New Class for 2008

I am VERY excited that Autodesk has put together this class. It will be offered at L.A. CAD and is will be a 2 day course. The prerequites include knowledge of Civil 3D (or AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Essentials).

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 Creating and Managing Plan Sets

This courseware shows how to use AutoCAD® Civil 3D® to complete tasks associated with the creation of construction documents. The courseware explains the functions of the Plan Production feature; its interaction with the Vault and with data shortcut project management components of Civil 3D; and the creation of documents using the Sheet Set Manager. Other topics covered include Sheet Template creation; Matchline and Frame styles; generation of Plan; Profile; Plan & Profile sheets; and alternate uses for the Plan Production feature.
The courseware examines several possible scenarios as students work through real-world examples to generate construction documents. The examples include plan and profile sheets as well as plan-only documents such as multi-sheet grading plans. Different annotation and linework strategies are presented and compared.

I wanted to say a special thanks to Mark Scacco, he is the author of this courseware! THANKS A BUNCH MARK :)

Nifty Surface Tweaks

Hello All,

I have a pretty neat surface tweak that I would like to share with you. I often get my data to build the surface from Survey. Usually what they give me is either a point file or a drawing that already has the points dumped into it. So I create some point groups to organize my data and try to weed out any points that are sitting at an elevation of zero and away I go. It is sometimes a quite tedious process to try and weed out all the points whose elevation cannot be used to build the surface so there is another way to accomplish the same sort of task.

Sometimes Survey puts in a very low (like zero) or a very high (like 10,000) elevation for points that they do not intend to be build in the surface. These elevations are extremes so when you look at the point data you know that they should be excluded from the surface data. If you have a good idea of what the elevations of your site should be you can exclude elevations less than or greater than a certain value. Here's how...

On your prospector tab you must first create a new surface (right-click on the Surfaces collection and select New). For what we are doing today we are going to select a TIN surface, give it a name of EG and display it as Contours 2' and 10'.

Hit OK to the Create Surface dialog box and now we need to dig into our surface properties to set up the less than and greater than values.

Select EG in your prospector, right-click and select Properties. While in your surface properties select the Definition tab and expand Build under the Definition Options and LOOK WHAT I'VE FOUND!!!

Now I am sure you may be curious if you can save this data to a template. Let's say that your Surveyors ALWAYS use values of zero when shooting trees for example so your surface will NEVER be built using a value of less than 1'. What you can do is create the surface, name it, give it a style, change your elevation values in the Definition and that data can absolutely be saved to a template file for later use.

Have fun with this!