“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 InstantOn 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.