Wow, just realized its been about 2 weeks since last post.  My apologies – that said, a few quick words about AU 2009…

I’m headed to AU 2009 out in quaint Las Vegas, NV. You know where the sun never sets?  At least that’s my impresssion cause i never go outside to find out!

What’s AU? I big conference / networking / training event for all autodesk based products. Lots to see and do no doubt.  Looking forward to picking up tidbits here and there. But mostly looking forward to seeing folks i know only from newsgroups or other blogs. This year – it’s held from tuesday to thursday, 8am to 6:30 pm Pacific. So you east coaster peeps can still catch the afternoon and evening sessions and NOT miss work using AU virtual!

What’s AU Virtual? If you’re firm is on subscription, you can tap into that way (premier pass for free). If not, i have 4 premier passes i can hand out…..

Otherewise, here’s the fine print:

  Free and Premier Passes for AU Virtual

• Free Pass – Available to anyone
  This pass offers access to all product clinics and up to two virtual classes with live interactive Q&A. Plus, you get a wealth of content including real-time viewing of keynotes, industry news, interviews, a technology showcase, and more. Add in access to the AU Online community and you’ve got terrific value for just signing up.
• Premier Pass – Full access for only US$99
  Get everything included in the Free Pass plus 50+ select classes with Q&A streamed live from Las Vegas. And, after the event, learn at your own pace with 350+ on-demand classes from AU 2009. That’s more than 400 hours of professional training at your fingertips.

Note: The Premier Pass is available at no charge to Autodesk Subscription customers. Plus, everyone who registers for AU 2009—the physical event—receives four (4) complimentary Premier Passes to share with colleagues.

Let me know if you’re interested!

Just a quick post today.  I was tooling around different areas of Civil 3D that i don’t normally visit, simply to know what i don’t.  In the ribbon, the VIEW tab is some place i do spend, setting viewports, views, view styles, etc.  At the right edge of this tab is a panel for Windows. You know, window arrangment for each document and that sort of thing.

Poking around the panel, I clicked the Status Bar; which is a flyout with an interesting list.  What’s at the bottom is my gem; Tray settings. Yes, that exciting command for Tray settings….

What you get is a dialog that looks like this:

What? I can toggle these off completely? Or better yet, how about limiting the display time, like new messages in outlook.  Yeah, i like that better.  I love the messages, but i hate having to dismiss each one with a click.  You know, ’cause clicking a button is such hard work.  Makes my finger hurt.

But now at least, i’m less grumpy and feel like i can continue working and address the notification on my terms. Whether it be a XREF reload or DREF has changed and needs to snyc, it’ll be on my schedule, dang it!  So, the next time you see these messages….

You can be assured you know something needs your attention, but you don’t have to stop what you’re doing at that moment to address these annoying, but necessary, notifications. I believe i have to update our AutoCAD profile now…

Enjoy your weekend!

some other day!  Boy, having not worked in metric in a metric year (?), i feel like a noob.  But that’s for a different day. Today’s note is for those that might not have worked in metric and are just starting.  Specifically, i’ll talk about pipe networks.  You can use the ootb metric pipe catalog and have 2010 build a full part list for you if you dont have one.  But the snafu comes when you want to try out the spiffy new feature to dump your network into storm sewers to analyze the system. Yeah, you can’t with metric pipe networks. Not directly anyway.

Alright some details. First, select a pipe or structure in the network to be analyzed. You must do this first. In 2010, the context ribbon for pipe networks appears. Towards the right end, you will a group called Analyze with a button for storm sewers. Clicking that will give you a drop down list; import file, export to file and edit in storm sewers.  Naturally, we want to pick edit in storm sewers.  This saves the network to a STM file which then opens in Storm Sewers.  Enter our metric job and this process stops dead right here.

The problem, it seems, is that storm sewers by default will open in english units. Yes, you can open SS and set the units to metric (SI), jump out and try the command, but that doesnt work either.  The only way to get the command “edit it storm sewers” to work, even with SP2, is to set the DWG to be imperial units. Period. 

Well, that option didnt work for me, i have a hard enough time working in metric that going back and forth during the process would REALLY confuse me.

So, the alternative is this:  simply use export to file and import and open SS yourself.  This process still creates the native STM file and updates c3d on import. It’s just a bit more manual labor.  Yeah, i know. Civil 3d is such hard work!

Good long morning to everyone.  Lots to catch up on. But first, a message from yesterday’s events.

Our standard new machines are Vista 64 with blah, blah….  More important to this story is that we are only loading 2010 to these new machines as they get introduced.  The only snafu is that there is one project in our vault (which is adms 2010) that hasn’t moved to the 2010 DWG format yet; it’s in testing. So, for the time being, any work has to be done in civil 3d 2009. No big deal right? So i run our base 2009 image install, which is silent, and come back to 2009 goodness ready to go.

Want some freakin’ awesome plugins to autocad (and related verticals) for free?  Check out the Autodesk Labs Plugin of the Month link below. They have 2 plugins out now!

Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD (October 2009)
This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to manage multiple clipboard entries, storing and renaming them for later use.

Offset in XREF (September 2009)
This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to enable the OFFSET command to work with externally referenced drawings. The plugin has been tested with AutoCAD 2007 onwards. The plugin enables the standard OFFSET to work with externally referenced content instead of responding with the “Cannot offset that object.” message.

How cool are those plugins? Sweet right? Check the link below every month for a new plugin. AND, if you’re super nerdy, the code is included in the download for you to fiddle with; cause we all like fiddlin with stuff.  The only gotcha is that you have to be using v2007 or newer to use these apps.  Please tell me you’re not on r14?

Autodesk Labs Utilities Plugin of the Month Updates.

Enjoy!

Good morning all.  Today’s topic is merely to add definition to an otherwise dead horse (long debate about how to “best” orient model space views). For those not familiar wth the debate – it boils down to using either Dview or UCS Rotate. In the firms i’ve used autocad and the vertical applications, we’e chosen Dview…..  Anyway, not why i’m writing today.

Alright, get to the point mcfly. (See, i really am self depricating).  There are some discussions being had on the autodesk groups that, while entertaining, need to have the facts identified a bit. In other words, i wanna clear my good friend, Dview’s, name. It seems that folks think that Dview will cause incorrect views because they think blah blah happens….  Well, like anything, its how we use it that doesn’t cause those issues.