We See in Civil 3D and Can Be Blind

Once upon a time at Autodesk University I delivered a popular CAD Manager track session called People Skills. I think it is safe to say that us techy types often tend to have people and management issues. We tend to want people to behave like software or man-made objects and then they don’t and won’t.

I’m a storyteller. I don’t do standup comedy nor can I deliver a joke all that well. I employed the best of current and funny TV commercials and other downloadable videos to help make some important points about being human.

That downloaded video thing is probably one reason why I continue to curate a large Autodesk Civil centric video training collection from public sources on this site. Thanks to all of you who share them. This work takes courage and lots of practice. Yes. I do watch every one of them and more. Ouch.

Please No More Drone

The best of education and skills attainment is participatory, emotional, and entertaining all at once.

The Sounds of Silence is a great song but silence is not what you want in a training video. Maybe Autodesk might pay AKN technical staff to try to get away with it. You should not. When you do that you lose a large percentage of the human race who are auditory learners and blunt or stunt the training experience.

There a reason why the brilliant art of silent film only existed only until it didn’t. Video and sound editing is an important training skill in the Internet environment that should not be ignored.

One must work hard in training to overcome the it goes in one ear and out the other problem. The AU People Skills class was a version of session I performed regularly in CAD Manager Boot Camps and Cadpilot Jump Schools. We tried out a lot of things to get to a more productive result. Thanks to all of you that still call or drop me a line to bring them back.

In People Skills, I always tried to remember to bring up the work of Daniel Simmons, a cognitive psychologist, whose groundbreaking work initially rocked the world starting about 15+ years ago.

Groundbreaking? Most, if not all, of the major car manufacturers and insurance companies are now selling product based on principals discovered in his work. There are already laws on the books in CA and most US States because of it. There will be more to come. Simmons investigated something he named

Sustained Inattentional Blindness

Many people have seen the famous Man in the Gorilla Suit You Tube videos. The 8-year old version on YouTube has received more than 20 million hits. If you ask people to count basketball passes between white team members in the video, more than half of the people will never see the obvious man in the gorilla suit walk through the scene. Airline pilots do not see other large planes on runways either.

When we engage our sequential intelligence, we get wrapped up in the counting (or task) and easily miss important details. The human engagement or focus problem is true for all the Seven Intelligences. It is a valuable skill and discipline to be able to consciously switch intelligences when faced with problems.

Here’s a good Civil 3D training video example of our Man in the Gorilla Suit challenge. Sadly, you will have to watch the video on YouTube since remote embedding is not allowed for this one video on ATG’s YouTube channel for some reason. Oops.

Identify Survey Coding Mistakes in Civil 3D with Miscode Styles

Please click the link. The 7 minute video contains good stuff and is worth watching.

Kyle Groves, a Technical Specialist at ATG, produced a very useful and good Civil 3D training video about the common Survey miscode identification problem.

Kyle's execution of a Style-based Survey Code QAQC solution is pretty good. His Style mechanics and details all work. His explanation is well detailed.

By the way, ATG is the only place where you can get the CTC Software Civil Tools that many Framework for Civil 3D customers also like to employ. Ok. A lot of folks like the equally useful SINCPAC Civil 3D Tools too. Both are good productive Civil 3D tool stuff.

I picked the video as an example because Kyle starts off with the What’s wrong with this picture hook. This is a stage magician’s trick. This is a bit like a politician who promises we all should give you something for free. The idea that people believe they can make promises for me sort of bugs me.

The sleight of hand device in this case encourages our Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Civil 3D. We miss the Man in the Gorilla Suit in the video. We are distracted by what we see on the screen which is contrived to make a valid point about Survey miscode identification.

Use the Tools not the Screen

The picture on the screen of the survey data is not the first or even the best place to look for these types of errors in Civil 3D. Why I train people not to import points and figures into a drawing in the first place. Automatic sounds and certainly looks faster in a demo but disguises the needed steps in a better QAQC workflow to produce better deliverable results.

Given a reasonable Description Key Set (or set of Description Key Sets) - If there are points that do NOT match codes these will appear in the All Points Point Group with an unresolved Description Format result in the Points list in the Toolspace. Easy to sort for that in the Points listing. Nothing in the Raw Description will be changed by the Format in the Description Key Set. You can identify this with nothing displayed on the screen and no Point Groups if you like.

The idea of one drawing with all the Symbols. Labels, and Figures makes me all twitchy and itchy.

 

Preview Survey Setups and Figures

For many Civil 3D data behind problems we need the skills, discipline, and resource structures to employ the entire Civil 3D Toolspace and interface to check the data behind before we pay as much attention to the screen results. We need to consciously fight the one drawing and one screen picture dependency. Our Civil 3D Survey at Jump Speed  page contains many more video goodies.

Your Civil 3D Diva Performs as You Direct

These nifty miscode Styles will not find those much more problematic Survey miscodes in Figures. Where we put in the wrong code (or added a bad Survey command) and screw up the Figure linework resolution. That was a LIP not a FLOWLINE. Misplaced codes if you prefer. That correct code was not actually the end of curve but an end. You know the drill.

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