Monday, July 28, 2008

Got stones .... or just lines?

So let's say you are wrapping up your planset and your final task is to hatch out your sidewalks or your driveways or perhaps even your stabilized construction entrance (if you don't use a block and/or marker style for this). So you go and make sure you have closed polygons to hatch with, you apply the hatch pattern and you see this:




It's rather disheartening to see your beloved hatch pattern broken up like this!! Alas there is a quick fix for this. If you select the hatch and then right click you can choose to go to Hatch Edit


Once you have gotten back to the Hatch properties dialog you will notice the option for a hatch origin point. The reason the majority of these hatch busts occur is this: Normally your drawing origin point is set to 0,0. However when we move a project into State Plane Co-ordinates we usually have a location point a long way off from 0,0. Therefore, to fix the hatch we simply need to adjust the origin point. Select "Click to set new origin" and then pick in your drawing somewhere closer to your project.


Once you have selected an origin (if you get an errors stating that it's outside the drawings extents, at the command line type limits and turn them off) Your hatch pattern will be fixed.



Happy CADD'ing you digital earthworkers!

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Avoiding the unavoidable

So who reading this has ever had a Civil 3D lockup and/or crash? If anyone didn't raise their hand then you aren't really using the software.

When the crash happens there are a few common variables whose settings go awry. These few settings are:

FILEDIA - possibly the one I get the most questions about! Make sure that just after you crash when you have finished swearing and stating that this is the biggest pile of software that you've ever used change the setting from 0 to 1. This will bring back you dialog boxes for File -> Open.

PICKFIRST - This is a new one that I seem to be getting more and more questions on. Have you ever not been able to double click edita piece of MTEXT without typing ED, DDEDIT (or some equivalent) and then having to select the piece of text? If you have then this is the setting for you.

Well that will conclude this post fr today. Good luck all you digtal dirt workers!