Civil 3D Data Shortcuts

The latest issue of AUGI World has a great article by Donnie Gladfelter about Civil 3D Data Shortcuts.  There is also some really useful info at the end of the article about saving memory and regen time.  Highly recommended for Civil 3D users.

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Improving Performance in AutoCAD and Civil 3D

I’m running Civil 3D 2009 on a PC with an Nvidia Quadro 3500 video card. I’ve recently taken a few steps to speed things up. First, I disabled Communications Center, which speeds up start times. Second, I installed the latest Nvidia Drivers. Finally, I installed the Nvidia Powerdraft Drivers.

I didn’t do any benchmarking, so I can’t say exactly what effect these changes had, but if you are having problems with AutoCAD’s speed, you might want to try a few of these things.

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Exporting from Civil 3D

Sometimes we need to export our drawing files from Civil 3D to plain vanilla AutoCAD. This may be necessary for a variety of reasons: the client or another consultant doesn’t have Civil 3D and they aren’t able to install the Civil 3D Object Enabler, or you are producing an archive set and don’t want to risk future versions of AutoCAD being unable to read old Civil 3D data. Also, given that Civil 3D surfaces take longer to load, you might want to produce vanilla AutoCAD versions of your design surfaces and pipe networks for use as base files on your plan set.

I’ve discovered a few issues with exporting from Civil 3D 2008 to vanilla AutoCAD, and have some workarounds.

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Okay, that was complicated

I just ran into a giant brick wall trying to update the Civil 2008 Object Enabler for AutoCAD 2008. I first tried to install the latest OE. Not so easy, because it told me that I already had an older version installed and I needed to uninstall it first. Okay, so I go to Windows Control Panel:Add/Remove Programs and click Remove for the “Civil 2008 Object Enabler for AutoCAD 2008″ entry. It then tells me that it needs the original installation package “2B5.tmp_AutoCAD_2008_-_English_(United_States).msi”.

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AutoCAD Blog Roundup

R.K. McSwain has a well-written tutorial about how to set up Paper Space Layouts.

Dave Dixon posted a quick tip on how to eliminate that huge list of annotative scales.

From the Ground Up has posted a handy LISP file for quickly changing polyline elevations.

Ward Romberger explains the usefulness (or futility) of plotting with Lines Merge.

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Solution: “Cannot find resource string number” error

I was getting the “cannot find resource string number” xxxx “in resource AEccLand50″ error in AutoCAD 2008. The dialog box popped up when I opened a drawing, and going through about 15 of these errors (the escape key helps), the drawing opened just fine. If I closed the drawing and re-opened it, the errors didn’t seem to appear – only when I closed AutoCAD and re-opened the drawing did the errors appear again.

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Civil 3D Splash Screen Replacement

Howdy, welcome to my new AutoCAD blog. To start things off, here’s a little hack for you. The Civil 3D 2008 splash screen reminded me of something else, so I decided to change it. Here’s the procedure:

First, download ResHack: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/

Then modify C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008\acadres.dll with ResHack:
1) remove RCData:414
2) Add new Bitmap resource : 414 : new splash image BMP (link below)
3) replace Bitmap resource 144 with new splash image BMP
4) save

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