Is it really that time of year again already? Spring training and March Madness are over.
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2016 is upon us.
See the news from Autodesk here.
Here at MoreCompetency our product Releases really have little to do with Autodesk product releases in some respects.
We always support more than one Autodesk release.
Our products for one AutoCAD Civil 3D release will work in the next.
We are now preparing our Production Solutions Release 6 products.
We plan to make our Release 6 Production Solution products available for Civil 3D 2016, Civil 3D 2015, and Civil 3D 2014.
People do call and ask,
“What’s in there?”
As promised there will be upgrades to the NCS (National CAD Standards) Layer scheme to make things more compliant, more useful for production work, and more manageable for every Production Solution customer.
We do plan to release a new City Standards AddOn product that covers typical city infrastructure in more depth and detail.
Do you like the idea of a BIM for Infrastructure in AutoCAD Civil 3D made real?
Imagine that.
- You should be able to pump out work into raw AutoCAD and AutoCAD Map without hassles.
- Given some minor caveats Output to editable Microstation V8 DGN seems to work well too.
Oooooo. This is a process, folks- It is not a push button solution.
Shhh. Please don’t tell Autodesk. They might be mad at me again. :-) - Additional support for Street lighting, Traffic signaling, Landscape, etc.
- More varied and/or segmented utilities
- Even more wish list Symbol Set choices too
- More and better NOT keys in the typical Description Key Sets
What’s a NOT key? You need to know that even if you don’t use our products. - More in-depth Major and Minor Keys
better coverage of all the production documentation details
AutoCAD Civil 3D Customization Improvements
Thanks to our continuous development model the Release 6 Production Solution products will support the generation of many ACAD Layer customization details by NCS Keys.
What does that mean?
“One ring to rule them. One ring to bind them.”
Yes. I left out “in darkness” since we’re about putting the light on Civil 3D templates and Civil 3D Styles for AutoCAD Civil 3D production work.
The New Key based customization tool will allow you to pick your NCS Major and Minor Keys and produce layer properties including color, plotstyle, lineweight, etc from a single source by a consistent and reasonably malleable set of rules.
- You can even weight can modify specifics by your personal or organizational preferences.
- We handle the whole thing in common software tools you already own, understand, and know how to use - Microsoft Excel and any good ASCII text editor are all you need.
- You can generate the scripts to modify the Layer scheme, produce Standards files, and even the Layer States for any kind of template you may require.
Yes! You can do production rocket science on your own desktop.
Folks. We do all of this without any code you have to buy and maintain?
Are you paying attention? That is innovation. Is that genius?
The Key Rules are:
- Simple and Easy to Understand
No rocket science required to learn them - Super familiar if you are already a customer with some “made even easier” tweaks that work.
- Make sense and work across multiple CAD and GIS applications – Really.
- If you want to translate from old Keys to new Keys,
we provide the built-in tool support to do that. - You need to produce work to a custom Layer scheme?
No worries.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ NCS.”
We Must Act Differently To Think Differently
If you’ve paid attention, I’ve talked about this some over the last few months. You can already get the new free and published list of Open NCS Civil Keys here. You might want to check out the Layer Standards posts that begin about here.
If you don’t care about the customization tweaks, we’ll supply the tools to upgrade your project work to Release 6 standards. Don’t we always? You betcha!
As I discussed in a previous post on Alignments as Publication Managers, we’ll supply new Styles to optimize the production of survey data and even design data for Plan and Profile sheets based on View Frames and that better AutoCAD Civil 3D workflow.
Maybe we’ll release that as a FREE AddOn to our customers. We are getting there.
What if you buy one of our ridiculously inexpensive and productive Release 5 products now?
- We always provide updates.
- Our 2015 will run in 2016.
- We will do a complete QA loop on existing products in the official shipping release of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2016 before we do anything else.