Acad.lsp and Civil3d 2014

I am just getting around to updating to 2014 and had a bit of trouble getting my old lsp routines to run. To get them to run I had to set the new variable secureload to 1.

You can use the command “sysvldg” to check out what the settings for the variable mean.

As well as doing this I had to make sure the location of the acad.lsp file was listed in the autocad “support file search paths”

 

and ”trusted locations”

To start I only had the upper folder containing the acad.lsp file and this failed to load the acad.lsp file . This was because within the acad.lsp file I was calling other lsp routines to load in the folder one level down.

To find this load issuing I pasted the following into the command line to check the correct acad.lsp file was being loaded.

(startapp "notepad" (findfile "acad.lsp"))

Then I used the tip of putting a princ statement at the start and end of the acad.lsp file

(princ "\nLoading Acad.lsp")

(princ "\nAcad.lsp successfully loaded")

This display in command line when the acad.lsp file was starting to be loaded and if it was loaded successfully.

Winter Arriving, Construction Finishing and looking to hire

With the first major snowfall for the winter forecast for this weekend and the snow guns being fired up on the mountains midweek, it is not long until the start of the ski season.

This also marks the end of a busy summer construction season that has seen one of the larger roading projects completed in Queenstown for sometime. With 1.5km of roading and triple that amount in underground services being laid over the past 16 weeks  that has keep me busy and away from blogging much.

However being pretty much Engineer,Surveyor, Project Manager and Civil3d modeller on this job I have learnt a great deal and the best news of the lot I have to do it all over again next summer.

This the case I am on the hunt for a couple of people to join our small team in Queenstown, so if you love Civil3d and Revit and want to visit Queenstown for a year or two or make a lifestyle change drop me an email and let me know. 

Aerial Photo of Eastern Access Road under construction at Remarkables Park in Queenstown

Changing Visual Style of View Port

Its is always nice to print out a bit of a 3d image in a plan set of the grading works to communicate to everyone what things will look like. Typically jobs do not have the budget to do the full Monty so I just adjust the view port setting to give a basic image as shown below.

To get the shading to shown up in layout tab you have to select the viewport and make sure the Visual Style and Shade plot are set to some thing like Shaded and Conceptual in the properties window.

If not you have to open the Visual Styles Manager then select the viewport and while having the viewport selected double check the visual style you want to be applied to the view port.

Changing Block Units

Quick reminder to myself when you define a block you can give it units mm, m , or make it unitless.

If  someone draws a block of say a title block at 800 units by 400 units and then sets the blockunits to m by mistake when the block is inserted into a drawing with the drawings units set as mm the block will be made 1000 times bigger and you will scratch your head for a while to figure it out. To change the block units use

BMAKE (not BEDIT), select the already defined block in the pull down menu. Reset the units and exit.

Aerial Capture of surface data

In the next few years it is going to be interesting to see how the capture of point cloud data will develop and now the price an accuracy of devices will develop and hopefully come down.

For us at least forking out 60K (NZD) for a GPS base station and rover just to get a bit of surface data for  design cannot be justified for the amount of use it would get.

That why back in June i read with interest an article  Photogrammetry from the sky with Recap Photo by Jack Strongitharm where he used a DJI Phantom (less than 1K) to capture aerial photos and then Autodesk Recap to generate a point cloud of a building.

I have not played with Recap myself yet so have no idea of what sort of accuracy you would great but its probably nothing that great, and for the industry we are in of green field land development I would suspect pumping in 100’s of photos of green grass would not generate a surface of much valve.

That is why it’s great to see a small company YellowScan in France working on a light weight Lidar unit to mount on drones due out in 2014 all through the accuracy is not super great it will better photogrammetry in generating a surface in a green fields situation.

Interesting method of setting up project

http://civil3d.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/fully-cooked-project-template-in-civil-3d/

Link to SSA part matching help

http://docs.autodesk.com/CIV3D/2012/ENU/filesCUG/GUID-B95DD309-9BD9-47D3-9722-391610D4F59-1119.htm