Civil Survey Solutions

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We strongly encourage you to look at the Civil Survey Solutions Forum - we are posting in there all the time with extra hints, tips and information.

Better still, it's interactive!  You can post in the forum and start an open discussion with all forum users.  Be part of the community!

Want to get to the forum?  Use the link below:

Civil 3D 2011 has been released and includes faciltities to add the ANZ (Australia-New Zealand) Country Kit - this countrification kit is intended to optimise AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 for Australian (and New Zealand) customers and includes a collection of ANZ Reports. 

The Problem

As of the date of publishing this article, the ANZ Reports may not work.  

	When you try to execute a report you may get the following message: It seems that there is a pathing issue to the reports resulting in this error.

Autodesk are currently working on addressing this problem via an updated Country Kit installation.

The Current Workaround

In the meantime, it is recommended that users revisit their installation and configure the installation to include the United Kingdom and Ireland country kit - this includes similar (and potentially identical) reports as provided in the ANZ Country Kit.

The process for doing this is to edit the installation configuration to include the UKIE Country Kit. This may be best deal with via a redeployment for network installations, but for standalone installs the process is:

• Click on the Windows 'Start' button (located at the bottom left) and select Control Panel
• Open the Add/Remove Programs (named Programs and Features in Windows 7) window, where you are able to remove and change programs
• Click on AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 and select the option to Uninstall/Change (you will need to insert the Civil 3D installation DVD if prompted).  You will be able to reconfigure the Content Packs that are included in your install.
• At the Configure Content Packs form, tick on to include the UKIE Content kit and proceed with the repair/install:
  

Once the installation is complete and you reopen AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, the Toolbox will include the UKIE Toolbox Reports - these will all work as expected:

We (understandably) get asked these questions every year when the next version of AutoCAD Civil 3D is released:

• "How do we get our settings across to the new Civil 3D", and
• "Is Civil 3D backwards compatible, and how to I share my data with users of other software"

Attached is a .pdf file published by Autodesk on this topic.  They offer some good 'best practice' approaches to moving settings from 2010 to 2011, as well as discuss methods for moving data to older versions of Civil 3D as well as other drafting/design products.

And no, it's still not directly backwards compatible....grrrr.

Here is the link:

 Migrating Data and AutoCAD Civil 3D

 For those that use this package, a new version is in development.  We are currently testing it for compatibility with both Civil 3D and the ARD HEC-RAS interface and report our results in the upcoming HEC-RAS Web Cast on 21 April.  Be there!!

Click here to review and join the Webcast. 

For those of you having trouble with creating surfaces from Google Earth V5, the following two suggestions may help:

1.  Make sure the image has been fully loaded, that is it indicates 100% or has a complete circle in the lower left corner of Google Earth, and
2.  Make changes within Civil 3D to limit the amount of information to be downloaded.  Details of how to make changes to Civil 3D settings can be found in the Forum section or Knowledge Base on our website.

You may not know that the Advanced Road Design website includes a New Features page - this gives you highlights of new features of the latest software.  It's well worth a look - you might see that extra commands and/or functions have been added based on your suggestions, or find out about a new feature that would be great for your work.

Over the last few months, we have been working closely with a number of irrigation designers to develop Site Leveller.

Site Leveller takes advantage of Civil3D's revolutionary Surface and Grading features to allow designers to easily grade and optimise Bays.

Designers can layout Bays from either Civil3D Feature Lines, Surfaces, or Parcels. Site Leveller is then used to ...

* Optimise volumes accounting for topsoil removal and reinstatement.
* Label all Bays across a grid showing cut/fill information.
* Output Bay Arrows, which show the grade and grade angle.
* Output detailed reports and tables.

For more information about Site Leveller and to see a video of it in action, please click here.

We have just seen the posting at the Advanced Road Design website - the ARD Ribbon interface is coming!