Tag: AutoCAD Civil

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AutoCAD Crash Caused by Odd Registry Value

seen on Tom’s blog – Without a Net

In the past, we’ve seen issues where you would launch AutoCAD and it would immediately close with a Customer Error Report ( CER ) dialog and possibly the message:
“This version of AutoCAD was not installed properly and some features may not run correctly. You should reinstall AutoCAD immediately to make sure all features are working properly. Do you wish to continue anyway?”
This often points to a corruption in the .NET Framework but we recently discovered a cause that was a bit more unusual.

It turns out that one source for this kind of crash stems from a bad registry entry in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.png key. There have been user-reported cases where the value in the Content Type key contains a leading space:

In cases where someone had that leading space in the value, simply removing it resolved the crash.

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Autodesk Announces AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 with Point Cloud Support

seen on Geoff’s blog – Between the Poles

Autodesk has announced new versions of its software for the infrastructure industries.

AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 supports point clouds and adds new data support and expanded workflow capabilities.

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 includes scalability and performance improvements, as well as an optimized 64-bit version, tools to better manage the creation and editing of corridors, and expanded superelevation functionality that provides a dynamic link to the alignment and flexible editing options

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Geographic Location of AutoCAD drawings

AutoCAD uses different light types to illuminate a rendered scene.
One of these light types is called a distant light.
When you add a distant light, you can use the Sun Angle Calculator, which includes an option for Geographic Location.
In the Geographic Location dialog box, you can pick a location from a map, or select a city from a list.

The selected point provides the information AutoCAD needs to calculate the sun angle for the distant light at a given date & time.
This information is also use for Georeferencing the DWG.

You can easily add your own location to the pre-defined list of cities.
The list of cities is stored in a file called: SITENAME.TXT
Located in: C:Documents and SettingsusernameApplication DataAutodeskAutoCAD Map 3D 2009R17.2enuSupport

Open the file SITENAME.TXT in a text editor.
Add your locatie in latitude and longitude coordinates, for example: +51.9513 +006.0024 +van der Pol-Consulting, NL
Save the file.
Make sure to restart AutoCAD, before this addition takes effect.

command reference:

GEOGRAPHICLOCATION – specifies the latitude and longitude of a location, stored in the Geo-Marker.

GEOMARKERVISIBILITY – controls whether the Geo-Marker is displayed ( 0 = not visible, 1 = visible ).

GEOLATLONGFORMAT – controls the format of the latitude or longitude values in the Geographic Location dialog box, and the coordinate status bar in Geographic mode ( 0 = in decimal degrees, 1 = in degrees minutes seconds ).

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AutoCAD Map/FDO – Scale Ranges

seen on Neal’s blog – CAD and GIS Integration

In the previous post I’ve described how to use a Spatial Query to limit the amount of GIS-data on your work-session.
But here is an other option: Scale Ranges.

An AutoCAD Map or Civil user can have as many Scale Ranges as necessary. This gives the possibility to setup which details are visible at what scale level.
When the map is opened, for example only road-centerlines are visible, zooming into a certain scale the houses-layer turns on and the centerlines-layer is replaced by a layer with the roadsides etc.

A combination of Spatial Query and Scale Ranges makes is possible to work with large amounts of GIS-data in a CAD-environment.

Scale Ranges
The Scale Range functionality is available in the Style Editor user interface.

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AutoCAD Map/FDO – Spatial Query

seen on Neal’s blog – CAD and GIS Integration

GIS-data is in general on a complete other scale available than CAD-users need for their projects. Importing that GIS-dataset into a CAD-environment gives an overkill.
When talking with AutoCAD Map or Civil users about connecting to GIS-data using FDO-technology, they reject because it is still to much data.

For example an AutoCAD Civil 3D user has to develop a terrain-model and calculate volumes for a new housing construction area.
It would be very usefull to add the soil-layer from GIS, but not the whole province or municipality, only limited to the area needed for the project.

This is possible by adding a Spatial Query – by rectangle or polygon – when connecting to the data.

Spatial Query
The Spatial Query functionality is available in the Data Connect user interface.