BIM on the Rocks

Join me for What's New Civil 3D 2010 Part II Today at 1PM EDT

Sorry for the short notice- I'm opening the show for Lucy today for about 30-45 minutes. I'm covering profile hatching, object projection, Revit interoperabilty, labeling and other goodies as well as answering your questions. Lucy will join us to talk about the new field to finish tools and survey enhancements.

See you there!

Sign Up for Today's Civil 3D Webcast with Dana and Lucy

Familiar Voices on NPR

I'm excited to check out a segment from this morning on NPR

Virtual Shovel-Ready Projects Get Stimulus Money

The segment features our work here at Autodesk in the transportation industry- specifically our shovel-ready efforts. You'll hear from some members of our team- including Kevin Stewart and David Fagerman.

Using GIS Data in Civil 3D 2010

One of my favorite topics of conversation is using geospatial data in Civil 3D. Civil 3D is built on Map 3D, so you get the advantage of several methods of importing shapefiles, arcinfo data, raster imagery, and much more. I'll be showing some techniques in Civil 3D 2010, but this capability has been around for a few releases and much of it should work similarly in Civil 3D 2009, 2008 and 2007. I originally wrote a process for Civil 3D 2007, which you can find here at "Can you do that in CAD? Yes!"

You can connect to data through the FDO a few different ways, but a really easy way is to just drag your shapefile into the drawing area. This animated image shows you how- click on the image to see the animation.

Next, bring in the Map Workspace. I typically get it by typing "mapwspace" in the command line. Then right click on the data you'd like to study. Choose Edit Style.

 

In the dialog, use the pull-down to choose which property of the data you'd like to theme. For example, this data has a field that breaks the soils up into categories of "well drained", "poorly drained", etc. I want to look for well drained soils, so I will chose that field. The theme will make each different drainage type a different color. You can play around with the colors using that style range option.

Then I can press the Label Ramp button and it brings up a dialog which will automatically make a label for each polygon. You can label the same data as your color theme, but you can choose anything else. For example, I could color the polygons by drainage properties, but label them with their soil name of hydrologic group.

Once I press OK to dismiss both dialogs, I can see a nice color map.

Let's say I wanted to isolate just the well drained soils. I can make a query to sort things out.

For this example, I made a property query and used the "get values" button to provide a list of properties so that I didn't have to remember how to spell "Well Drained" (or remember what my choices are).

Once I press OK, my map is redone, and those well drained areas are isolated.

 

A few weeks ago, Lucy did a webcast about using geospatial data that covers a lot of techniques like this to help you study sites during the concept phase, bring in data to get started, create maps and exhibits, and other tasks using Civil 3D 2010. You can watch other archived webcasts here.

All the Good Posts Are Already Written

Today is my birthday and I am feeling old and uncreative. I was trying to get back some blogging mojo by remembering the old days of Civil 3D Rocks when I would be in bed at 2AM and my eyes would pop open with some new hack or idea. I tried to shake it off and go back to sleep, but it never worked. I had to get up and try it.

I've decided I am going to be like Disney. I am going to dig into the vault (though I never was a Vault person) and repurpose some old material. Perhaps I will only make them available for a limited time and throw in a complete line of plush toys, hair accessories and theme park rides.

The first one is going to be You Can't Do That In CAD! I have the draft right here, but it's my birthday, so I am going to eat popcorn for lunch and watch a half hour of LOST instead of finishing it. If you have any old favorites that you would like to see updated, improved and enhanced with new insights, please let me know.

And for some reason, I can't this song out of my head today.

 

Using a *.dtm File to Build a Civil 3D Surface

I was pulling down some data from the MassGIS website, and I found some terrain information in the from of *.dtm files. I couldn't figure out what to do with them, so I posted a question on the Civil 3D discussion group. Thanks to Jeff who gave me the answer.

You can import the file as an ENZ space delimited point file, either as part of your surface or as cogo points. (Be careful if the file is large- you might want to check out my Civil 3D and Large Surface Datasets Class from AU for more information.)

 

Getting Excited About Wastewater

I haven't been this excited about wastewater in a long time.

I've had three really memorable tours of sewage treatment plants. The first was way back in the stone ages when I lived in Edmonton. I was eager to be involved and learn lots of smart things, so I went the meeting of some environmental engineering group which included a tour of the Gold Bar treatment plant. There are only two things that I remember from that tour:

1. Some of the underground tunnels and such were finished with really gorgeous tile and it was explained that portions of the plant were built during one of Edmonton's many oil booms.
2. After walking through tunnels, viewing open pools of raw sewage and sewage under treatment, big piles of sludge and other glorious things, everyone sat down for a guest speaker on water bourne diseases while shoveling copious amounts of pizza in their mouths. Gross.

The second tour was of the Rehoboth Beach Sewage Treatment Plant as part of a sewage operator class at Delaware Tech. What I remember from this tour was seeing what appeared to be a UV system mothballed, and later hearing somebody that it was no longer in use because of the sunblock being washed down the drain by vacationers. I am not sure if that is true, but it was interesting. I can't seem to find any info on the web about the system currently in use, but I am curious. I've send some notes to people on the tour with me (8 years ago) to see if they remember.

The third tour was this week when I watched this Navisworks video recorded by Paul Walker, our Navisworks TMM. The dataset shown is a real wastewater treatment plant using spray irrigation for the City of Tallahassee.

Hazen and Sawyer is using AutoCAD MEP, Civil 3D and Navisworks to design the project, and our cross-discipline team is using the information to create demonstrations and training material.

We are still building our material from the project data, and this was one of Paul's early drafts, but I couldn't wait to publish it.

Videos like this one- built with real Civil 3D and AutoCAD MEP data from a real project really drive home the idea of BIM for me.

I will post more about this project as my work continues.

Friday Whetstone 5-8-2009

I've had a subscription to audible for about four years now. I originally signed up because I did a lot of driving and I felt like all of those hours were a waste just listening to the same four songs on the radio. It was before I had an iPod, so I used this neat little USB listening device and a cassette adapter.

Every month, I get to download two audio books, and this month one of my choices was Elsewhere, USA. I've been listening to it whenever I have a chance to go for a quick walk or when driving home from dropping the kids off. I'm not sure where I heard of the book, probably NPR, but I really didn't know what it was about. About 10 minutes into my walk on the first day, I stopped in my tracks, looked around with concern and said "Where are you? Come out of the bushes! I know you are following me because THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ME." Well, not exactly. But pretty dang close. The idea of the book is that we are never present in the moment- our minds are always moving on to the next thing.

The thing I hate about audiobooks is that I don't have the text in front of me to make a direct quote- but the idea that struck a personal chord was that professionals with young children enter into flexible or home office work arrangements because it gives them more room to manage their families. But it also means that there is no clear division between work and not work. We wind up working all the time... never going to bed without checking email one last time, reading email with one eye open after turning off the blackberry alarm in the morning...

I'm not sure the book offers any solutions (we haven't had many nice walking days), but I know that I've taken notice of this phenomenon in my life and I'm working on some strategies to make some more clear divisions and be totally present.

One simple thing is wearing a watch. This sounds silly, but when I wear I watch, I find that I look at my blackberry a whole lot less. If I can avoid looking at my blackberry, I won't get that adrenaline buildup that comes when you see an email that "will just take a second" to respond to. That email can wait. Especially at 6PM on Saturday night.

So my goals for the week are to keep going for walks while wearing a watch. Leave the blackberry at home for 45 minutes and find some non-business books to listen to at audible.

Erosion and Sediment Control

Erosion and Sediment Control,
originally uploaded by Dana Breig Probert.

Prospector's school is doing a unit on NPDES Phase II

WisDOT Corridor Building Workflow Webcast Thurs 5-7-2009

This Thursday, May 7, 2009  at 2PM EDT (11AM PDT), Karen Weiss will be hosting Brad Hollister from WisDOT.

Wisconsin DOT Webcast: Corridor Modeling with AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Karen will work with Brad to learn about WisDOT corridor modeling workflows, WisDOT custom subassemblies, corridor object codes, and their implementation project in general. 

Brad will demo an urban corridor model concept, a rural 4-Lane Divided corridor model concept, and a corridor refinement technique that uses PLine targeting on the daylight link to smooth out steep-to-flat slope transitions on backslopes and fill slopes.

You can register for tomorrow's webcast here.

Go ahead and register for all of the future Civil 3D related webcasts at www.autodesk.com/civil-webcasts

Also of note for those of you in the Wisconsin area- the Wisconsin Geospatial User Group is hosting a conference on June 1 that will include a ton of Civil 3D classes. Karen Weiss, our transportation TMM, will be presenting along with several other Autodeskers. You can register for WGUG event here.

Integrating Geospatial Data Webcast Wed 5-6-2009

You could create colorful and "intelligent" maps this way:

Or you could tune into Lucy's Road Design Series Webcast tomorrow Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 1PM EDT (10AM PDT)

Lucy will be covering:

• Connecting to a variety of file types
• Drag and drop capabilities
• Theme and labeling capabilities
• Using huge aerial photos
• Converting DEMs to surfaces
• Checking out a GIS feature, editing it, creating identical feature, and checking data back-in
• Transforming CAD data from one coordinate zone to another

Sign up for more upcoming webcasts at www.autodesk.com/civil-webcasts. There is also a WisDOT Corridor Workflow webcast on Thursday, May 7, 2009.

Or you could trust this guy to do it for you.