Year End 2011 News

 

So this isn’t brand new news. My company, KlingStubbins has been acquired by Jacobs Engineering Group (as of November 1, 2011) and will be aligned with their Global Buildings North America division.  I’m not sure what impact the merger will have on my content, but I will continue to write as much as I can.  It’s been tough to get anything posted. So I’m simply jotting this down while I can.

Here’s the press release
You can call us “KlingStubbins Inc. a Jacobs Company”

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2012.

Kevin

No-Plot This!

Take a moment and tell me what your firm uses for a no-plot color.  Just wanted to take the pulse on this “topic.”  This doesn’t imply STB or CTB, just the color associated with a layer. I suppose it does imply that object color is BYLAYER. If it isn’t, then you’re in violation of the International CAD Code.  :)

[Edit 11/23/2011 So the results are all over the board.  Even the "other" responses were varied; 211, Brown, 124, 101, 160, 49, 245 and a true color 255,255,255. Although layers can be set to no plot, we are still grounded in the idea that a color implies results.]

Thanks for your help!

Get your voice heard!

Now is your chance. Autodesk has created a new vehicle to get input from you, the users of all things Autodesk. It’s called the Infrastructure Participatory Design Council.

What is it?

Annotative Brain Freeze

Man, I hate coming back to AutoCAD sometimes.  Like when I’ve been away in Revit for 6 months and see this nastiness…

I knew a system variable probably controlled this or at least maybe those 2 buttons hidding down in the lower right corner, but to no avail. See sysvars ANNOALLVISIBLE and ANNOAUTOSCALE for more detail.

Being an “Owner”

In an effort to better understand our services as an Architectural & Engineering firm, I thought about putting myself in the shoes of an owner.  Presuming that they’re a size 10 1/2, we’re good to go.  The scenario is that I have a 3-story 30,000 sf commercial building I want to build on property I own. Whom do I hire to help and what type of contractual agreement with my “team” is best for me?

Let’s just say I got stuck right there.

Rotating your view without changing coordinate values

OR  aka DVIEW TWIST and SNAPANG.  There isn’t a building or subdivision i’ve ever done that looks good with north straight up. Typically, north has to be rotated somewhat to get the view we’re looking for. You know something like this.

To do that with AutoCAD, you need to use two commands – DVIEW and SNAPANG.  Dview has many uses, most of which I have no clue. But what it can do is rotate your view without changing the coordinate values. Snapang is used to set the crosshairs horizontal by using the negative angle of the twisted view.  Blah, blah, blah….