Tag Archives: Civil 3D

Draping images over surfaces in Civil 3D

Having recently overcome various difficulties to successfully drape an image over a surface in Civil 3D, it may be useful to pass on a few points I have learned. There are various posts and videos out there that helpfully go through this process, but some of them (including Autodesk sources) contain information that is irrelevant or just plain wrong, and none of them contained all of the information I needed to complete the task.

I used Civil 3D 2015 for this, but the principles apply to all recent releases. Here is the basic sequence required:

In the drawing containing the surface, attach the image to your drawing using your preferred method (ImageAttach, Xref, ClassicImage). I’ll assume you’re familiar with what you need to do to get the image correctly scaled and aligned with the surface.
Invoke the DrapeImage command, which will show you this dialog:
Make sure this is set for the image you want to drape and the surface you want it draped over. You can change the Render Material Name to whatever you like, or leave it as the default. Pick OK.
You no longer need the image attached to the drawing and it will probably only confuse matters, so you can use use the Xref or ClassicImage command to detach it.

If you’re really lucky, that’s it. You will have a lovely-looking surface with a draped image over it. However, at this stage that’s pretty unlikely. Don’t panic! You also need to ensure the following conditions are in place:

The surface will need to use a surface style that includes triangulated surfaces so the image has something to drape over. In the Toolspace, under Surfaces, right-click on the surface and pick Surface Properties…, then change Surface Style to anything with triangles, triangulation or TIN in the name (this varies depending on the template used). If you don’t have such a style available, you’ll need to make your own or edit an existing one using the button with a pencil in it.
While you’re in the Surface Properties dialog, have a look at Render Material. That should be showing the Render Material Name you specified in step 2 above. If it isn’t, make sure it is. Pick OK.
Bonus tip: if you later need to remove the draped image from the surface, you can do so by changing the Render Material to something else (e.g. ByLayer).
Still seeing nothing useful? Make sure you are using the Realistic visual style. You can get at the Visual Styles Manager using the VisualStyles command, but in recent releases it has been made easier to switch visual styles using the in-canvas control:
Still nothing? Try turning off Hardware Acceleration. Right-click on that glowing blue blob thing in the lower right corner and pick Graphics Performance…That will give you a dialog with a Hardware Acceleration switch. Turn it off, pick OK and (hopefully) voila!

Note that the above conditions need to be in place when plotting, too. You might not expect hardware acceleration to make a difference to plotting, but in this case, it does.

Missing language pack fixes compared

2 Replies

Having tried out the cleanup fixes from both Autodesk and Owen Wengerd, they both appear to work fine. Here are some points of comparison:

Owen’s utility will work with any AutoCAD variant from 2007 on; Autodesk’s fix is currently restricted to Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011. As this problem is definitely not confined to Civil 3D, and may need to be dealt with by non-Civil 3D users, that could be the dealbreaker right there.
Owen’s can be installed by anyone by simply copying a file and loading it when needed or in the Startup Suite; Autodesk’s requires admin rights to either run an installer program or manual replacement of a program component, depending on the release.
Owen’s loads and runs as the user requires; Autodesk’s runs automatically when opening and saving a drawing.
Owen’s provides some information about what is getting cleaned up; Autodesk’s operates in total silence.
Owen’s utility can take a while to scan through everything in a complex drawing; Autodesk’s appears to take no longer to open the drawing than normal. To give you some idea of the times involved, in one test in Civil 3D 2011, opening a blank ( but 2.2 MB!) drawing based on the Civil 3D template took 3.6 s with or without the fix; Owen’s cleanup took 0.7 s. In another test on an oldish PC with AutoCAD 2010, cleaning up a drawing with 2.8 MB of real content took Owen’s utility about 15 seconds.

For my purposes, Owen’s utility is what I need, because the users who need to clean up these drawings use AutoCAD, not Civil 3D. I’ve set up a batch process for these users, which opens each selected drawing, runs Owen’s utility and saves the drawing. However, I suggest Civil 3D users install the relevant updates and patches anyway, as they fix more than just this problem. In addition, in Civil 3D 2011 without the Autodesk fix, one of the problems fixed by Owen’s cleanup (a AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef one) is then immediately recreated by Civil 3D.

The upshot is that Civil 3D users should at least apply Autodesk’s fixes; everybody else should use Owen’s.

Using Owen’s fix, it is interesting to see what it reports as being the problem in particular drawings. Here’s what one of my non-Civil 3D problem drawings shows up:

Command: cleanlanguage Scanning drawing for corrupt objects... Corrupt object AecDbScheduleDataFormat<2F84> CLEANED Found 1 corrupt object

Here’s what the Civil 3D 2011 ANZ template shows up when cleaned:

Command: cleanlanguage Scanning drawing for corrupt objects... Corrupt object AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef<8B7> ERASED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<1619> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161B> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161A> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161F> CLEANED Found 5 corrupt objects

It looks like every Civil 3D 2011 drawing based on these templates has been going out corrupt in 5 different places. Hopefully, Autodesk will quickly get on to fixing up the Civil 3D template situation, and will incorporate the automated open/save cleanup in future updates to AutoCAD itself and all the other AutoCAD-based verticals.

Partial fix for language pack problem

1 Reply

The Civil 3D group within Autodesk has moved impressively quickly in providing a partial solution to the language pack problem I described earlier. What has been provided so far is a set of patches for Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011 that allow Civil 3D users to remove the spurious language pack flag by opening and re-saving the affected drawings. I have not yet tested this, but I am informed that it works.

What’s left to do? Obviously, not all recipients of these drawings are going to have Civil 3D. In fact, prior to isolating Civil 3D as one definite source of the problem, I had spent a lot of time helping out AutoCAD users clean up language-pack-infected drawings, using awkward and dangerous copy-and-paste methods. So Autodesk has AutoCAD and all its vertical variants to work through yet as far as a cleanup mechanism goes. Also, the problem needs resolving at the source end. All “infected” templates (in Civil 3D and any other verticals that may have the problem) need fixing and distributing to users as quickly and effectively as possible, in order to reduce the number of drawings being created with the problem. I know individual users can do this for themselves, but large numbers of users won’t do so if left to their own devices, causing problems for everyone else. As the originator of the problem, Autodesk has a duty to do its very best to resolve it.

Thanks, Autodesk, for quickly getting started on fixing the problem and providing a partial solution in a timely manner. I hope you can provide the rest of the solution equally efficiently.

Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

6 Replies

If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus:

Language Pack warning

Now I know that in this case it’s not an actual virus causing the problem, but rather the ANZ template drawing being “infected” with this Language Pack requirement. I have had to deal with quite a few incoming drawings in this state, and that’s painful enough without Autodesk also infecting every Australasian Civil 3D drawing with the problem. Other profiles may be similarly infected, but at the moment I don’t know. Edit: Matt Anderson reports that the problem occurs on US systems too.

Autodesk, I suggest that as a matter of great urgency you create a clean ANZ template file, post it as a hotfix and warn all your Civil 3D customers of the SNAFU. Neither “install the language pack” nor “turn off the warning” are adequate workarounds. Your customers do not want to send out or receive any drawings in this state.

Beyond the immediate issue of Autodesk shipping software that on first use warns the user that they may have a virus (and encourages the creation of drawings that spread that warning far and wide), I would appreciate some assistance in dealing with “infected” drawings, whether in Civil 3D or plain AutoCAD.

First, I need to be able to detect such drawings using LISP so I ensure they are rejected rather than allowed into our drawing management system, and this detection will need to work in releases at least as far back as AutoCAD 2004.

Second, I need a mechanism of cleaning up such drawings. The only thing I have discovered that works so far is the manual, time-consuming and dangerous process of recreating the drawings by starting from scratch and Copy/Paste in each layout. With big jobs using nested xrefs, this is fraught. I need to be able to provide a LISP-based cleanup mechanism that I can set up to work in batch mode on a set of drawings.

I would be grateful for any clues anyone might have about the above detect & cleanup needs.

Edit: see the comments for further important information.

Filling the holes in Autodesk’s CHM Help stopgap

6 Replies

It was good to see Autodesk react to criticism of AutoCAD 2011’s browser-based Help with an acknowledgement of the problems and an attempt to provide a workaround by making a zip file of CHM files available for download. That’s much better than ignoring people’s concerns, denying the validity of those concerns or shooting the messenger, which has been known to happen in the past.

However, there are some holes in the workaround, only some of which can be filled.

Under 64-bit Windows 7, the Search pane is blank, as it is in the CHM Help for earlier releases on that platform. This is stated on the download page. Index works well, but Search doesn’t. As Search is one of the worst aspects of the browser-based Help, this is a rather unfortunate.
There is no obvious way of making the CHMs provide contextual help. Don’t bother pointing at acad181.chm in the Files tab of Options, it doesn’t work. Edit: See Chris Cowgill’s post on the AUGI forums for a partial workaround.
Even without contextual help, no advice is provided for calling the CHMs from within AutoCAD; you are only told that you can set up a shortcut on your desktop and double-click on that when you need it. However, you can set up an alias command in AutoCAD. To do this, edit the acad.pgp file or use the Express Tools Aliasedit command to set up a shell command. The alias name can be whatever you like (e.g. HEL), the command name should simply be the path and filename of the main acad181.chm file.
The CHM files are currently available only in English.
The set of CHM files is incomplete. See below for more details and what you can do about it.

These are the CHM files provided with AutoCAD 2011:

acet.chm – Express Tools
AdRefMan.chm – Autodesk Reference Manager
adrefmanctxt.chm – Not to be launched manually
ole_err.chm – Not to be launched manually
webbrw.chm – Not to be launched manually

These are the CHM files provided in the zip file download:

acad181.chm – Main AutoCAD 2011 Help file
acad.readme.chm – Readme
acad_acg.chm – Customization Guide
acad_acr.chm – Command Reference
acad_aug.chm – User’s Guide
acad_dpg.chm – Driver and Peripheral Guide
acad_install.chm – Installation
acad_nfw.chm – New Features Workshop
adsk_lic.chm – Licensing

These are the CHM files that are missing:

acad_aag.chm – ActiveX and VBA Developer’s Guide
acad_alg.chm – AutoLISP Developer’s Guide
acad_alr.chm – AutoLISP Functions
acad_alt.chm – AutoLISP Tutorial
acad_car.chm – Connectivity Automation Reference
acad_dev181.chm – Developer Documentation
acad_dxf.chm – DXF Reference
acad_sso.chm – Sheet Set Objects Reference
acadauto.chm – ActiveX and VBA Reference
adsk_brw.chm – Licensing – (this appears to be a later version of adsk_lic.chm).

Do you need any of the above? I did. To obtain a full set of AutoCAD 2011 CHM files, I had to do the following:

Download a vertical AutoCAD 2011-based variant. I used AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, because I am entitled to download that from the Subscription Center. You may need to download an evaluation copy of a vertical. If so, make sure you delete the files after your evaluation period of 30 days, won’t you? Hopefully, Autodesk will have provided a better workaround by then.
Double-click on the downloaded executable (which is actually a self-extracting archive). You will be prompted for a location for the files to be unzipped to. I accepted the default of C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_Civil3D_2011_English_32bit.
After the unzipping process is complete, the installtion window will appear. Pick Exit; you do not need to go ahead with the whole installation.
Search for the CHM files in the unzip location. There are a variety of locations, some of them containing duplicate files, but I was able to find what I needed in C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_Civil3D_2011_English_32bit\x86\en-US\C3D\Acad\Help.
Copy the files from here to a safe location, and set up shortcuts and/or alias commands to access them.

Note that I can’t vouch for the completeness or correctness of these files (which may be why Autodesk didn’t include them), but I can’t do that for the HTML versions either. For those of you in non-English-speaking locations, I would be interested in finding out if you can use this method to obtain non-English CHM files. Are there non-English AutoCAD 2011-based verticals available for download yet? If so, are the CHMs in your language?

Finally, if you are having trouble reading CHMs over a network, check out this Microsoft document on a security update that may be the cause.

Trusting Autodesk? Contemplating a new product

5 Replies

Last week, in my capacity as a de facto CAD manager for a large public utility company, I was having a chat with an Autodesk Australia person (he’s a nice guy and very honest, by the way). The topic of conversation moved to the new AutoCAD-based vertical, Plant 3D 2010. At that stage, I had not even installed the 30-day trial, but I still raised some of the issues that potentially stood in the way of the company adopting this apparently highly suitable product.

In a word, it comes down to trust. Each drawing used or issued by this utility is a legal document with a potentially very long life ahead of it. I showed the Autodesk person a drawing issued in 1901. The assets documented by that drawing are still in use today; indeed, many thousands of people daily depend heavily on them. Before we invest our money, time and training in Plant 3D, we need to know that the electronic drawings produced with it are going to be fully functional in the long term.

In terms of a new product like Plant 3D, can we trust Autodesk to do the following?

Still be around and providing CAD software for many years?
Go on supporting this new product for many years?
In the event that the product is discontinued, provide an alternative, together with a migration path that retains full drawing intelligence?
In the event that the product is discontinued, continue to provide ongoing support at least to the level of allowing the product to run and be transferred from one computer to another?
Provide a product that works as well in real life as it does in demos?
Provide a product that, from first release, works without crippling restrictions or bugs that render the product unusable?
Include adequate support for national standards?
Sell the product for a reasonable price on an ongoing basis?
Provide Subscription for a reasonable price on an ongoing basis?
Provide the product in such a way that we have flexibility in our use of network and standalone licensing long-term?
Continue to allow the licensed use of earlier releases and use at home?
Provide full API access to the custom objects, including ActiveX?
Provide adequate object enablers for all recent AutoCAD releases and variants?
Support the ongoing use of DWG files by other releases of this product freely up and down within a 3-release DWG version bracket?
Provide full visual integrity, editability of proxy objects and round-tripping of intelligence, when saving to plain AutoCAD, including earlier releases?
Provide mechanisms that allow any company-based custom work to be distributed easily to internal and external users and carried forward to new releases reliably?
Avoid introducing problems and restrictions that would interfere with customisation and other aspects of CAD management?

Feel free to add to my list in your comments. If you go down the list giving a Yes, No or Maybe, how well does Autodesk do? Before looking at the product, I’ve got one Yes, a few Maybes and a very large number of Nos. That’s not based on paranoia or hatred, just on past history, including very recent history.

For example, can Autodesk be trusted to still be selling Plant 3D in a few years’ time? Ask the users of Autodesk FMDesktop. The same can be said of any of the other products in a long list of Autodesk abandonments that goes back to the dark ages. Generic CADD, anyone? What do I do with all my old Graphic Impact files?

Is it likely that Plant 3D will work properly in the real world in the first release or two? Ask the users of Civil 3D who tried to get any grading done for the first few releases. Very major and obvious problems in new products can go on for years before being addressed.

I’d be interested to hear how well you think Autodesk rates for new-product trustworthiness. There are other aspects to trusting Autodesk, and I will cover these in a future post. Please wait for that one before launching into any generic tirades; for now I just want to know about your level of Autodesk trust, purely in relation to new products and continued support for existing ones.

Hotfix available for Raster Design licensing issue

cad nauseam

Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects