by
Tench Tilghman
| May 24, 2013
One of the major benefits of our Jump Production Solutions products is that we make upgrades from one release of AutoCAD Civil 3D to another much more painless. That ease of upgrade doesn’t just include the templates we supply that includes your working Project drawings created from templates too.
We Do the Nasty (Work) so You Don’t Have To
As more than one customer put it,
“What a brilliant idea.”
In real man-hours that real upgrade work is worth a lot of time each year or every other year for that matter. It’s worth WAY MORE than what we charge.
Let’s see?
Pay a few bucks per seat per month or year OR spend weeks and weeks every year fighting the UPGRADE tiger.
I say,
“Get the big kitty off your back. She wants to eat you alive.”
Ask yourself this simple question,
“Can our templates do that?”
The Liberty to Work in AutoCAD Civil 3D
Oh Yeah. You also get More tested and proven Style tools for AutoCAD Civil 3D than anyone can ever use. Need a Profile Label Style to properly label an Asymmetric Parabolic vertical curve in a 1:30 Plan and Profile sheet in a Profile View with a weirder vertical scale.
Oh…and you say you need Sections to match.
No Problem - It’s in Jump Kit. Really? Really.
Aside from the weird you get the wonderful too. Many of those Style tools are even in “plain old” InstantOn Basic Release 5.
Calling IOB “plain” is a bit like saying the Freedom Tower in New York is just another “commercial building” or that Hover Dam is a “drainage structure”. You get the point, but you may not believe.
“What you don’t know kills you.”
Speaking of That
Instant Release 5 upgrades are easy. This is true even though we rerouted and retooled where many View styles put their many parts. We did that to make doing and publishing more kinds of work a whole lot less of a hassle in AutoCAD Civil 3D. There’s a blog post about that somewhere…
Innovation is Change for the Better Not Just Change
Here’s the ENTIRE upgrade process if you employ Jump Production Solution products.
It is not Rocket Science.
AutoCAD Layer Compliance
Open a drawing.
From a Land Standards resource folder, Load and Restore one or two supplied Layer State files (depending on the Jump 4 product or release of Civil 3D).
Run ONE supplied script file. This updates all the Layers to Release 5 and NCS 5.0 compliance.
From the same Land Standards resource folder Load the new Layer States for a Layer Standards dws file.
Restore on of the black or white background Layer States for Design or Survey drawings.
AutoCAD stuff Done.
Save the drawing.
Civil 3D Style Updates
Import the new Styles from the new templates with update Settings in place and deletes and updates of everything EXCEPT your tweaked Styles.
You can CLEARLY identify these in the lists because you’ve obeyed the published Style Rules.
Yes. You can even search this blog for what those Style Rules are.
Save the drawing.
Close and reopen the drawing to make sure all the many changes are firmly committed.
Maybe Purge those hang around layers, blocks, textstyles, etc.
AUDIT check the drawing. Repair any found errors.
Purge the Regapps (Hint: -PU) to remove all the hang around “registered” apps. Some of these (even the official Autodesk ones) may come back and bite you if you don’t.
Save the drawing
Close and reopen the drawing to make sure all the many changes are firmly committed.
Civil 3D stuff updated.
We are done.
We’re Paranoid About Detail
You can even the Style update process on a Feature by Feature basis because in Release 5 we supply the By Feature drawings in addition to the whole template. That helps if you’ve made a whole bunch of Style changes in only a couple of Civil 3D Features, but left most of the rest of the Styles and Label Styles alone.
That’s a critical Jump Solution idea.
Maintain ONLY what YOU care about and leave the rest alone.
It’s going to work, make everyone’s job easier, and allow everyone to publish consistently.
Work the Same…Publish on Demand
Of course, it wouldn’t be software without some caveats.
Some Cautions Apply
Autodesk’s Style Import doesn’t really do Projection Styles correctly (in 2012 and 2013) so you have to import those manually via the drag and drop method.
I always do Description Key Sets manually. The Import for DKSs works sometimes but NOT ALL the time in all service pack builds.
Feature Criteria Sets always seem to need to be checked and reorganized in templates.
The default Object Layers in Drawing Settings must be manually updated to new Layers. Now that’s annoying.
Survey Prefix Dbs remember Layers AND Style names and must be manually adjusted, but at least you can choose which drawing you suck up the Layers and Styles from.
Point Group definitions are NOT a Style.
We supply external text files (matched to our published and supplied list of Standard Keys) to help you document and standardize these useful tools. I posted about external Point Group definitions in this blog previously. Look for “Point Groups”.
If you’ve upgraded recently, look for the Point Groups folder in the Jump Kit’s common sense folder structure.
If you employ EXPRESSIONS in your Label Styles, put ALL the Expressions employed by a bunch of Label Styles into the text value of one Style that you should ALWAYS IMPORT FIRST. I posted about that “Expressions” topic in this blog before.
If you Style Purge unreferenced Styles first, the Style Import (discussed above) will have less to deal with. BUT save, close and reopen the drawing after the Style Purge and before the Import.
Civil 3D really likes to “reinitialize in code” its required “Standard” styles in a drawing.
I do an AUDIT check here too – before the Style Import.
You can easily update a drawing that contains just your own modified Styles with the process outlined above and add or replace them in the “IOB” standard templates before you hit the projects. You have a changed and/or new Styles drawing don’t you? You can make one.
That’s an Upgrade
Not many steps. The steps are easy to repeat. Any Civil 3D user with limited experience and skill can do it. Not much time consumed for a lot of bang for the buck - A small list of cautions that most folks really don’t need to fret about much if at all. That should be music to your ears.
Let’s boogie.
Next time….
“We never used your products before?
Is it this easy to convert our work?”
Take Five and Jump Ahead