After attending yesterday’s Civil 3D webcast, I can safely say that my opinion of what Autodesk was doing in Manufacturing seems to themed throughout the company. User requests are scattered throughout as well as fit and finish improvements.
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Organizational Standards
I’m not sure I’d call it Organizational Standards, but rather Style Improvements.
Labeling improvements
Label Rotation
The ability to rotate object labels in Civil 3D is not new, well at least you could do it in the style. Now we can apply that to each label individually. Dragged states support this as well.
Maximum Text Width
This gives us the ability to set a width in the Label Style, and when the text hits that point, it wraps. These are individually overridable in each Civil 3D object label.
Style and Settings Management
Autodesk has taken the Civil 3D Subscription Advantage Pack Style sledgehammer idea, and expanded it into a functional centerpiece for capable object style management
Import Styles and Settings
A dialog interface is included with Civil 3D that allows you to navigate to any drawing and extract the complete list of Styles and Settings, and individually or globally import these into your current Civil 3D 2012 drawing as needed.
The tool offers a tree style hierarchy, with checkboxes for each item to confirm or deny import. Additionally, any child style that already exists and is subject to be overwritten gets visually flagged so that you know exactly what will be modified when the import is completed.
As with the SAP sledgehammer, this tool offers the ability to globally ignore settings within the import session if desired.
Purge Styles
That’s right, you can purge those odd styles that don’t exist in the sample, making this the ultimate style management tool.
Perhaps one day some Vault connectivity might work well here.
Transportation Design
Alignment Geometry Improvement
There have been a few enhancements to Alignment geometry, including new annotation options and entity highlighting.
One of my favorite features is the Alignment geometry constraints that were implemented in this cycle. Existing Geometry can be constrained such that tangents and the like are held while editing is performed. Additionally, Implied tangents can be applied on curved alignments that had no tangents defined. A dialog contains options that Civil 3D 2012 uses to interpret and constrain the alignments.
This Alignment was imported through XML, and constrained as part of the process. Very slick set of enhancements.
Corridor Editing
A viewport configuration tool arranges viewports with customizable layouts for use when editing Corridor Sections. This is a nice function to quickly establish views and deliver great situational awareness with visual cues that are active in all viewports simultaneously.
The Corridor Section Editor permits easy access to the Corridor, and permits modifications through the Context tab of the Section Editor, allowing uninterrupted workflows and less headaches. Modifications such as Assembly changes and adding Regions are available.
One sweet function is targeting another surface through the Cross Section Editor viewport.
Multiple Corridor used in Sections and Volumes
Now you can show multiple Corridors in a single Section View with no hassles. Sample lines can be skewed in relation to Corridor Alignments, and Section Views update properly on the fly.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a better clip as they skewed the Sample Line, but I guarantee it’s cool.
Superelevation
Civil 3D 2012 received enhancements giving substantially improved control over the Superelevation, with dialogs that configure axis of rotation type and location, as well as shoulder control.
Coming up next
A special thanks to Christopher Fugitt for contributing a couple clips.
In the next post I’ll show some equally hot improvements including:
