ďobo-CADzone, true men don't kill coyotes and use AutoCAD…

V tejto časti seriálu CAD v archeológii sa ponorím do konkrétneho softvéru, ktorý budem naďalej používať. Z pomyselnej “veľkej trojky” Autodesk – Microstation – Solidworks sú to práve produkty Autodesku, ktoré považujem za najvhodnejšie pre naše temné plány…

Application choice

It is evident that the selection of appropriate CAD is a pure subjective matter. There are some influences of money and licencing policy and application capabilities as well, but the real point of choice is a tradition and older habits. The majority of drafters works with software they have met at school or in previous work – a typical example is Microstation vs. Autodesk. It is also my case – I lost my virginity with Autodesk Map 2000 ten years ago continuing today. In fact there is no real selection dilemma – CAD possibilities overreach drafters requirements and data formats interchange is easy problem nowadays.
Appropriate product branch (profession oriented) is a little more complicated thing – in the case of Autodesk we should hardly meet someone working with “pure” AutoCAD today but use it only in the role of basic drafting engine with profession specific extension. Product forking leads to wide range of applications and there is even archaeological rebrand of AutoCAD called ArchaeoCAD. I didn’t have the possibility to evaluate this product and it is also a little bit out-of-date (based on AutoCAD 2005)

From Autodesk portfolio there are two prominent products for our purposes – AutoCAD MAP 3D and AutoCAD Civil 3D. Map is full-featured AutoCAD with strong GIS funcionality and Civil is aimed for terrain modeling and BIM (Building Information Modeling). Considering fact that Map is complete integrated into Civil environment untill 2008 version, with AutoCAD Civil 3D you gain:

• AutoCAD in its beauty
• AutoCAD Map with GIS functionality
• modules a objects Civil specific

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009

Although there are some significant diference between AutoCAD and AutoCAD Civil GUI, there is no need for panic for those that used AutoCAD before. Firstly you can switch to pure AutoCAD or Map GUI (Workspaces toolbar), and on the other hand everything important for Civil is collected under panel Toolspace. Workspace (or GUI) could be of course customized out of all recognition but basic stepping stones – command line, menus and toolbars still remains the same (Fig. 01).

Fig. 01. AutoCAD Civil 3D – one of potential Workspace settings. 1 – basic Menu; 2 – dropdown workspaces list; 3 – Civil Toolspace – basic interface for Civil objects; 4 – Task Pane – basic interface for Map 3D environment; 5 – command line

Toolspace (nr. 3 on screenshot; switch on/off through General > Toolspace) contains exclusively Civil specific objects – they are tabularly shown on fig. 02.

Fig. 02. AutoCAD Civil 3D and its objects. Keep it in mind while sharing data with someone who works in another Autodesk product – those objects will not be shown correctly.

Toolspace has several panels of which are first two most important – Prospector and Settings. Those express the philosophy of Civil – all objects created in Civil are situated in Prospector and have their properties which can be defined in Settings panel. Settings (attributes, styles) could be more types – which means that objects are separated from their presentation logic.

Drawing settings – basic concepts

In contrast with AutoCAD where are the basic settings mainly managed through Options and Units there is one very important area in Civil 3D that essentially influences the nature of objects and geospatial data – Drawing settings. This item is accessible through Toolspace, Settings panel > drawing name > right click > Edit Drawing Settings.  Consequent dialogue window disposes with 5 tabs:

• Units and Zone – coordinate projection and units
• Transformation – possibillity for geospatial transformation definition (during objest insertion)
• Object Layers – defines default Layers for newly created Civil objects
• Abbreviations – definition of object labels abbreviations
• Ambient Settings – various settings for distance, area, volume and other units, approximation etc.

AutoCAD Civil drawing settings – figs. 03-08 show individual tabs of environment settings. In order to avoid these settings editing everytime you start new project, the best practice is make one default starting file (template) with defined locale settings.

1. viď aj krátku diskusiu pod týmto starším príspevkom [↩]
2. Building Information Modeling [↩]