IMAGINiT Civil Solutions Blog

Happy Holidays!

As another year comes to a conclusion, I hope that everyone is able to take a few days off to spend with family and loved ones.  From all of us on the Infrastructure Solutions services team... Happy Holidays!

Drone Registration

 

I think it is safe to say that the popularity of drones exploded over the course of 2015.  It seems like just about everyone either already has one or has plans to get one soon.  For me, I hope Santa remembers that I have had one on my list for a while and I have been really good this year :)

Earlier this week, I was able to find about 30 minutes that I spent in the hotel bar unwinding and reading the newspaper.  An article regarding drone registration was on the front page and caught my eye.  It would seem that the government has started taking the beginning steps to regulating drones and UAVs.  My understanding of the article is that any UAV larger than 1/2 pound (or larger than the palm of your hand) will have to be registered with the government beginning on 21 December.  While the registration fee is only $5 for a 3 year term, there is about a 4-5 week window in which you can register for free.

Keep this in mind if you are fortunate enough to get a UAV this holiday season!

(a link to the story in the Wall Street Journal can be found here)

 

 

 

Project Kameleon Updated

At the end of November, Autodesk released an update to Project Kameleon.  For those unfamiliar with this technology, Project Kameleon is a stand alone parts editor that promised a new way to create drainage content for both Civil 3D as well as Infraworks.  With this update, it appears that the scope of the project has expanded and now includes pressure pipe content as well as a way to author bridge abutment types for Infraworks.  This is definitely gaining traction within Autodesk as I heard the project referenced many times at Autodesk University last week.

Project Kameleon is free to join and check out but remember, this is pre-release software.

 

A video that shows the features included in the November 2015 update can be found here.

 

2016 Product Updates

Last week was a busy week for Autodesk.  While many of us were gathered in Las Vegas for Autodesk University, the product teams were hard at work releasing service packs for several of the 2016 products.  Specifically, the following updates were released:

• Autodesk Civil 3D 2016 SP2
• Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 2016 SP1
• Autodesk 3DS Max 2016 SP2

These updates are currently making their way through the Autodesk systems and should show up in the Application Manager and on Autodesk.com soon.  If you are impatient and would like them sooner, you can get them from the manage.autodesk.com site.

 

Happy updating!

Profile View Title - Civil 3D

James Musselman | Applications Expert

I was putting together some profile view styles the other day and I ran into a similar problem I’ve seen many times. The requirement was to display the horizontal and vertical scale in the profile view title. Easy enough right? Well when we build this into the style we run into an issue:

The title and scales end up being the same size and color. The requirement was to have the scale be half the size of the title and be yellow in color. After seeking out some help I was presented with the solution. The answer was to use the bottom axis title to display the scale. However, when you look at the properties available to the axis titles, the drawing scale and vertical scale are not present. As it turns out, these titles can recognize properties from the main title object even though it is not present in the properties drop-down. So in order to transfer the codes we go back into editing the profile view title contents:

We highlight the scale text and copy or cut it from the editor so that we are only left with the graph view name. We then head over to the axis title text section and paste the text and codes into the contents editor for the bottom axis title:

After playing around with the text size, color and location we end up with the scale displayed below the title at half the size and using the color yellow:

My inclination is that this ability is not limited to profile view styles. I can imagine it would work with section views and possibly any other style that employs multiple labels. There’s only one way to find out!