Kevin Breslin | ISD/RCS Services
Typically IMAGINiT will put together a “New Features” presentation, blog posts and whitepapers on the latest version of Autodesk software, and we will of course still do that, however, in the meantime, I wanted to make a quick post on a few of my first Impressions of Civil 3D 2019 and share what has immediately caught my attention.
Note: This is NOT a comprehensive “What’s New” list, just the things I appreciate out of the gate.
Status Bar:
Whether it’s that my eyes aren’t what they used to be, the screen resolutions is getting higher every year, or the icons used in the AutoCAD UI, keeping track of exactly what tools are on or off in the Status Bar within AutoCAD has for the last few years been difficult to know at a glance. In the 2019 version of AutoCAD/Civil 3D, Autodesk has opted for updated graphics and after starting the program for the first time, I was immediately drawn to the fact that I could easily see what was on or off in the Status Bar.
2019 to top, 2018 below:
Does this change the world, or will it be in the TOP 10 NEW FEATURES list? Probably not, but for me, it is something that I like and appreciate very much.
New Tab/New Tools:
In the 2019 version of AutoCAD/Civil 3D, Autodesk has added a new “Collaborate” tab with a few new tools. The “DWG Compare” tool caught my attention as I have many times been asked by users, “How do I know what’s different between different versions of a file?”. The good news is, it appears that this is now easy to figure out.
When you use the “DWG Compare” command, it pretty much does exactly what you would expect it would do. First, you are prompted for the two files you select the files you want to compare.
Original File:
Modified File:
Next, it creates a results file that very clearly displays the areas where there are differences using Revision Clouds.
With the graphical results, you also get a new series of compare tools in the Ribbon which allows you to interrogate the files differences further, and also change the way the graphics are represented.
Note: In this example one of the changes I tested was a difference in a Civil 3D object styles (the Surface styles was changed), and the tool was able to detect that change as well as the added circle.
While I’ve not done an exhaustive study of this tool, at first glance it seems like something users could really get a lot of value from.
More to come, so stay tuned.
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