In my last post about Questions of Power in AUTOCAD Civil 3D, I tried to point out that our traditional CAD thought processes about AutoCAD Civil 3D don’t always line up with the way the software actually behaves. This is because our thinking processes most often line up with how we used to do things.
The statement above may sound a bit moronic or circular, but it ain’t.
We humans are tool users. How we employ our tools defines how we think about most things.

Civil 3D is All About the Data

I repeat this mantra all time in many ways and in many forms. 
The Civil 3D Data perspective helps us shake up our old school CAD thinking patterns.
The point of View (multiple puns are intended here) hopefully generates a new perspective that allows us to think about and approach our civil engineering and survey real world problems differently.
It’s true Civil 3D is all about the data, and then again it ain’t.
The software does have a real world job to do – spit out a plan set.

So ok, I lie - or at least I try to supply some quantum, model-based spin on such matters. You tell a good story and at times the plot tends to runs away from the characters or vice versa.

She’s a Diva

Her abstracted Style power makes the Civil 3D diva able to deliver a continuous stream of crafted Instagram photo ops(Style), Twitter tweets (Label Styles), and interconnected blog posts(Sets). To get a well-managed handle on all of that is a new required skill we must acquire.

Nothing in Civil 3D makes the Data|Picture dichotomy more apparent than the Alignment feature. The Alignment is where Autodesk puts the big investment bucks into the production that is AutoCAD Civil 3D. I’m sure you notice that the Alignment feature long ago and far way ran away with the Leading Actor (Feature) Award inside Civil 3D. OK - so Surfaces are important too, but mostly pretty boring without the leading man (or woman) and a purpose to drive the plot (multiple puns are intended here too).

Go ahead. In your head start listing the things you might want to do in Civil 3D. You’ll have to work impossibly hard to try and get anything accomplished and still avoid Alignments. Luckily, we actually have the opposite problem.  There’s almost too much an Alignment can do.

Creative License

The more competent list to work on is:
What are all the other things I can employ an Alignment for in my projects?
As I allude to in my last post, we often get emotionally stuck on CAD-based information management practice. Yeah Alignments and Alignment spawned Features is the stuff of critical design data. Alignments can be Parcels as I talked about in my Parcel posts earlier this year. Yada yada yada…

Blockbuster Productions

If it’s linear, we can Style it, Annotate it, and Manage it as an Alignment. Hence our InstantOn and Jump Kit products are chock full of Style, Label Style, and Label Set tools that employ Alignments as dual purpose data/annotative tools. We supply thousands and thousands of graphic symbol elements in our products.
By popular demand, the fastest growing collections tend to be alignment related graphics. Fancy that. Once the lights go on for an AutoCAD Civil 3D user the desire for useful choices explodes.

A Drift Over the Centerline

Frankly, you can almost argue that with a bit creative license and ingenuity you just might rid yourself and your drawings from AutoCAD linetype dependencies and similar CAD machinations completely.

I’m not saying we want to eliminate AutoCAD linetypes, but with what’s graphically possible within the Alignment feature context it is something to consider now and then. How much managed graphic detail can you cram into an Alignment’s Label Set etc.

Is that method the best way to deliver the desired published result?

Of course, we supply annotative Alignment Styles, the typical National CAD Standard and related Labels for the classic uses of alignments, and then some. We also supply typical NCS and typical US State Dot versions of infrastructure linetypes and more. Our latest Release 5 products actually include more in-depth and more consistent NCS 5.0 linetype resources as well. Find out some more details here.

Is That Thing an Alignment?

Take Five and Get the Freedom to Work in Civil 3D

If you train a bunch of AutoCAD using folk in AutoCAD Civil 3D you get some common questions. Errr. Actually these questions are usually formed as a statement. For example:

“We make a lot of stuff in our drawings that isn’t Civil 3D stuff. Civil 3D also seems to need lots and lots of Layers too. All these Layers are confusing. We probably don’t need them. Can we do anything about that to simplify things?”

Sure you can do that. You may actually end up working harder because you do.

Backwards Management

You might want to consider that you’re looking at the whole CAD management and publish thing backwards. Civil 3D in a very real sense turns these things upside down.

In AutoCAD, the ONLY things that make something mean something in your drawing is typically what Layer the thing is on and/or what the graphic specifics of the Block are.
You must worry about Layers because for the most part Layer Management the only way to get what you need to print out the door. In the AutoCAD world, you have to worry about all the silly little details ALL the time, because the sum total of all those many little details pile up on you in the end.

Aren’t you tired of that? Doesn’t that seem like a waste of time?

Civil 3D is NOT AutoCAD

Civil 3D employs a Style based management approach. Layers, blocks, and all that AutoCAD stuff is just something every Civil 3D Feature uses to “express” itself.  Get the Style, Label Style, or Set “right” and you get exactly what you want.

But there’s just regular AutoCAD stuff that isn’t Civil 3D stuff?

Really? Like what?

“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 IntantOn 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.

Take Five and Jump Ahead