Project Chronicle Updated

Autodesk Labs has released an update for Project Chronicle.  For those of you not familiar with this tool, Project Chronicle is a technology preview that makes it easy for users to share and capture software workflows.  The utility consists of two main components.  The first component is the recording utility.  It allows the user capture worflow from either Revit or AutoCAD based software.  The utility records a continuous video with optional narration.  Some cool features of chronicle are that it is also is recording the timeline and details of the workflow, such as the commands used to create the objects or data.  The second component is the web site.  After capturing the data, it is uploaded to the Project Chronicle website where other users can view the videos, along with the timeline and other recorded components.  It is important to note that viewing can be made public, or can be restricted to a specif user or users.  Your chronicles can also be shared to such public media sites as Facebook or Twitter.

Flatten my Linework

This is topic that seems to come up frequently, so I thought I would refresh everyone's memory on this.  Lots of users tend to use their Civil 3D points to manually draw line work  and aren't real happy with lines they have created because they are elevated from the chosen points.

As you can see from the screen capture above, the line is elevated as we would expect.  Now the user has two options.  The first option we will look at is in the point style.

As you can see in the capture above, we can simply set the point display mode to flatten points to elevation, and set the elevation to zero.  It is important to note that this setting will have no impact on the creation of a surface using these points.  The second option is to set the osnapz variable to 1.  By setting the variable to 1, osnap substitutes the z value of the specified point to the value of the current UCS.  It is worth mentioning that Civil 3D does not save this variable, and thus why it defaults back to 0 each time you open the software.  The only way that I can see to permanently change this would be to add the following line of code to the acaddoc.lsp file.