As you may or may not know, Autodesk University is coming up in just a couple short months. It’s an annual tradition of design geeks of all shapes and sizes coming together to teach, learn, and share in each others’ passions and struggles for the software they use to get the job done. AU2011 is November 29th – December 1st out in Las Vegas and you can find out more information here.
Last year at AU I was a lab assistant for 2 classes, attended a bunch more, took part in …

You may or may not have noticed, but there was a big gap in time where no posting was going on at Indydrafter.com, or it was sparse at best. It wasn’t due to a lack of writing or creative ideas, however. I was busy creating posts for the IMAGINiT Technologies Civil Solutions Blog where I contributed many articles covering Civil 3D and Map 3D tips and techniques, as well as details regarding the new 2012 products Autodesk released in April/May.
Below, you will find a list and links for all the …

Unfortunately, there are no automated tools for generating COGO points in Civil 3D in relationship to a Pipe Network. However, we can utilize some other basic functionality of Civil 3D objects to create our survey staking points for both horizontal and vertical data. This takes additional effort (also covered in this post) when applying vertical pipe and structure invert information to be staked.
The 3 methods for generating your survey staking file covered in this post will include copy/paste plus cleanup from the Panorama, using the Pipe Network Alignment for generating …

Microsoft didn’t include the Jet engine with 64-bit operating systems and thus disabled for use within 64-bit versions of Autodesk software (i.e. Map 3D 2010 and Civil 3D 2011). As you can probably guess, this causes a lot of problems and should raise alarm. For one, there are literally thousands of .mdb files out there based upon the Microsoft Access 32-bit architecture which can no longer be utilized for geospatial data. What’s a person to do in this scenario?
Until recently, the only options available were to install a 32-bit version …

Friday I posted the AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 system requirements as detailed by Autodesk. However, today I’m going to cover what workstation components provide the most benefit for your budget dollars and what kind of configuration is ideal for running the new Civil 3D release.
First of all, there is a huge change in Civil 3D 2011 that has the most dramatic affect on your workstation build: it is now offered as a  64-bit native program. What does this mean for you? You can now utilize more than just 3 GB of …