Jump Kit

The Framework for Civil 3D
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It’s Production Solution upgrade time. I chatted with a customer about his Jump Kit upgrade last week. He was particularly concerned that we were still supplying our additional Imperial Assembly Tool Palettes for AutoCAD Civil 3D. Yep. Even I forget to mention some of the way cool stuff that’s in there.

Thank you for customers!

AASHTO Assemblies

We’ve supplied AASHTO compliant roadway assemblies for a lot of releases of AutoCAD Civil 3D. These days we supply assemblies for most of the common typical roadways for rural, suburban, and urban environments. We wrap these up in a common content library you can attach to your default Civil 3D workspace. Yeah. I know. Civil 3D makes the install sort of weird. We handle that with both detailed written instructions and in the install videos. Not quite a no brainer, but close.

You get the Assemblies and the Assembly sets (for Intersections) with all our InstantOn Basic, InstantOn Survey products and definitely in Jump Kit. Sorry. We don’t supply them in our Templates Only trial product. You can see a list of these in the product documentation pdf available here. There are a lot of them. Our Assembly Sets are detailed and all listed in there as well.

Our Talk About Assemblies

I had to ask, “OK. Ralph, tell me why you use our assemblies and the Tool Palettes? You’re a public works agency. I’m sure you have your own set of typical cross section standards.”

“We do. I just cheat and modify your resource drawings a bit by editing the subassembly details. We use standard 6” instead of 8” curbs for example. Takes me hardly no time at all to get that done and the palettes and assemblies just work. The assembly sets work too. We don’t use those as much as we should.
We liked the naming convention. Beats the heck out of something called County Section A, B, or C which is what we used to have. It makes sense. It includes the speed, the subs, and works great.
Mostly we do suburban stuff and you have all the common speed rated stuff already done. The guys can’t it screw up. Sometimes they try. If we have to do a rural project out in the boonies, that’s in there too. No one has to hassle me to come up with new cross sections. Well, hardly ever. I edit one of yours anyway.”

“You thought of changing the resource drawings on your own?”

He laughs. “No. I read it in your documentation or I saw it in a video recording on the website. What the pictures look like in the Tool Palettes doesn’t really matter. We want to get the right cross sections for our particular project. I just delete out the stuff they aren’t supposed to use.”

Me? I’m apparently lucky if I can remember my own name.

“Do you use the supplied Axis of Rotation assemblies?”

“Depends. I’m glad there in there. Sometimes I have to explain the difference, because staff forgets. We don’t do a lot of work that requires superelevation. If they haven’t done a new design that requires supers in a while, it’s start over. You know how that is.”

I had to ask, “Do you use the Autodesk Subassembly Composer?”

“No. Thank God. I never had to.”

I encouraged Ralph to take a look at our new Deliverables Civil 3D video training course in the Members section. You can too. Register here. This really productive method relates Alignments to annotative point groups and point labels. I mentioned that we now even had new Description Key sets for point labeling from corridor design using this same method. The abbreviations are even easy to customize.

“Thanks. Sounds great. Keep up the good work. We couldn’t use Civil 3D without your stuff.
We’ll upgrade today.”

Assemble a More Productive Future