information about the different memory, video and operating system considerations that impact performance.

Be Better! ...always vote.

2010

Today, Shaan Hurley and many other bloggers have been given permission to blog about AutoCAD 2010. click on the title of this post to get to Shaan's blog.

Look for his post from yesterday (February 4) to see a link for a sneak peek webcast for tomorrow (February 6) for AEC products (Civil 3D among other).

Be Better!... Look as far forward as possible!

New and Updated Whitepapers

As announced by Dan Philbrick, Autodesk's Civil 3D Software Development Manager, in the blog he shares with Dave Simeone, "The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show" Autodesk has just released one new whitepaper and updated a previous whitepaper.

The new whitepaper is titled:

Best Practices for Working with Large Data Sets

The updated whitepaper is:

Civil 3D 2008 Project Management Using Autodesk Vault

Lastly, Dan mentions technical solution 1071001 that involves enabling Window to over-ride the 2GB limit for applications and allow Civil 3D to use 3GB of physical memory to improve performance.

All of this information is very useful and much appreciated. Thanks Autodesk.

A Couple More Blogs

I have recently run across...

Civil 3D Worldwide by Rad Lazic (a friend)

and

CommTech CAD Café by Brian J. Hailey and LuAnn Sims

I wish all of you success in these efforts.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

Here is another Civil 3D blog. Cristopher F. from San Luis Obispo, CA writes Civil 3D Reminders. He has shared several undocumented commands.

Good job Christopher.

New AutoCAD Civil 3D Blog

Autodesk's Sanay Asnani has started a Civil 3D blog called 2D to (Civil) 3D.

Sanjay is Autodesk's Civil 3D evangelist to the educational community. Sanjay's role will effect the future by contributing to the exposure of Civil 3D to engineering students across the country. Plus he has behind the scenes knowledge that we will likely benefit from.

Sanjay, we look forward to your efforts.

Windows Vista Update

In her Blog yesterday Heidi Hewitt provided an update about the support of Autodesk products on Window Vista. She states that AutoCAD 2008 and AutoCAD LT 2008 will be supported in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista.

But perhaps more importantly in the short term is that there will be in "the coming months" support for AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD LT 2007 on the Window Vista 32-bit version.

There has been no official word of future Vista support for Civil 3D yet.

Once again Heidi, thanks for the update.

Heidi Shows Us Annotation

If a picture is worth 1,000 words then a movie is worth 100,000 words. In her blog "AutoCAD Insider" Heidi Hewett talks about the new annotation scaling in AutoCAD 2008.

Plus as a bonus feature she has two links to animations about how this is done and how it will be done.

Thanks Heidi! This is very helpful information.

New Blog??

Here is a link to a new (what I think is a..) blog. It is on WordPress and seems to be about Civil 3D. The last post is about Civil 3D Point Groups.

New Blogger Interface!

I have been waiting to be able to use the NEW Blogger site. I had not been able to until now because of the size of this blog (almost 400 posts over 2 plus years).

The new Blogger allows many additional capabilities with blogs like this (ie. tags, easier formatting). I hope to be able to revise all old post to take advantage of the new abilities and make this blog better.

With the start of 2007 this blog can enter a new era. Cool.

If you have any suggestion, of course they are all welcome.

Lets start.

Tag I'm It

OK, so you have probably seen that a virtual game of tag has been under way with several of the bloggers lately. Not wishing to be the one that ignores this (I understand that either my great-grandchildren would pay the price for this or I will develop an incurable ailment after the next full moon) I will contribute.

5 CAD related things that you may not know about me.

1. Actually, some may be aware that I was taught AutoCAD Release 9 by THE Lynn Allen back in October of 1987. (It is not easy taking classes from a kindergartener).

2. I taught AutoCAD to John Rodriguez (a current KETIV co-worker) back in 1990 where we worked together for the 1st time (KETIV is our 3rd different company working together. Clearly, one of us is stalking the other).

3. I wrote profile creation lisp routines that somehow were in more wide use among engineering companies in southern California than I had worked at. How does that happen? Why didn't I have a copyright or something?

4. While learning CAD, during one particular class, I created a drawing of a spider web and spider. I then modified the drawing so that when I did an undo the spider moved around the web and ate a fly. (Don't ask me why? Hey, the instructor said he had never seen that before!)

5. Creating 3D models in CAD completely correlates with my life-long fascination with miniatures.

I am going to join Anthony and tag Dan & Dave

Congratulations Abound

As I attempt to get caught up from being away there are a few pats on the back that I would like to share.

First to the group over at civil3d.com, for very quickly receiving their 100,000th page view. Few groups have contributed to advancing our collective industry as has Engineered Efficiency, Inc, and for achieving this milestone I congratulate them.

Next, to the following Autodesk University 2006 instuctors. They received the highest ratings from their class attendees for the specified categories:

HIGHEST RATED SPEAKER in 90min SESSION
Louis Marcoux "Animation Rigging concepts for Advanced 3ds MAX"

HIGHEST RATED SPEAKER in 90min HANDS-ON LAB
John Beltran "Introduction to Dynamic Blocks"

HIGHEST RATED SPEAKER in 3.5hr SESSION
Jay Tedeschi and Derrick Smith "Using Autodesk Inventor for Simulation"

HIGHEST RATED SPEAKER in a LARGE CLASS
Matt Murphy "The Do and Donts of Dynamic Blocks Revealed"

HIGHEST RATED FIRST-TIME AU SPEAKER
Kevin Robinson "Power Tools of AutoCAD Mechanical"

Great Job to you all!

Lastly, I congratulate all bloggers, users of YouTube, Amazon reviewers, Wiki contributors, posters to flickr, the MySpace community, bidders and sellers on eBay, iTunes downloaders, discussion group'ers, open source developers, and everyone else that helps define Web 2.0.

Why?

Because in their December 25, 2006 / January 1, 2007 edition Time Magazine made us all "Persons of the Year" for controlling the Information Age, along with all of the good and bad (spelling & grammar) that that entails.

New Year... New Blogs!

Well, here we are in 2007. I am back at the office attempting to get caught up.

I have recently become aware of some new blogs about Civil 3D. Here are the links:

"From the Ground Up" by Autodesk's Chris Berends, Ove Cervin, and Jack Strongitharm. (They are all based in Europe)
"the civil chick" by Sarah Cunningham (yes, it is all lowercase)
"billneu's Civil 3D wish list site" by Bill Neuhauser
"Avid User of Civil 3D" by Wendy Lim
"Civil 3D for Beginners" by Sami ????

Note: My aggregator now contains over 35 Civil 3D related blog feeds. Some are more active than others. Although, it all helps.

SubNote: My New Years resolution is to... "Be Better!"

New Autodesk Home Use Policy Mentioned By Dave

A very important new policy was mentioned by Dave Simeone, Autodesk Civil 3D Senior Product Manager, regarding the use of Autodesk products at home. This is a NEW exclusive benefit for subscription customers only.

100,000th Page View

It seems that at some point today the 100,000th page view to this blog will occur. I am now including the page view counter at the bottom of this blog.

If you should be that 100,000th Page view'er make a screen capture and email it to me. I would like to provide an "Angel's Civil 3D Thoughts" blog t-shirt.

Thank you all who introduced yourselves to me this week, and were kind enough to mention that you read this blog. It is good to know that it helps in some small way.

I also wish to thank everyone from whom I have learned from, shared with, and helped with this process. After all, we all have the same goal...

TO BE BETTER!

Blog Stats

About 800 more page views in order for this blog to reach a total of 100,000 page views.

It seems that it will happen on Friday.

Incredible.

Autodesk University 2006 Update

Today, Friday November 10th, is the last day to pre-register for Autodesk University 2006. This year's edition is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 27 through December 1. Anyone wishing to register after today can still do so on-site via late registration.

The demand for Civil 3D instruction has exceeded all expectations. This is evidenced by that fact that ALL three of my AU classes now have over 300 registrants. One of my two PowerTrack courses was closed at 440 registrants.

Joseph Wurcher mentioned in his AU Blog that overall registration is up 41% over last year's event. Remarkable!

Cul-De-Sacs Fix in SP3

Dan Philbrick, Autodesk Civil 3D Software Development Manager, mentioned in his blog, in the Civil Engineering Community, that Service Pack 3 fixes an issue that has existed when trying to design cul-de-sac corridors with arcs in the centerline alignment.

If our baseline was run around the cul-de-sac bulb entirely as one alignment and had as its target an centerline alighnment with an arc, the assemblies would not solve correctly and leave a flat teardrop shaped gap in the middle of the corridor. This did not happen if the centerline alignment was a tangent (straight).

The necessary workaround was to create two alignments around the bulb of the cul-de-sac each targeting the centerline alignment with the arc.

With the fix provide by Service Pack 3 we no longer need to create the two alignments and can accomplish this goal with one alignment if we so choose.




I went back through the ...README.htm file to see if this was mentioned. I could not find any mention of it. Either way this is a very good thing.

Too bad my Autodesk University "Cul-de-Sacs Are Not a Dead End" class handouts were already submitted. Oh well, I will just have to mention that that was fixed.

Civil 3D and Vizualization Blog

I see that Natan Elsberg of RDV Systems has started a blog. He will be posting about Civil 3D and visualization tools. It should be informative.

Good Luck Natan.

What Comes First AU or 100,000 Page Views

Lately, this blog has averaged over 6,000 page views a month. With 28 days left until Autodesk University 2006, there have been approximately 93,000 page views to date. With a little math it seems that it is possible the the 100,000th page view may occur while I am at AU.

Seems apropos.