BIM on the Rocks

Volumes Dashboard Extension for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012

Every Thursday morning, I have a meeting with Dave Simeone, Nick Zeeben and other team members that prefer to remain anonymous. Here is a picture of Dave as he reminds me that I still have not talked about the Volumes Dashboard Extension which is available on the Autodesk Subscription Center. If I don’t get this posted soon, he’s going to unleash his pet fisher cat on me.

Volumes Dashboard gives you tools to aggregate the results of multiple volume calculations. For example, let’s say I have a road design. I have an existing ground surface and a proposed ground surface that is linked to the road corridor. My road is broken into three phases and I’d like to know the total cut/fill as well as the cut/fill for each individual phase.

Using the dashboard, I create a volume surface and assign boundaries for each phase. As I work through iterations that affect the proposed surface, such as a profile adjustment, I can see the effect in real time on the dashboard. I can also create reports at any time.

I created a video introduction to how this tool works. I posted it to youtube (embedded below). I will make it available for download shortly- typepad doesn’t seem to want to let me upload it right this second.

Civil 3D 2010: Bring it on!

Today is the beginning of the official launch. Civil 3D 2010 will be available to download from the subscription center in a few weeks, and will ship shortly thereafter. I'll let you know specifics once I hear the final dates.

I would write this big, long blog post about all of the awesome stuff coming in detail, but truth be told, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I've spent a bunch of time over the past week writing some AU-style papers for a user event where I am teaching terrain modeling, corridor modeling for stream design and roundabout modeling. I did as much as possible in drawings in the local language to make it easier on my translators and the students. It's pretty hard to follow a roundabout design when the alignments are named in Czech! (Well, not if you speak Czech, I suppose.) I also think I learned how to say "triangles, points and border" and other handy phrases such as that.

So James over at Civil3D.com posted his list of favorites and some videos, and I know there is more on its way all across the Civil 3D blogosphere. You might want to sign up for Tenlinks email if you don't already. I am sure Roopinder will have some listings of key articles as the weeks go on.

Since we've already talked about intersections quickly, and shown how much faster it is to build an intersection model in Civil 3D 2010 (and its sure to be high on all of the other bloggers' lists of things to talk about), I've uploaded a video about the new Quantity Takeoff Tools in Civil 3D 2010.

Pay items can be built into your corridor model, your pipe networks, and assigned to blocks, lines, hatches and areas. While we have been able to get quanities out of corridors before, it was never in the right form. Who cares about the cubic yards of material in curb? That isn't how we order it and pay for it- we pay for linear feet. The new QTO tools take care of that for you and can produce reports, tables and more. Check out the video on youtube, or watch below. (The video quality is not the best, I forgot to reprocess it in camtasia before I uploaded it, but hopefully you get the idea. It is narrated by Karen Weiss, our Transporation Technical Marketing Manager.)

Related Posts:

Civil 3D 2010: Very Quick Look at Intersections

Building Intersections in Civil 3D 2009 vs Civil 3D 2010