As part of a planned series of User Groups and technical Forums, Excitech held an Infrastructure User Group meeting in Enfield on May 11th, 2010.

The purpose of the User Group was to bring together engineers and technicians who work in Infrastructure Design in order to show the latest software solutions and for everyone to share their experience of using the solutions in practice.

The day was kicked off with an overview of the latest 2011 versions of AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D, with Jack Strongitharm of Autodesk showing off his Civil 3D skills once again!

Robert Issott of Arups presented the user case study, and judging from the feedback we received everyone was really impressed with what he has been doing with Civil 3D.

Particularly impressive was the Bradford Mirror Pool project which shows just how versatile Civil 3D can be with a bit of lateral thinking. Our thanks to Robert for stepping up to the mark to give this presentation.

We finished the morning off with a look at some complementary solutions, such as Autodesk Dynamite VSP, Navisworks and the Civil 3D bridge modelling toolkit.  Steve Rudge, who has recently joined Excitech as our Senior Consultant for MEP and Plant solutions, gave an overview of Plant in the Environment using Plant 3D. This was an excellent presentation and served to highlight the fact that there are other solutions that could be considered for designing utility plant in conjunction with Civil 3D.

After a brief lunch, we started the afternoon with a look at Autodesk LandXplorer, a great product which entered the Autodesk portfolio last year, and is used for developing and presenting Digital City models

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Lawrence Hooker, our resident structural and mechanical guru gave another great presentation on Collaboration and Design Data workflow. Here he looked at how we can better integrate some of the Autodesk products, sharing data between Civil 3D and Revit, and Civil 3D and Inventor.

Jack Strongitharm once again took the stage with some really useful Tips and Tricks, showing how Civil 3D can link dynamically with MX using the Genio import/export tool and data shortcuts. He then showed off the new borehole import tool, and ended with a look at creating surfaces for visualisation.

After coffee it was the turn of Pierre Vogel, one of our Application Specialists, who showed off his expertise in Civil 3D and all things Google. He showed us how to use Google Earth with Civil 3D, exporting Civil models and importing Google Earth images and surfaces. He followed that up with a stunning presentation on using Google Earth as a mapping and GIS tool, which really showed what can be achieved with this free mapping service.

To round the day off there was a brief discussion and feedback session, where we discussed what was shown and what users would like to see in the next event.

I’d like to thank everyone who take time out of their busy schedules to attend this event. I hope that you found the day interesting and worthwhile, and we look forward to seeing you all again at the next one.

In case you’ve missed it, Autodesk have now released a Design Visualisation solution for Civil 3D. The solution is available for download from the Autodesk Subscription Centre and is based on Dynamite VSP and 3D Studio Max Design. If you have either Civil 3D or 3D Studio Max Design on subscription then you are entitled to download the solution for free. If you have Civil 3D but not Max Design and you want to give it a try then you can download a 30 day trial.

Dynamite VSP is a plug-in for 3D Studio Max Design 2010 (32-bit only) or 2011 (32 or 64 bit), and will enable you to bring in Civil 3D design information to quickly create a model in Max Design. The solution comes with an exporting tool (Autodesk® Dynamite VSP Exporter for AutoCAD Civil 3D) that plugs into Civil 3D and exports model data in a more efficient way than linking in drawings. Using Dynamite VSP you can configure which data is needed for your model (alignments, corridor feature lines, surfaces etc) and create it with automatic assignment of materials. Aerial images can be draped onto surfaces to give the model real-world context. Additional tools quickly populate the model with road markings, road signs and gantries, street furniture, barriers, vegetation and even custom structures such as bridge decks. Vehicles can be added to the model with the ability to include random vehicles and colours, and these can be animated to drive along the roads. Traffic flow data can also be imported and used to control the vehicle movements.

Should the Civil 3D model need to be changed, it can be re-exported to the same link file and the model in 3DS Max Design will be able to update automatically without the need to delete and recreate anything. Dynamite VSP will automate the process of creating drive-through or fly-through animations, and of course because this is 3D Studio Max you can render your animation to an extremely high quality.

What I like best about this solution is you don’t need to be a 3D Studio guru to create stunning visualisations – and you won’t be spending weeks doing it either – this is fast!

For those of you who have both Civil 3D and Revit in your toolkit, here are a few options to help you get your surface from Civil 3D into Revit.

Surface viewed in Civil 3D.

Revit has tools to create it’s own surfaces – called Toposurfaces – from either drawing data or from a point file (text file of XYZ co-ordinates). In this post we are going to take a look at creating a Toposurface directly from the Civil 3D surface object. The first thing to understand about the way Revit creates it’s surfaces is that just like Civil 3D they are formed from a series of triangles. Unfortunately, unlike Civil 3D, there is no way of automatically controlling how the triangles are created (no adding of breaklines, no option to swap triangle edges, etc). So, how faithfully Revit reproduces your surface may depend a lot on how you take it across – and there is no single method that works great for all circumstances.

Setting up the Civil 3D drawing

Create a new drawing with ONLY your Civil 3D surface in it. If you import a Civil 3D drawing into Revit, and you have both Civil 3D objects and the polylines, text, points and other AutoCAD information you used to create your surface, Revit can get confused with the co-ordinates. I have found the best way round this is to use Data shortcuts in Civil 3D to recreate the surface in an empty drawing, with a co-ordinate reference point (such as a Survey station or other known point). Civil 3D point objects don’t show up in Revit, so if you use a Civil 3D point as your reference marker, explode it before saving the file.

Importing into Revit

Using the Import CAD tool in Revit, you can import your Civil 3D drawing.

The best results are obtained when setting the import units to metres  rather than “Auto detect” (make sure Civil 3D has the AutoCAD units set to Metres!) and positioning Manual - Centre . This positioning is important – you may be tempted to put it at the correct co-ordinates (Origin to Origin), but as you will probably have some large co-ordinate values, you certainly won’t want to use these in Revit.

Use the Revit Survey Point and Project Base Point to align the surface drawing to your project. Use the “move” tool in Revit to move the entire import instance based on the reference point you added to the Civil 3D drawing, snapping onto the Revit Survey Point.

Surface From Contours

One option is to set the display of the surface in Civil 3D to show contours. This is achieved by using or creating a suitable contour surface style with the intervals set appropriately. If you use this option, then you need the contours spaced close enough to model the details of the surface, but not too close that you end up with a huge surface in Revit.

Use the Toposurface tool , “Create from Import”, “Select Import Instance” in Revit to create the surface by picking the import instance.

Switch to a 3D view in Revit, and then change the visibility / graphics settings so that the Toposurface is visible.

When you finish the surface creation, you will see the contours from the imported drawing, together with the shaded Revit toposurface. Notice where the Civil 3D contours disappear below the Revit surface, showing the differences in the way the two surfaces have been triangulated.

Surface From Triangles

You can also try using a triangle display from Civil 3D. Since Revit does not honour every triangle formed in Civil 3D, there will be some discrepancies in the results. Set the surface style in the Civil 3D drawing to one that shows triangles in both plan and model views.

The image above shows the Revit triangle sides highlighted which don’t conform to the Civil 3D triangulation. However, if your Civil 3D surface has triangles which are evenly spaced the you should get a reasonable result.

Autodesk have now released Update 2 for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010.

The update can be found here.

Update 2 contains all previous updates for Civil 3D 2010.

This update includes the resolution of over 40 issues. This section of the readme documents the resolved issues that previously caused loss of data, unexpected failures of AutoCAD Civil 3D, or reflect a change in functionality. You can view the issues resolved in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 Update 1 in the Update 1 Readme.

General

Alignments

API

Corridors

If you are using Windows XP and have set your display settings to Large DPI, you may find that certain dialog boxes in AutoCAD don’t display all the options. Here in this example I am using Civil 3D and trying to import a LandXML file into the survey database. Unfortunately, I can’t select the file I want to import because the right hand side of the dialog just won’t display, no matter how I try and re-size it.

If you edit your display settings, you can click on the Advanced options….

…and you’ll probably find you have Large Size set for your screen resolution.

In the DPI settings, select Custom, and then you can manually tweak the settings. With a bit of trial and error I found that setting this to 128% worked for me.

You’ll probably have to reboot your machine, but now when you go back into AutoCAD you should find the dialogs work as expected. Now I can see the Browse button and pick my file!

Civil 3D’s Plan Production tools are a great way of automatically laying out plan and profile sheets along your route design. You can create your own template for the plans that include fields you can update automatically on all the sheets, such as the project name, client etc. This post explores how to create a template with the fields you want using Sheet Set Manager.

The first step is to set up the sheet template. There are sample templates you can use as a guide, or you can set one up from scratch. In an empty drawing, create a new layout tab and name it appropriately, e.g. “A1 1to500 plan and profile”. Set up the paper size and then create the viewports. For each viewport, set the viewport type in the viewport properties (either Plan or Profile). Civil 3D uses this to determine which viewport will be used for the plan view and which for the profile view. Also set the Annotation Scale for the viewport.

Create attributes for the fields you want to have update automatically in the Title Block, using the attdef command.

Define the Tag and Prompt, but for the Default value, click on the Insert Field button.

In the Field dialog, select SheetSet as the field category. You could use any other field type as well if you wish. Select the field you want to insert – for example, pick CurrentSheetSetProjectName for the Project Name. If the field you want is not listed - in this case we want a Client Name field – then select CurrentSheetSetCustom, and create a Custom Property Name.

Add the attribute to the drawing frame, as below..

Save the drawing as an AutoCAD drawing template (.dwt).

When you create sheets using the Plan Production tools in Civil 3D, select the appropriate template…

During the Create Sheets phase, define the Sheet Set name and location.

Initially the fields may not be populated.

From Sheet Set Manager, click on Properties….

Add the properties required to the Sheet Set…

For any Custom Properties you defined, click on the Edit Custom Properties button. Add the custom properties using the same names that were used in the template.

The updatefield command can be used to update any fields in the drawing.

For more information, click the link below…

Aug 26 - Autodesk Acquires BOSS Int’l Water Analysis Apps

This is a very interesting development, as Boss Int’l produce some very good products for water analysis. Exactly how this will make it’s way into the Autodesk product range is not clear at the moment, but the potential is that we may eventually be able to carry out drainage and flood analysis directly in Civil 3D. Purely speculation on my part, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a two-tier Civil 3D product range – with a basic Civil package and then a high end package with all of the analysis functionality. A similar product line already exists in the States, with AutoCAD Civil and then AutoCAD Civil 3D as we know it in the UK. One of the Boss apps is a water distribution package. I would imagine this might well make it’s way into Topobase, or possibly even Map 3D. Take a look at the Boss web site for more info.

Using Civil 3D, you can create strata surfaces from your borehole elevations – but if you simply take the elevations of your borehole data and create a surface from it, you probably won’t like the results…

In the example above, the profile shows the strata surface touches the ground surface – but that’s because there are not enough strata levels to accurately portray the relationship to the ground.

Instead of using the borehole elevations directly, you can use the depths of the strata and build a surface from that. Use Excel or notepad and create a .csv file that contains the Easting, Northing and depth of the surface, and import it into a point group. I used Overrides in the point group properties to set the Point Level to the user defined field “Depth”.

Build a surface from this data, and you will have something that looks like this:-

The heights on the Strata surface are not heights at all, of course, but the values represent the depth of the surface below ground. But now we can create a Volume Surface from the two surfaces, which will create a new surface showing the depth of the strata below the existing ground.

The resulting surfaces now look like this in profile…

Notice how the strata surface follows the ground line using the interpolated depths.

The strata surface is a Volume Surface, and so cannot be used as a target for grading operations in it’s present form.

However, you can export the surface as a LandXML file, and then re-import it as a normal TIN surface…

..just make sure you uncheck the section that refers to SurfVolumes in the Import LandXML dialog box.

Autodesk have now released Update 1 for Civil 3D 2010. There were some frustrating bugs in the release version of 2010, and amongst my favourites fixes are:

• Losing sample lines from a referenced alignment if you RECOVERed the drawing
• Disappearing or shifting cross-section band labels if you changed the band sets.
• Intersection objects not working as expected on files with large co-ordinate values (over 7 digits)
• Viewing multiple points in the Object Viewer no causes a fatal error
• Profile chainage band labels not displaying properly on a 2009 drawing opened in 2010
• Surfaces created from contours have strange(!) heights

There are a lot of issues addressed in this update, so don’t forget to view the read-me file first. There was perhaps one notable topic missing from the list of fixes though. In my opinion, Civil 3D 2010 has got some really good new features – but it seems the price we’ve had to pay is we now have a Civil 3D with a voracious appetite for memory. I’ve spent many a happy hour watching the Mem Usage counter click over in Windows Task Manager, with Civil 3D gobbling every last bit up as quickly as it can. I’m sure there must be some memory leaks somewhere for it to be consuming so much, but there is not mention of any memory issues being fixed in this update. Perhaps we’ll get some answers next time…

The update can be downloaded here.

When creating Section views you can now control how many Ordinate lines (Gray Lines) display by simply deleting the lines that are not required from the Section View. I recently explored this process and found that deviating form the UK Country Kit Styles to be a challenging at times.

In this image you will notice I only require the levels from the Centre line, both Channel lines and also the Daylight lines.

The labels on the left have additional levels that need to be deleted. But lets first look at which Band Styles I used to get the correct levels. In the image below under Bands Tab you can see the three Styles that are applied.

The GAP column has a 5.00mm value that allow the Bands to be offset on the Y-Axis away from the Section view. To get the correct Levels we need to scroll further along the and adjust the SECTION 1 and SECTION 2 columns.

To remove the unwanted Ordinate lines and labels you will need to use CTRL + SELECT, this will allow you to individually remove each ordinate line (gray lines) from your section view. In my screen capture I have selected the labels and you can see how the Cyan grips highlight all the labels. Be careful not to select the incorrect labels as this caused me some frustration in the exercise.

The rest of the Section View Labels are easily modified inside the Section View Style dialog box. The DATUM 35.000 label (Title text) as well as the ALIGNMENT label (Title content) can be modified by substituting values according to my screen capture below.