2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 17,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Dynamic Parking Lot Design

This is an often asked and misunderstood workflow within Civil 3D.  The general question revolves around what objects should I use and how should I use them to create the finished design. We’ve done this forever using manual calculations and hand drafting.

Typically, users will opt for feature lines and grading objects first to create their design. And this is my assumption that feature lines closely resemble 3d polylines used in Land Desktop.  Granted, in Civil 3D, if you make a change to the feature line that is a data source for a surface, then the ripple effect happens and the surface will update.

Only, with feature lines, we’re generally hand calculating key points and then possibly using some of the feature line tools to set curb line elevations.  Not a bad tool to use, but a very manual operation in this given scenario.

And, for the most part, you will get a surface. But probably one that you’ll extract the contours and edit them directly.  Again, a very similar mindset used in Land Desktop where at some point you will no longer utilize the LDD design database and rely on the information in the drawing. Pardon my language, but… Yuck!

Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a simple adjustment and have all the islands and curbs update and having a parking lot surface we would he HAPPY to show our boss?

AU 2012

Out in Vegas this week for AU. Keynote session about to kick off

3rd Annual Synergis Student Competitions are Open!

Synergis is having its 3rd Annual Student Competition with Architecture and Mechanical categories! The architecture theme this year is adaptive reuse of an existing main street shop into a children’s museum. The mechanical category is based on the Pennsylvania F1 competition. We are only judging entries submitted to us and will focus on design from creative and functional aspects.

The competition is currently open to anyone in K-12th grade.  So pass this along to kids or your friend’s kids to enter! Prizes include cash awards and acknowledgement at Synergis University 2013 next June.

I’m hoping to get them to introduce a Civil Engineering category next year as well as add an age group for university students! What do you think?

Here are some entries from last year to peak your interest…

AutoCAD Fundamentals for Civil Engineers – Part 325

As Civil Engineers, we often dive pretty heavy into the tools we use. For me, one of those tools is Civil 3D of course. What, with all of its styles and settings, tabs, external databases and such, sometimes I forget about the underlying nuances of both AutoCAD and Map that live within Civil 3D. That brings us to our next AutoCAD tidbit.

Of note today is something I noticed probably 3 releases ago but quickly pushed it to the side; coordinate entry troubles. For whatever reason, entering coordinates with DYNAMIC INPUT toggled on would give me incorrect results. While I would get the right answer with it toggled off. So, given the finicky nature of Dynamic Input with Civil 3D functions, that was a no brainer to toggle off.

I figured I wasn’t reading the prompts correctly. I certainly wasn’t being patient enough to find out what was happening. Until now….

PASDA GIS Data Reminder

As the Oil and Gas boom has hit Pennsylvania, GIS data is a prime commodity in obtaining permits and generating needed concept plans. A major source is the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) clearinghouse. And I quote:

Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) is the official public access geospatial information clearinghouse for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and has served for fifteen years as Pennsylvania’s node on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, Geospatial One-Stop, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure.
PASDA was developed by the Pennsylvania State University as a service to the citizens, governments, and businesses of the Commonwealth. PASDA is a cooperative project of the Governor’s Office of Administration, Office for Information Technology, Geospatial Technologies Office and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment of the Pennsylvania State University. Funding and support is provided by the Pennsylvania Office for Information Technology,Geospatial Technologies Office. In addition, PASDA also receives substantial support from the Pennsylvania State University.

So there are tons of great data types to choose from, depending on your needs. But there is one question I often get asked and rarely remember the answer. For some reason, some data is formatted to be in the coordinate zone Antarctic98.LL, which refers to the Lat Long grid for the Australian Antarctic 1998 datum. Of course, this is not correct. So the first place to research is the metadata.

Parcel Ownership for Oil & Gas Pipelines, Part 2

To pickup where we left off, let’s review what we have in the drawing.

The missing part is the parcel information in the data band between the “property lines.”

To do this, we have two options, one would be to just create hard text that would require re-positioning whenever the alignment moved or use a pipe connected to the structures, allowing the pipe information to adjust as the alignment adjusted. But how do we use the pipe to use the parcel information?