Civil 3D 2012 Bid Express Extension

Autodesk has released a new extension for those users who do work for a department of transportation.  The bid express extension allows us to use the functionality of QTO and ultimately tie it to pricing and establish cost estimations. 

Once you have downloaded and installed the proper executable file, you will see the following  options listed under miscellaneous utilities on the Toolbox tab.

The first option under the extension is subscribing to a web service.  The first thing I will mention about this is that you only need to sign up to get access to the pay item and report pricing with an email address and password.  Currently the service is being provided to users at no cost, even though it asks for billing information when continuing with an activation email.

Upon setting up your account, you will then select get pay items and execute where you will enter your user name a password.

After logging into Info Tech's service, you will be presented with a list of pay item files available for download, similar to the one seen below.

Once you have selected the appropriate pay item file, you can then use QTO to assign the pay items to your Civil 3D and AutoCAD objects as needed.  Finally, when you are read to generate a takeoff report, you will select the produce price report.

Give the appropriate name for you bid report and select go.

Notice that your report is taking form, but you must select get price report to finish it.  You will most likely need to log in again to the get the price to update as seen below.

Finally, we can either create a report or have it create a table in Civil 3D.

Creating a Box Around Structure Labels

Today I was asked by a client if there was a way to show a box around all of the  structure information in plan and profile view as seen below. 

In the label style composer, you can turn on a box for a given component, but there is no simple way of turning on or off a box that encompasses all of your structure information.  The reason that we can't make one label is because of the text for each component that has to be added to generate invert information.  The approach that I took to create the above label was to add the structure name component to the top and bottom of the label, with the bottom copy display set to false.  I then attached a line component to the top of both of the structure name components in the top left and top right to get the proper length of the line.   This generates the top and bottom of the box.

As shown above, I finally create the box by adding two more line components.  Line 3 is determined by selecting the start anchor point to be the start of line 1and the end anchor point is set to the start of line 2.  Conversely, line 4 is created by doing the same process except choosing the anchor point to be the ends of lines 1 and 2 respectively.   We have essentially created a box from four lines.  The one caveat that we must take into consideration, is if the invert information is longer than that of the structure information, we will have text outside of the box since the lengths of lines  1 and 2 are determined by the structure name length.

Creating Point Styles with 3D Blocks

I have been recently working with a energy consultant who is looking to use point styles for visualization purposes.  I had previously showed them how to use Google Earth along with other Civil 3D tools to send the client a kmz file to give a good perspective of the impact on surrounding neighbors.  I would suspect that many of you have tried to do this and eventually gave up.  The key to using a mvblock as a point marker is to completely purge the block from the drawing.  For some unknown reason, the mvblock must not reside within said drawing.

As you can see from the screen capture above, you must browse to the location were the mv block resides.  The default location of the multiview blocks for Civil 3D 2012 is C:\Program Data\Autodesk\C3D 2012\enu\Data\Symbols\Mvblocks.

Finally, here is what the point style looks like in 3D.

Lastly, make sure that your point style has the marker turned on in the model view direction.

QTO - What is What?

Recently I was asked some general comments about QTO, so I felt this was a good topic to discuss. Below are the questions I was asked:

1.  What items can you assign pay items to?  Besides assigning payitems to pipe networks and code sets for example, you can also assign to polylines, blocks and text.  I like to assign a driveway demolition payitem to asphalt removal text so I can track the number of driveways to reconstruct.

2.  What happens to an object like a polyline if you break it into more than one piece?  The payitem is assigned to both pieces and would and the report would still show the proper quantity.

3.  Can you assign more than one payitem at a time to a given object?  Hitting control and selecting the appropriate payitems will allow you to assign the appropriate amount to a given object.  A good example would be areas that will need seeding, mulching, and stabilizing.

4.  Can we have a payitem calculate the area for example in some other type of measure than what is in the payitem file?  The formula option within each payitem row allows for other calculations to take place such as cubic yards instead as oposed to cubic feet.

Update 2 For Civil 3D 2011

Late last week, Autodesk released AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 Update 2.  This update addresses several issues that Autodesk and customers have encountered.  It is important to note that AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 Update 1 must be installed prior to installing Update 2.  As usual with other updates and hot fixes, please install the proper version of your install ( 32bit or 64bit).  For a list of items addressed, you can look in the readme file.