The Autodesk Civil 3D team made some major progress on the functionality of Pressure Pipes in Autodesk Civil 3D 2021. Lordy, Lordy! They finally introduced the concept and practice of the Runs into the Pressure Pipe interface and tools. Ok. If we use that now famous and comely term “Lordy”, some tongue in cheek is clearly understood. It is sort of a doctored 302 form of FBI setup if you catch my drift.
It’s a key concept that Alignment and Profile mechanics and workflows indeed might have some direct practical application to Pressure Pipe Networks (and conduit systems). This took a while to penetrate. Now that we are into the thickness of it, could we call that a (thrust) block problem? Sorry.
Many of us in Civil 3D Land have been awaiting this mid-course correction for how long? Oh. Happy Day.
The Issue is Your Current Point of View?
The New Civil 3D 2021 Pressure Pipe Runs and More
Seth Cohen is notorious for both his high-speed delivery and excellent depth of necessary Civil 3D detail and nuance. Seth’s justified attention to sound production project mechanics doesn’t mean he won’t train to bend the rules creatively to get the work out the door. Hoorah.
We all need that. That does mean you need to watch the entire webinar video. In case you miss it…
It’s more fun when you get to the juicy bits.
The Last Shall Be First
The last third of Seth’s presentation is all about the mechanics of managed and systematic use of named Views for Civil 3D project Sheet production. Heck. He even covers how to document your Views in real time. Useful, doable, and practical stuff.
Seth could have employed an annotative Alignment and tweaked Viewframes to pull this Sheet production off. Ok. That might scare some folks…
All you stand to lose is Wasted Time. Que the Eagles Live track.
It's happening again
Your baby's gone and you're all alone
And it looks like the end
And you're back out on the street”
The order of Viewframes is important but where the Viewframes are spatially in relation to one another or even to that potential anno Alignment is not. Huh?
Go ahead. You can easily test this. Create an Alignment. Make a set of ViewFrames from a valid Sheet template. Move them around and plot check the results.
Yep. Civil 3D can do that.
See the Serious Views in Civil 3D and Managed Civil 3D Views and User Discipline posts.
Must Do Busy Work
Somewhere and somewhen we do have to manually create the named model spaced Views. Yes. Some of these may require some DVIEW Twist mechanics.
Seth knows better but he wanted to make the point about the importance of user maintained named Views that Civil 3D Viewframes sadly still don’t contain and manage.
Autodesk still sadly does not allow us to grab and share View definitions easily from other drawings.
They totally miss the point that the View Names can be more important than the easily adjustable property specifics. Dooh!
View Layer Snapshots
Seth’s example employs saved Layer Snapshots embedded and saved into the named Views. This works great in one publishing drawing but does not translate well across many project drawings and the multiplicity of Sheets the often occurs in a typical project.
Mirror Mirror on the Wall
You may build a Set of default standard named Views into your templates and/or INSERT Explode a canned Set of View definitions held in a resource drawing into your Sheet production drawings.
This works.
However, those Layer Snapshots tied to those model space Views are not very likely to remain the same. Oh. Bother. More maintenance busy work. Who needs that?
Layer Standard Layer States to the Rescue
The automation of Layer Standard managed Set of Layer States solves the consistent Viewport layer display problem a lot better. Make and employ the Views as shown but do not save the Layer Snapshots in them. Employ a known publishing Set of Layer States into the Viewport(s) instead. Simply awesome.
The Layer States approach is much more adaptive and consistent but does require that you manage the Layer States in your Layer Standard inside Civil 3D. See the recent Civil 3D Layer Standards and Magical Thinking post.
What if that busy work was already done for multiple Layer Standards and those supported many releases of Civil 3D? You might want to try that. All you stand to lose is Wasted Time.
It is Easier to Edit Than Create
Get the Framework for Civil 3D Release 8