ViewCube Not Aligned with Crosshairs

While on support recently I received a drawing where the cross hairs looked fine, along with the USC icon, but the ViewCube is slightly rotated like the following:

After spending an hour searching system variables and other commands such as plan, I finally came across the GEOGRAPHICLOCATION command.  Upon typing the command, you get an option to edit the location.    The important variable to check is the angle under the North Direction.  This should be set to zero.  This variable may have changed because the drawing may have been started with Land Desktop where we were allowed to change the north rotation of the drawing.

Printing the Design Criteria Symbol

You have probably seen the triangle with an exclamation point for either alignments or profiles when you are using Design Criteria.  The symbol is designed to let you know that a violation of criteria hasn’t been met and that it needs to be resolved. 

The ability exists within Civil 3D to print this as part of plans, especially for use when we are doing our preliminary design.  By simply typing options and going to the AEC Editor tab, we can check on plotting/publishing option under solution tips.  Now the warning symbol will plot along with the rest of our cad elements.

Pipe Network Layers

I got an email from a client a few weeks ago asking how they could have the pipe network layers conform to the specific type of pipe network they were creating without having to go into the network dialogue box and change them manual each time.  For example, if I want to create a sanitary pipe network, I would like the network layers to match like the picture below:

Rather than having to set the layers depending on the pipe type, why don’t we create a few pipe networks in our template that already have the appropriate layers associated with them like the following.  Note, these networks will not contain any pipe or structures, but will contain the layers we want them to be designed on.

Now, rather than starting a new network from scratch, just edit one of the blank networks, depending on the pipe type and start laying out your pipe networks.  Just remember, you will probably want to change the name of the network to something more appropriate than blank sanitary for example.