From the Ground Up

Where are the Civil View Tutorials?

Caught me out this, but all the tutorials for 3DS Max Design have been moved to online. Probably to keep the installer from getting bigger.

So if you need to use them and learn, here is the link.

Link to tutorials

 

Thanks to Ian McGregor for hunting these down.

 

Jack Strongitharm

Photo montages with the Infrastructure Premium Suite - Preview

Been working on how to work up a photo montage today and actually found it very easy to do.

So here's a preview of what I will write up for next week.

Yes it looks a bit tame compared to augmented reality in Infrastructure Modeller, however these are images you have to provide in environmental statement reports.

To be continued...

Jack Strongitharm

Creating outer boundaries for buildings - TIP and TRICK

Been a little while since I posted a cool tip and even this time I have taken someone else’s idea.

This one is from Donal McMoreland of Amicus Technology in Galway, Ireland.

http://www.amicustec.ie

So you may want to build a cool city model using our Infrastructure Modeler application and you have the local mapping dataset, (this one from the OSi in Ireland)

The problem here is that there is no polygons or closed polylines, especially when you have adjoining properties

So the steps are

Create a new layer and make current.

Isolate the building layer

Draw a rectangle around the area

Now using the BHATCH command (use the solid hatch), select a point in the area outside the buildings within your rectangle

Select your solid hatch and then right click and select ‘Generate Boundary’

Now select and delete the solid hatch and you are now left with nice closed polylines around each building.

Final step if you are going into Infrastructure Modeller, it is better to save this layer to a SDF file, so type in MAPEXPORT and save to a file.

 

Now you can connect that SDF file in Infrastructure Modeler and up they pop!

(Note the relistic sky in Galway)

 Jack Strongitharm

 

 

 

Nice tip, thanks Donal !!

 

Jack Strongitharm

Cut and Fill Tadpoles - the re-visit

After a couple of comments on the previous post I have done some tweaks.

1. I replaced the cad block to a triangle symbol shape in the slope marking style as some people were finding that when applied a block would be applied at 0,0,0.  So I will log this issue

2. Amended the cut styles as the head of the tadpole was not positioned correctly (thank you Neil:) )

Again, thanks for the feedback

Download Cut and Fill Tadpoles_Triangles

 
Jack Strongitharm

Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler Plugin for Civil 3D 2012

One thing to add if you get hold of a copy of this new bit of kit, is the plug in for Civil 3D.

Add it in the installer under the ‘tools and utilities’ button

And you get a nice little button in your output ribbon

 

 

It will export the civil objects into this IMX file format ready to go straight into your model.

 

Will pick up on this in my next post.

 

Jack Strongitharm

Cut and Fill Tadpoles - TIP and TRICK

Something I have been meaning to do for a while.

The tadpole symbol I have in the UKIE country kit upto 2012 was a bit poor and also not set up to draw in separate colours for cut and fill as I am sure most of us plot in colour.

So here you can download the sample file with some new styles in there ready to drag and drop into your own template. (made in 2011 version)

Download Cut and Fill Tadpoles (Right click on the link and 'Save As')

Here is how you can use them.

For corridors, using the ‘Slope Markings’ tab of the Corridor Properties, you select two feature line codes to use to draw the tadpoles to. 

You select these lines in the plan view, so make sure you have them displayed.

So in this example, I want to select the corridor feature line on the back of footpath and then the daylight_cut or daylight_fill

 

 

When you select the lines, if there are multiple lines drawn close or on top of each other you get this selection box

Choose the cut or fill so that the tadpole can react appropriately for colour

You need to do this for both cut and fill and sections of the corridor.

Choose the cut or fill tadpole style

For colour control for these, the blocks are placed in C-TADPOLES_Cut and C-TADPOLES_Fill layers.

 

Within Grading, Cut and Fill is automated via a Cut and Fill style.

These again use the same slope marking symbol style as the ones above.

 

The only difference is that you might want a small spacing of the tadpole symbols to be placed.

So for this in this file there are two versions of the tadpole style,

 

So you can see here where you control the distance and also the length of the line that extends from the block to the daylight line.

You may need to tweak this values to suit your project to get the best effect.

 

Hope it helps

 

Jack Strongitharn

AutoCAD Civil 3D Workflow Series - Designing a Layby

Not sure on how to design a particular design task, well hopefully we can help out with some workflows on using Civil 3D functionality to carry these out.

First one

Designing a Layby

 

Download AutoCAD Civil 3D - Designing a Layby

Jack Strongitharm

 

2D to 3D Survey Conversion

Great little tool here that I know a number of you have used in previous versions.

With the main focus on the change from VBA to .NET, Will Forty has updated his tool to work in .NET and of course in full 64bit glory.

Check out his website and short video to explain how it all works and of course get the tool downloaded.

http://howtoautocad.com/autocad-civil-3d-survey-fix-tool/

 

Jack Strongitharm

Subassembly insert point?

Getting feature lines on the wrong side? Specially in junctions/intersections?

So there is always some little hidden changes that don't get flagged unless you read blogs like this (and somebody has pointed it out to us!)

So a change in 2011 that I missed is that with the laneoutsidesuper subassembly you can choose to what the insert point of that subassembly represents.

So a sensible change would be to the subassemblies for junctions (yes I wish I knew about this for the country kit for this past year)

So rather than the lane saying 'Crown' around the kerb return it can now represent 'Edge of Carriageway' or for those using US English 'ETW'

This can come in handy for a lot more applications when adding widening bays etc

Just toggle the value in the subassembly properties.

 

Jack Strongitharm 

Jamies Jewels!

There is a new blog which I thought you’d like to know about. This European blog is created by Jamie Gwilliam of Autodesk. It concentrates on 3ds Max/Design and Design Visualisation. This covers many of his past email newsletters as an archive and also includes articles he has produced on image creation.

Jamie, based in London, has a background in Industrial Design and Architectural Visualisation as well as experience with working with Games companies.

The blog is called ‘Jamie’s Jewels’ and promises lots of gems of information. Have a look at http://bit.ly/1jamiesjewels

Jack Strongitharm