Hydraflow Express and Hydraflow Hydrographs are available for download in the subscription center. Log in here.

The Hydraflow Express extension brings a variety of hydraulic calculators to Civil 3D users. Including culverts, weirs, and channels.

Hydraflow Hydrographs brings storm routing and basin design to Civil 3D.

The FILEDIA variable has a tendency of being set to zero when Civil 3D crashes. This results in your file open options being displayed on your command line. A major annoyance. This topic has been posted on the discussion groups several times. One solution is to place the following line in an acaddoc.lsp file in you civil 3d support directory.

(setvar “filedia” 1)

If you don’t have an acaddoc.lsp file you can create your own in notepad and save it in your support directory. Or right-click and save as the file here.

The acaddoc.lsp file is run by autocad when you open a new file. The line you added will set FILEDIA to 1 preventing the dialogs from being disabled.

While this blog is about Civil 3D I expect a majority of readers are engineers and designers having some level of management responsibility. If you want help staying organized check out the suite of online software offered by Chicago based 37signals.

To get started I would recommend signing up for backpack. You can use backpack to organize your projects, to do lists and more. A free account offers up to 5 pages, but if you’re creative that will be plenty of space.

37signals flagship product is Basecamp, it is a complete project management tool. It’s more difficult to get by with the free version. If you have a large project or a large project team it’s worth the money.

Another great product is highrise. This is an online contact management tool with reminders and other great features.

The great thing about the 37signals software is that it is online and you can share information with your project team. This is where highrise really shines. You and your project team can have access to all the important contacts for a project and see notes and reminders related to each contact.

The 37signals blogs are also a good read for information workers.

They have a company blog, check it out here.

And a product blog, check it out here.

For anyone who dabbles in web design the 37 signals team are also the creators of the Ruby on Rails Framework.

Check out their offerings, stay organized, and have a Happy and Safe New Year.

After seeing this post on the Autodesk C3D wishes discussion group we put together a quick LISP routine (Close your eyes Peter) to paste the STYLE property between objects.

This routine will paste the STYLE property between any Autocad entities. It has some very basic error trapping but has worked well so far.

If you have any suggestions, comments or request feel free to post or email.

Update 2007-01-16

The paste style lisp routine does not work with point objects, I’ll add some error trapping and repost the routine.  Thanks Ed.

Right-click and Save As to download the LISP routine here.

If you haven’t stumbled upon David Garrigues’s Double and Right-Click CUI available on the Autodesk Civil Engineering Community page you are missing out. David has customized the CUI allow the user to interact with Civil3D Objects via double-clicks and right-click menus. This falls into our Must Have Category. Once you try it you won’t be able to use C3D without it.

Here’s David’s summary of the customization:

“Did you ever wish that if you double clicked on a Civil 3D Object you would get the appropriate Properties Dialog box for that Object? Of course and what if you right clicked on a Civil 3D Object did you wish you had more appropriate options in your right click menu? Of course you did so here it is just as it was presented at AU this year in my class called Civil 3D Grading: It’s Not a Slippery Slope.”

Check out his post on the Civil Engineering Community page here. (You’ll have to login to view this page, you can use your login for the Autodesk Discussion Group)

You can also further customize the right-click/double-click functionality. We’ll build on this in our next post.

Add civil3dblog.com to your favorite RSS feeds now so you don’t miss out on any posts.

Is Civil3D missing features?

Being a long time LD user I’m finding the answer to this question to be a resounding YES!

We’re asking Civil3D users to email us any features that Civil3D is ‘missing’.

We’ll be posting routines to fill in some of the Civil3D feature gaps so get your requests in early and often.

Please email requests and ‘missing’ Civil3D features to us at missing at this domain.

The Civil3D Storm Sewer Extension is now available for download in the Autodesk Subscription Center. Log in here.

The Civil3D Stormwater Discussion Group is Live as well check it out via this link.

Be sure to add us to your favorite RSS feeds by clicking here.

Autodesk will unveil their first integration of Hydraflow Storm Sewer into the Civil 3D product tomorrow morning during a webcast at 9AM PST sign up HERE.

It’s been a long wait for C3D users to see a hydrology & hydraulics tool integrated into the software. It’s great to see Autodesk releasing the extension prior to the April release of Civil 3D 2009.

We will post more information after the webcast. The following is from the Autodesk Civil Community Web Page:

Join Dave Simeone, Civil 3D Product Manager for this live webcast where he will demonstrate the capabilities of the new Autodesk storm sewer functionality. He will also review recommended workflow for integrating analysis operations with the layout, design, and drafting capabilities of AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2008.

Enjoy the web cast.

If you have been using VBA to customize Autocad Civil 3D and have been wanting to check out vb.net now is a great time. Microsoft has made available express editions of their visual studio products for some time now. They can be downloaded here:

Visual Studio Express 2008

Visual Studio Express 2005

Either version should work equally well for Autocad .net customization and can be installed side by side.

The express editions have some limitations over the standard and pro versions of visual studio. The most important being that the express editions do not allow real time debugging in Autocad. This makes it very difficult to debug your code.

I came across a link to Kean’s blog through the API with a post on Debugging using Express Editions. After reading the post you’ll see it is possible to debug with the Express Editions.

To make it even easier those who attended Jerry Winter’s class at Autodesk University in 2006/2007 who received a DVD from him it includes an Autocad vb.net express template installer that works with Autocad and C3D.

The website civildev.com provides a template installer for VS Express 2005 it can be downloaded here. This installer was recommended by the AU 2007 class .net Programming for Civil Engineers and Surveyors.

Best of all this powerful programming tool is free.

Autodesk employee Sanjay Asnani’s blog 2D to (Civil) 3D is reporting that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is moving to adopt Civil 3D in the near future.  That will be a huge leap for C3D entering into the DOT realm of Microstation and GeoPAK.

This will be very interesting for the transportation consultants working with WDOT who will be making the leap from GeoPAK to Civil 3D.

We’ll post more details when they become available.