Creating Custom Graded Corners in Civil3d

One of the first things people notice when moving from LDD to Civil3d is the lack of a mitred corner option for grading corners. There have been a number of discussions in the Autodesk Civil3d forum about work around this issue.But I would like to throw another option into the mix.
You can use the grading plane routines developed back in 2008 for the "Caffeinated Grading" paper at AU and shipped with Civil3d 2010 and 2011 as a .dvb file. or use the .net version  kindly updated here by Jeff Misher .

In the C3D Surface Working Plane.dll you get a number of additional commands

WorkingPlane2Point
WorkingPlane3Point
WorkPLaneMove
WorkPlaneResize
You can use these commands in combination with a temporary cut fill surface to create feature lines to generate a number external and internal corners and daylight lines to do this.

1. Download the .net .dll file for your version of Civil3d from here
2. Type netload and load the C3D Surface Working Plane.dll
3. Now try one of these methods to build a corner.

Option One
Extract zero cutfill line,trim and assign existing ground levels

Option Two

Trim up lines, assign surface elevations and add to surface as breaklines , infill grade the corner if you want  to avoid having to draw boundary.

Option Three

Trim up and add to surface as per above.

Change Multiple Layers in Style in one hit

Always learning something in Civil3d to change multiple sub component layers for example in the an alignment style to a no_plot layer.

1. Click the Name of the first component and hold the shift key.
2. Still holding the shift key click the name of the last component.
3. Now all component names are highlighted blue
4. Select the layer cell and select the layer you want all the components on.
5. All the layers are changed at once.

Two Types of Weeding give different results

Been playing around with weeding polyline contours to get my drawing file size down and have found that the mapclean –> weeding command gives different results to the featureline weeding command, not sure why at this stage but with the same settings the map weeding only removes about one third of the vertices that the featureline weed does. But the featureline weeding is very slow in processing a large number of polylines in one hit where as map is a lot quicker.

Checking and Assigning QTO items to Multiple Objects

I am just getting using QTO manager more an one thing that bugs me each time I use it is that in the assign pay item command you cannot use crossing window selections for multiple items. To assign payitems to multiple objects you have to select the objects first than go to the QTO manger and select assign pay item.

then the command line will come up with

Just press enter and payitems will be assigned to all of the objects you had selected.
To check that the items were assigned if you have roll over tool tips turned on move over the object and the payitem appears in the tooltip.

otherwise in the QTO manager select the payitem from your list of items and right click and choose select items with payitem

Extract 3dpolyline from Featureline

It is possible to extract a polyline from a Featureline here is an example

    Public Function PolylinefromFeatureline(ByVal Featureline As Civil.Land.DatabaseServices.FeatureLine) As Object
        'Refer to this forum post
        'http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D-Customization/Polylines-from-Featureline/td-p/3313009
        'http://msmvps.com/blogs/joacim/archive/2009/08/31/gettype-and-typeof-confusion.aspx

        Dim cv As Curve = Featureline.BaseCurve

        'The basecurve of a featureline can be a 3dpolyline, 2dpolyline or a curve
        'check if the base curve is a 3dPolyline
        If cv.GetType() Is GetType(Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices.Polyline3d) Then
            MsgBox("this is 3dpolyline")
        End If

        'check if the base curve is a Polyline
        If cv.GetType() Is GetType(Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices.Polyline) Then
            MsgBox("this is polyline")
        End If

        'check if the base curve is a 2dPolyline
        If cv.GetType() Is GetType(Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices.Polyline2d) Then
            MsgBox("this is 2dpolyline")
        End If

        'check if the base curve is a curve
        If cv.GetType() Is GetType(Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices.Curve) Then
            MsgBox("this is a curve")
        End If


        Return cv

    End Function

Quickly Saving and changing Views

For years I have used some lsp code in my acad.lsp file to save and restore views to jump from place to place in a drawing typing V1 saves view 1 typing R1 restores view 1 and you can save upto 10 views 0 to 9. I just updated the code last week to also save a layer snapshot at the same type here is a capture of the original code.

here is the revised code and link to the code in a txt file

Updating old Title Blocks to Work with SheetSet Manager

Just a reminder to myself to update and old title block with Sheetset Manager fields

1. Open the Titleblock in Block Editor .
2. Go to the Block Attribute you want to link to the Sheetset field.
3. Right click in the Value textbox and choose insert field

4. Go to CurrentSheetSetCustom and type in the custom property name exactly as it appears in the sheetset manager as shown both. Remember to map the connect field to the right attribute in the block

5. Save the changes to the titleblock.
6. Insert a new copy of the block in the drawing and it should update with the sheetset fields if the layout in in a sheet set.

7. Use to use express tools->block replace with the new title block with a different name but for some reason it does not update the block fields ever with ATTSYNC on not sure what going on here.

New Terrain Grading tools to crash and bash at the Lab

Today the Autodesk labs website released civil3d terrain modeller available here http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/civil3d_terrain/ for download and testing for 64 bit systems only.

I have downloaded the tool and had a play for a couple of hours.

Comments so far would be.

1. Wow
2. It has not crashed Civil3d yet but a bit slow for some tasks. could be lack of ram or high spec video card on my part.
3. Like the over all concept.
4. Would still like to get the featurelines of intersections, etc. maybe I have missed it
5. Like the 3d view editing tools wish this worked on individual vertices of a featureline as well in 3d.