When drawing Civil 3D Pipes in Section Views or when displaying crossing Pipes in Profile Views you may find that the Pipes do not look very smooth. In fact they may look like the example below that appears to be drawn with just a few straight lines. If you want to display smooth, more rounded, […]
Smooth Pipes in Section and Profile Views in Civil 3D Read More »
It has become common to work with surfaces in Civil 3D that are created from large datasets that contain tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of points. Even with the latest hardware, performance can become an issue when attempting to display these large datasets. Civil 3D 2012 introduced a new feature called
Surface Level of Detail in Civil 3D Read More »
There are a number of very interesting new features in AutoCAD 2008, including the ability to fade the appearance of locked layers, control layer properties by viewport, and link AutoCAD tables directly to spreadsheets, so that changes to either the AutoCAD table or the spreadsheet automatically update the other. All very impressive, indeed. However, the most exciting improvement
Annotative Object Properties Read More »
Many times you will have an object in your drawing, like a viewport for instance, which you want to be visible for editing purposes but that you do not want to plot. A common way to accomplish this is to place the object on the Defpoints layer. AutoCAD automatically creates the Defpoints layer when dimensions
Be Careful With The Defpoints Layer Read More »
The words accuracy and precision are tossed around a lot in the CAD, mapping and engineering fields, and they are often thought of as having the same meaning. It is important to know the difference, and it’s even more important to verify whether data you are getting from someone else is accurate, precise, or both,
Accuracy vs. Precision Read More »
I’ve been using AutoCAD to create maps since the mid-1980s, and I had to develop a lot of kludges in the early days to get what I envisioned to come out of the plotter. Significant improvements to AutoCAD over the years have made many of those work-around tricks obsolete, but there are still a few
Creating Linetypes with Measure and Divide Read More »
A new feature of AutoCAD 2004 is the ability to password protect drawings. This is a feature that some users have asked for for a long time, but it may fall into the category of “Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it”. The idea at first might sound great, and
Password Protecting Drawings, Is It A Good Idea? Read More »
Object selected is not a polyline Do you want to turn it into one? <Y> This is a prompt that we have all seen thousands of times. It shows up every time that you select an object with the PEDIT command that is not a polyline. Personally, I have always wondered why AutoCAD is asking
Streamlining The PEDIT Command Read More »
If you have ever tried to open a drawing only to find that it is already open so that your only option is to open a read-only copy then this tip is for you. Starting in AutoCAD 2004 the WHOHAS option was enabled by default. You may have noticed .dwl files being created in the
Finding WHOHAS A Drawing Open And For How Long Read More »
Did you know that you can use any of the standard AutoCAD selection options when selecting objects during the FILLET command? Although AutoCAD does not automatically let you select objects by using the Window and Crossing Window selection sets as it does in other commands. You can still use any AutoCAD graphical selection technique if
Saving Time With The Fillet Command Read More »
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