“Can your Layers and block names be adjusted quickly to another CAD Standard?”

Step Beyond the Pale

Our Jump Production Solutions are NOT a specific customization of AutoCAD Civil 3D.
We chose to employ the National CAD Standard (NCS) as a basis because of all the hard won experience expressed in those tested standards.  In many respects, we employ the NCS, UDS, etc. because of the underlying How and Why for those standards not because of the specific result.

It’s true…It’s truuue!

Most of our IntantOn customers simply use our Style tools and get work done and delivered.
They tweak a few things and produce real project work. That’s what pays the bills for most civil engineering and survey organizations. The NCS generally helps makes the process pretty painless, powerfully consistent while the underpinnings remain adaptive and surprisingly flexible.

How can that be?

More Competency

The Jump is a designed System and an engineered Structure to BUILD standards for AutoCAD Civil 3D from. We built it that way from the ground up and from the very beginning.

Was that a seed of genius or and moment of madness?
Somedays… I wonder  :)

If you employ Civil 3D for even a little while you discover there’s a lot of integrated detail to cover in the complex world that is the ever-growing beast of AutoCAD Civil 3D.
No one could get a practical and working system done all at once. There all lots and lots of parts involved. We knew up front it was commitment to a continuous development process - a project that never ends. That perspective changes how you think and work at everything.

People will customize Civil 3D for you. Many organizations do that customization work themselves. Either way it’s painful and expensive. Our products prove it doesn’t need to be that way.

Each new Release adds significantly to both the depth and capability that's built in By Design.

We seek to build tools to make that current unfortunate necessity go away as completely as possible for our customers. We supply a functional working system, the structures to support that in production, and methods to change all of the details that are a vital part of the above.

More and Better

The Platform System is designed and built around a set of Standard Keys that transfer MEANING to user and the civil engineering performance diva that is AutoCAD Civil 3D.
That means, if you have a new and different set of Standard Keys and want to employ different meanings you may systematically apply them to the structure and produce radically different results from our products.

Work the Same…Publish on Demand

Style Matters More

In one sense AutoCAD Civil 3D Style doesn’t care about AutoCAD Layer Standards, Block libraries, Textstyles, Color, Plotstyles or really anything else AutoCAD.
It is a bit mind-boggling that Style inside AutoCAD Civil 3D is such an abstraction. We all can employ that abstraction of Style for our mutual benefit.

The Power of Names

Civil 3D Styles and Label Styles EMPLOY the AutoCAD “named” parts to “express” themselves. C3D Styles and Label Style just look for and match the “right” names.

Change the names and you can change anything. There are lots of posts here about the Power of Names in AutoCAD Civil 3D for obvious reasons.

Given a planned set of new Names (Standard Keys) the production of almost any graphic standard is a matter of repeated Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA) loops. The loops are practically necessary because of the many integrated and connected parts within the Civil 3D “environment”. There are references aplenty - even references within references. The Civil 3D core programming doesn’t have a problem with this intertwined complexity most of the time. It was designed and built that way. Our human brains aren’t so lucky and so good at keeping track.

How do we make that essential PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, and Act) process faster and easier for our customers? We supply the system and the structure to support the system. We provide simple tools that employ those same things to make your required changes easier.

In Jump Kit Release 5 products we supply to every customer the easy to employ tools to change the underlying Layer System based on any other Known set of Keys.
These tools don’t run inside of AutoCAD Civil 3D.  That would be sort of silly. We’d be reinventing the wheel so to speak.

Why not build tools our customers already understand already know how to use?

These “customization” tools run in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is much better suited to this type of formative work. These customizing tools require no custom code and no programmic geekdom. They require no particular AutoCAD Civil 3D skill either.

“What? You’ve got to be kidding?’

Understand One Tool and You Learn to Build More

Some really basic AutoCAD skills are all that’s required. Truly - any reasonably skilled and computer literate intern can do most of the work.
Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t tell people that.

Take Five and Jump Ahead

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

The new Release 5 of our Jump Production Solutions products for AutoCAD Civil 3D simultaneously supports the last 3 releases of AutoCAD Civil 3D - AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012, AutoCAD Civil3D 2013, and real soon now - AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014!

AutoCAD Civil 3D Upgrade Freedom

We guarantee easy drawing and project upgrades from one release of AutoCAD Civil 3D to another. We’ve kept that promise for seven consecutive releases of AutoCAD Civil 3D including all the upgrades and service packs in between.

Work the Same – Publish on Demand

Our products fully embrace and support an important idea:
Get work done easier and faster in Concept, Practice and Deliverable.

Inside AutoCAD Civil 3D you should be able to produce project work of any type in a consistent working production environment. You must be able to deliver that work to any jurisdiction, client, professional, or organizational standard without reinventing the wheel for each project.

In Depth Style Support for Every Civil 3D Feature

If Civil 3D includes it, we support it with a host of Consistent, Functional, and Practical Civil 3D Styles and Sets. You get the choices, the variety, and the demanding presentation and publication performance you need from the largest, fully integrated, and most complete Civil 3D Styles library on the planet.

The 2000 “basic” Styles in Templates Only and Instant On Basic are just the start. Thousands and thousands more Styles and Sets are available in an easy to use site licensed Jump Kit resource library.

Jump Kit includes hundreds and hundreds of Alignment, Profile, Section, and multiple variations of all the View Features. Our Styles and Label Styles and Sets all work together to create seamless Production Solution for AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Field to Finish in AutoCAD Civil 3D

A new InstantOn Survey product arrives.
IOS includes 1500+ job tested Description Keys in a host of Description Key Sets and Survey Prefix Db file based on the most commonly employed commercial, State DOT, and US government agency standards.
Our Key Sets work together with fully integrated Point Styles, Point Label Styles, Survey Figures, and Survey Prefix databases. Out of the box support for multiple forms of graphic and annotative variations are actually all built in.

In depth Style and Set tool support for all typical types and kinds of survey found and civil engineering design infrastructure:  Roadways, Site Design, Subdivisions, Earthworks, Utilities (all types), even Traffic signal diagrams and Tree species surveys are supported.
If you survey it or design it in AutoCAD Civil 3D, the odds are we have Ready to Run Styles that support it. We even supply the Styles to quality check and markup errors and omissions for all the mission critical Civil 3D Features.

National Standards

The Jump Platform 5.0 release is NCS (National CAD Standard) 4.0 and NCS 5.0 compliant.
You get consistent graphics; in depth, complete, and organized collections of all the necessary resource files; and more fully integrated options.
All our resources are easy to find, edit, and maintain.
All the naming schemes for all the included AutoCAD resources (Layers, Blocks, Linetypes, Textstyles, Plotstyles, etc.) employ user friendly NCS “like” naming schemes.

Standard Parts

We offer Blocks Only and Symbol Set products that allow you to add our standardized NCS resources to your own custom templates and other AutoCAD based apps in minutes.

Easy to Learn Well Documented Products

Inside AutoCAD Civil 3D all our Style tools are documented in-depth. Every user can see and understand what all the tools do and how their available choices differ in detail. Our in-depth external documentation extends to every file and folder for every resource.

Our complete development , training, and demo project dataset is documented in depth and in detail. Hours and hours of in-depth and free on line video recordings support all the Features and functionality of our tools at work inside AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Easy to Install, Deploy, and Implement

The typical product install takes a few minutes. Our product installation requires no special security privileges or special installation or management skill. Our default installation won’t even effect an existing Civil 3D installation.

Easy Customization

Our products are continuously developed and built from the ground up to be customized. In fact, our Civil 3D Production Solution is the only product line of its kind available anywhere in the world for any price.

For the most part, most customization involves the simple act of choosing what you want and removing what you do not need today.  We even supply the built in tools, structure, and project resources you need to perform the customization process and maintain it for all your users and different types of projects.

More Affordable Productivity

Jump Platform Release 5 products make AutoCAD Civil 3D instantly more productive, more capable, and easy to employ in real world survey and civil engineering projects.

We do all that for a price that any organization can afford.

Take Five and Jump Ahead