When we talk about ripples are we talking about wave functions or particle behavior? This physical quandary led to our modern “quantum” perspective of the physical universe. That new relativity changed how we think about Everything. That changed What and How we do many things…even reading this blog post.

Certainly, the storm surges from storms like Sandy and her topical cousins will continue to pile up consequences. Maybe the double spike and dip of the solar maximum of 2013 will produce another different sort of wave and particle storm that’s even more disturbing. Maybe one of those asteroids that are whizzing by in a wave this February and March got your attention? I hear there’s a new comet in bound that may whack Mars a good one on its rebound.

Ripples are Strangely Related

AutoCAD Civil 3D, as model-based software, continues to create new ripples that affect how we deal with old AutoCAD management stuff like Layers, Linetypes, Blocks and all the rest. If we try to ignore and treat these fundamental particles in the same old ways, we can make ourselves more work.

Simply put – to create, edit, manage, and publish a model is not drawing stuff. As our models get more complex and more functional, the details of how we manage the fundamental particles (parts) come back to bite us. Search this blog for posts on “Blocks”, “Layers”,  and “Linetypes” for example.

A Ripple in Time for Civil 3D

Here’s a not so simple case in point. AutoCAD Civil 3D ships with a drawing template that purports by its name to be NCS (National CAD Standard) compliant. It isn’t. It’s just an example and as everyone learns pretty quickly. It is not something you can actually employ to do real work. We sell more complete AutoCAD Civil 3D template solutions that do work.

The NCS employs a Layer scheme that’s designed to make the publication of CAD files more consistent, transparent, and more understandable to more people in and from more applications. That scheme works on the concept of coded Major and Minor Groups. These Group names give a rule based “meaning” to the output. “C-ROAD-LINE” and “V-ROAD-EDGE” mean something easy to understand.

Meaning By Group

We employ this NCS Rule based “meaning” and naming language to Layers, Linetypes, and Blocks in all our products. Why?

• A lot of smart folks worked pretty hard on developing and testing this method in many types and scales of projects over a long time period. They continue to do so. Why reinvent the wheel?
• The system is “robust”. It’s adaptable, flexible, and consistent all at the same time.
• The Major and Minor Group concept makes it easier for Users to deal with the complexity for Civil 3D models and their myriad forms of input and output.
• Users can connect ANY and ALL the resources by connecting the consistent Standard names.

You can say all the above and still be led astray by unintentionally adding granularity (more detail or more particles) to the naming system than is necessary.  More isn’t always better.
I did it. You probably did it too if you’ve tried to build your own Civil 3D templates and Styles.
Simply put – you can easily end up with hundreds of layers and many more Civil 3D Styles, Label Styles, and Sets to create, edit, and maintain.

It is not good to stubble into a pit of chaos of your own making.

We’re introducing a new Major Group in the upcoming 5.0 release of our products to help reduce both the Layers and the Style related issues of too much granularity (detail). This new Major Group is so obvious you’ve probably done it yourself already. It’s the end result of additional Civil 3D Features. We’ve debated whether to convert over to employing it since 2010. Now is the time.

The VIEW Major Group

Civil 3D has a rash of View Features – Profile, Superelevation, Sections, Mass Haul, and a new Cant View in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013. The Autodesk example templates employ a Minor Group “VIEW” to separate these things. That’s the way we did it too so as not to confuse our new users too much. We did at least change all the View Features to employ a true NCS compliant form.

The Minor Group positioning for View Features always bothered me. It added a lot of unnecessary detail to the total Layer count and increased the necessary Style count in equal measure. Like the Particle Soup problem in the Standard Model in particle physics that happened over time, something was out of wack. A new perspective was needed.  Like a stone tossed in a pond this Minor Group created ripples and those created even more refracted ripples of complexity. Dooh.

Time of Simplify

The following peudo code for the Civil 3D View Features works. These are all Design Discipline layers. The root layers have the additional related Layers to hold the other View Feature Component variations – TICK, LABL (TEXT), GRID, etc.

• Profile – <Discipline>-VIEW-PROF-<Major Group>
• Section - <Discipline>-VIEW-SCTN-<Major Group>
• Superelevation – <Discipline>-VIEW-SUPR-<Major Group>
• Mass Haul - <Discipline>-VIEW-MASS-<Major Group>
• Cant - - <Discipline>-VIEW-CANT-<Major Group>

It might appear be less complex to not employ the VIEW as a Major Group at all.
For example:

• Profiles – <Discipline>-PROF-<Major Group>

However, removing the Major Group “VIEW” causes things to get muddy and mixed up not in the Layer scheme itself but in the requisite nested Civil 3D Styles, Label Styles, and Sets for the Features themselves. In other words, if you simplify too much you just get dumber models that are harder to design, edit, quality check, and publish with Style changes.

We need the balance the Layer count to the ease of use and management by Style in AutoCAD Civil 3D. A little more Layer complexity turns out to be worth the consistency and management by Style benefits.

What About Plan Representations?

In the NCS a “Plan” representation annotation might be theoretically routed to <Discipline>-ANNO-<Major Group> layers or <Discipline>--<Major Group>- ANNO. However, both of these approaches have issues. The NCS “ANNO” Major Group is really about Sheet and Plan Set annotation and not about model annotation – linework (LINE,CURV,SPIR etc), labels (LABL or TEXT), marks (MARK), etc.

Employing the “ANNO” as a Minor Group is formally discouraged in the NCS as well.
In the 5.0 version it is even formally “not recommended”. Huh?
Why is that?
Maybe you don’t want to see a title block etc on a Sheet at the moment, but accidentally not printing critical buried annotative content in a Sheet or Plan Set can have really bad consequences.

Property related Features are already nicely classified in the NCS “PROP”, “ESMT”, “BNDY” Major Groups. No changes needed there.

Alignments play an ever growing significant role in Civil 3D production use. Don’t Corridor solutions rock? The magic of Alignment related control in Civil 3D’s Managed Dynamic Models is important. No problem there either. The Alignment Feature needs a Major Group. We still might argue over the details of the Major Group name-  Is it ALGN or ALIN?

Plan Design Features:

• Alignments – <Discipline>-ALIN-<Major Group>

Site Related Features

There are a couple of ways to approach these issues.
Take the Civil –“C” Discipline approach. That means we probably have to employ the “SITE” Major Group as a predicate for Feature Lines, Gradings, and even Figure related geometry and annotation. Many typical commercial, residential, and public projects will work that way. The approach works fine, but you do end up with both longer Layer names and some muddling of the Layer waters as the project complexity grows. Is the road side ditch produced from the corridor model a ROAD feature or a SITE feature?

The second approach or optional addition is to employ the Works – “W” discipline. This gets necessary in larger dirt projects where the number of kinds of earthwork details is important to track and differentiate. When you employ the Works Discipline you can avoid lots of potentially redundant C-SITE layers and manage the production process and published output better as well.

For either approach our new VIEW Major Group used for all AutoCAD Civil 3D View Features works really well to simplify both design and publication work very nicely.

In the last couple of posts I talked about classic Point Display Strategies and how to develop them.

Point Display Strategies Part 1

Two Paths Out of the Woods - Part 2

In the last post we talked about the point display Override Strategy.
That’s where many organizations end up after initially struggling with AutoCAD Civil 3D point display issues for a bit.

Ride Sally Ride

The Override Strategy works great. It produces consistent symbols and annotation and mostly keeps new Civil 3D users happy.
However, because it does EXACTLY those very things we also discovered has a hidden back side to it – the probability that more production man-hours will be invested in point display maintenance on an individual point level. Some of this is almost always required but limiting man-hour duplication and waste is important.

If you’re a high performance guy or you’re lazy like me, we look for another approach.

The Point Director Method

I went after this approach (which I also call the “Priority” Method) in a previous blog post the bears mentioning again. Read it and…

Rule the Points

The post explores the Priority method using the metaphor of a movie director.
You have a Camera, a Set, and a group of Actors you need to get working together to produce a specific Scene.
You have to deal with a couple of Unions whose current priorities always will affect how the Actors perform on screen.
Civil 3D resolves the Union disputes for you, but as a Civil 3D user you are responsible and you must call the shots.

What I See is What I Want

Civil 3D is weighted to perform in this way by its object model and Style based roots.
You’ve probably noticed by now that somehow you have to tell Civil 3D to Update, Refresh, Rebuild, Synch, etc.
Last month I claimed that Civil 3D is a supermodel. She is a diva. She’s particular about when, where, and how you talk to her.
She’s a character actor. Let me quote one of the best character actors ever…

“It’s twroo…It’s twroo”
             Madeline Kahn as Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles

You get more display flexibility, but YOU are responsible to KNOW what you want and HOW you want it to appear right NOW. This also requires you KNOW how to make that happen inside the Civil 3D interface. Obviously, this requires a bit more and some different tactics in Civil 3D training.  Our old school CAD experience may actually get in the way. We have to be “retrained”.

The Director approach also makes a lot MORE sense to those who have to perform the process of point correction, figure building, and surface create and edit QA work.
Your Design folks DO face a similar issue – They have even more Civil 3D Features and many more potential display presentations to deal with.

I should mention that if you only see the end results (like many a principal or project manager) the need for this other display representation and Style stuff inside Civil 3D isn’t initially apparent.
You can clarify this, “We’re going after the lost and hidden “in-process man-hours”, boss.”
Any PM who is watching his Civil 3D project and model development man-hours will appreciate this reality.

Delayed Gratification

The Point Director|Priority approach says the point data is DATA.
How I need to display the DATA NOW is more important than any downstream publishing goal.
I care that the point DATA looks this way NOW because I want to QA and FIX the data and improve the usefulness of the Civil 3D Features the data produces.

I choose to consciously ignore any “published” end result until THAT Is the specific task at hand.

Publishing specifics will be easier because I understand HOW to get any other display results.

The Point Director|Priority Method advocates the idea of
“Work the Same and Publish on Demand”
that I probably rant about too much in this blog.

WTMI

A key concept I often neglect to mention in those discussions is that for the user TOO MUCH information right now is often as dangerous as TOO LITTLE immediate information.
Let’s keep that concept in mind as we explore some details.

Director|Priority Method Specifics

You will always have multiple Description Key Sets. Some will be in your templates. Some you may load on demand (like character actors) from other drawing or template files when you need them.
You may think of the Set or really stack of Sets as “Task based” Sets.
Perhaps “Purpose based” is a better formal term than “Task based”.
I have  ALTA survey data. Load those Sets. I have “as-built” survey data from an oil field. Load another Set(s). I have a commercial site development parcel data set. Load that one. You get the idea.

Over Specialized?

Could you build specific task based templates to handle the tasks? Of course, but you have to be careful to make sure you don’t create for yourself and your organization a Civil 3D Style and Civil 3D Template maintenance issue. These happen fast because of the interrelated and integrated way Civil 3D handles the Style and Label Style stuff.

Dealing with the differences and exceptions requires you spend time checking that the “integrations’ between the variety of “moving” parts (Desc Key Set, Figure Prefix Db, Style collection, etc) works.
You have a lot of EXACT NAMES to keep track of and then MATCH appropriately.
Sorry folks that’s the way it is.

Data Management Development

This essential “data management” stuff is really not rocket science or all that hard.
It is, however, something new to most CAD folks particularly at the level of complexity happening inside Civil 3D.

AutoCAD Civil 3D is decent about moving around what you’ve got. C3D is not presently very good at helping us create and manage itself and the development at these fundamental levels. That’s why all Jump products employ and include a development project.

You’ll have to employ external resources like Excel files (or databases) to help you Plan, Do or execute, Check, and then Act (PDCA) to maintain this stuff. Excel works fine. You’ll have to keep doing a consistent process loop as things change.

That sounds a bit intimidating especially after trying to do it the first time.
However, as “data” 80 to 95% of the stuff and specifics for all the varieties of integrations NEVER change.

The 80 20 Rule Applies

We are really in search of the Similar NOT the differences and/or exceptions.

From a big Master list of Keys and multiple descriptions (Formats) come all the published special parts – Description Key Sets and a smaller number of Figure Prefix Dbs.
For all our paying customers (even InstantOn Basic customers) we’re happy to supply the lists and if requested the resources they came from.
You shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
That would be dumb.

Next time we’ll talk about the various matching issues and tactics we need to address.

Last time we talked briefly about how to Get the Old Way Working for point data. Most, but not all organizations are over that AutoCAD Civil 3D hump I hope.

Point Display Strategies Part 1

This time we’ll talk about the first of two Point Display Strategy options that can help you put the petal to the metal.

At The Crest of the Hill?

There are two basic approaches to the point display problem. These of course can be (and often are) blended together after a bit. 
Jump platform products like InstantOn Basic (IOB) employ one of these strategies by default. The IOB approach is probably the more technically sophisticated one, but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily the best approach for what you need and want to do.
We employ the second method mentioned below (and detailed in the next post) because it is more flexible and adaptable to the many general “flavors” of survey data.
If you always work with vanilla “flavored” data you may not need its increased complexity.
If vanilla is what you do, you can tweak an IOB template and NCS (National CAD Standard) resources to employ the first method (discussed below) in only an hour or less. Yes!
Did I say InstantOn Basic was built to be flexible?

The Override Method

This more vanilla method basically reflects the old school (I have one or two Description Key Sets) approach. Your users don’t have to pay much attention to Description Key Set Priority and/or get the feel for a more complex set of point display filters and sophisticated point display choices. There is less to do and therefore less to worry about.

Executing the Override Strategy in a Description Key Set  is simple.
Make sure EVERY Key has an explicit Point Style and Label Style assigned in the Key.
Every piece of point data that enters a drawing with this Description Key Set enabled will ALWAYS have a Point Style and Point Label style assigned to it.
In Civil 3D speak we are “forcing” the Point Style and Point Label Style properties of each and every point.

With this approach usually you also do the same SINGLE decision thing with the values in the Format column in each Desc Key. In other words, A Raw Code generates A Description.

In the Desc Key examples shown above note the use of NCS 5.0 compliant layers tweaked to allow for easy infrastructure layer management in a civil/survey working environment.
The NCS "like" Point Style names (and associated NCS named blocks) make Style and graphic identification easy.
These are available in IOB, our NCS Symbol Set, and NCS Blocks Only products.

Points that match NOTHING In the Description Key Set(s) float to the ever present “All Points” Point Group. The All Points Group (or another Point Group that collects every point) is assigned a Point Style and Label Style like “No_Match”, “Non-Standard”, or something like that.
This basic Civil 3D Point Group trick makes sure that you don’t lose out on the opportunity to see what might be uncoded in your point data on entrance. Everyone blows codes and/or miscodes points in the field.

The Override approach almost assumes and sort of implies that ALL the points will also show up with some kind of symbol and some kind of label all the time. Yes, you could assign Styles and Labels that show nothing or use the Civil 3D null of “<none>” here and there. In the Override approach, however, this is the exception not the rule.
Override acts like the Get the Old Way Working approach I started off with and most of CAD folks are “used” to. It’s comfy. You can still change things and do more.

When you need to display points and/or point labels differently you create or edit Point Groups and employ the Override tab properties to force the filtered “matching” points to OBEY a Point Group Override.

What You See is What You Get

Your Civil 3D users really only have to worry about the Current Point Group Priority Order and the specifics of the Point Group definitions themselves.

Of course, Point Groups are drawing specific so you have to load named Point Group and their property values into your Civil 3D template or resort to other levels of Civil 3D trickery to move the Point Group definitions around.
I’ve covered some of those processes before – search for “Description Keys”.  I won’t go there again here.
See this post on how you might externalize the specific Point Group Property details from inside of Civil 3D in a systematic way. For those of you in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 you might try employing a similar tactic for Survey Query definitions.

The Override Method is good a producing consistent symbols and annotation.
ThIs sounds good.
It is good.

Oncoming Traffic

However, it also says that you and your users care about the final published representation of the point almost all the time.
Typically, users will also think and/or perceive that they have to manually edit more points and labels individually.

How they see the points will drive their “in drawing” production edit and point display behavior.
That behavior is ALREADY weighted towards exactly the individual point edit approach by their previous working CAD history and experience.
In the past we had limited point display and annotative choice.
All of that individual point handling has a hidden project man-hour backside to it.
Each manually tweaked point has to be maintained and maintained and maintained.

To put the petal to the metal and get more performance we have to look at the Civil 3D tools that are there right in front of us and find another way.

We’ll explore that next time when we discuss what I call the “Priority” or “Point Director” Method.