Sidewalk with Subbase and Optional Subbase Extension

After three years of the thing being available, I've finally gotten around to digging into subassembly composer (or SAC as the kids call it).

The following zip contains a sidewalk subassembly that many consultants back in Wisconsin asked for. Previously, we used generic links and generic pavement structures to do the same thing. Here is an all-in-one, P.I.A.-free subassembly.

https://autodesk.box.com/s/5cvzhp2kscj10af8or6b

The zip contains:

• SidewalkwSubbase.pkt file
• SWwSB.png for the tool palette thumbnail
• SidewalkwSubbase.htm the main help file
• SidewalkwSubbase_files folder for supporting the help file

When creating a surface model from Datum links, it is important to use the "Bottom Links" option in the corridor properties. This is true for many subbassemblies - but especially where there are deliberate extensions.

If you find any issues with it let me know - but don't be whiny about it. I'm providing this out of the goodness of my heart, so be kind.

Enjoy.

Force OSNAPZ to 1

True story: When I bought my last car, I wanted vanity license plates that read "OSNAPZ". When the dealer looked in the system to see if it was available, it was already taken! I was bummed, but ended up with plan B; plates that said "C3D Girl".

OSNAPZ is a system variable that determines whether or not elevation is taken into account when using object snaps.  When the setting is 0 (the default), Autocad will use the elevation of an object.  When the setting is 1, elevation is ignored on most objects.

Whether or not elevation is taken into account is a huge deal when working in a Civil 3D drawing. This setting affects the distance inquiry commands.

Most other variables are stored in the registry or the drawing – but OSNAPZ is an exception.

To get OSNAPZ to set to 1 every time a drawing is open, see if you already have a file in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Autodesk AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014\Support\ called acaddoc.lsp. You may want to check the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Autodesk AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014\Support\en-us\ folder too. If you do find this file open it up in notepad and add the following to its own line:

(setvar "osnapz" 1)

Save and close the file and you should be good to go.

If you don’t already have a file called acaddoc.lsp, just make a new text file in one of the paths I mentioned above and rename it (make sure it ends with .lsp rather than .txt). Throw the line in there and save and close the file.

The reason you want to make sure there is only one file called acaddoc.lsp is because Autocad will only read the first one it finds in the support file search paths (pictured right) – so if you put it in a second one your trick will get ignored. 

Have a Happy Snappy Day!

Chicks in Engineering

The Goldiblocks video has been making the rounds on social media, which has got me thinking about the women I know in engineering. The marketing of this toy has been steered towards girls - although I think any kid would think it was cool. My point (if/when I finally get to it) is that recruitment and interest in engineering/science/technology for women already exists. The retainment of women in engineering is a bigger problem.

Most people know that women comprise the majority of undergraduate university attendees - about 57 percent according to this. Most people are also aware that women are "underrepresented" in the STEM  fields.  In the US, only about 20 percent of engineering graduates sprouted boobies in their teens*.

This excellent study by UWM (go Panthers!) says that even though women are about 20% of the engineering graduates, only about 11% of practicing engineers are women. My experience bears this out. Personally, I know more when who used to be engineers than are engineers.

Of my female engineering friends, an alarming number are working in a field totally outside engineering. Classmates and colleagues are now stay-at-home moms, accountants and real-estate agents. Many have gone on to get advanced degrees taking them out of the typical production grind. Arguably, even my career is more engineering adjacent than "real" engineering.

This is bad. It is disappointing. I did not hand-calc structures' matrices until 3am, drag my ass to class the next morning and skip many, many partying opportunities to throw it all away 5 years later. WTF, women?  

So why are we dropping like flies after working a few years?

I don't have answers. But let's explore a few theories (and why I think they are BS):

• "Engineering is hard." Well, school was kinda hard, yeah. But once you have a job, it really isn't that bad. Can I call that theory busted?
• "The lack of a buddy system" as cited by this article. The type of women who go into engineering tend to be pretty comfortable hanging out with dudes. So they might not be game for lunch-hour manicure/gab sessions. Maybe this makes the senior females seem less welcoming? This theory is a paradox however, so nevermind.
• "Sexual harassment" Ugh. Please. I WISH**. But seriously, with the laws and the hyper-awareness in this area this does not seem to be a problem. Anecdotally, the only incidents of harassment my friends and I have had are eye-rolling, dirty-old-man situations. If you work with me, I am the one likely to be doing the harassment. 
• "The hours suck" So far this is the most likely culprit. When I was an intern at a big civil consulting firm  I worked with a woman who worked "part time" after returning from maternity leave. Part time for this place meant only 40 hours a week vs the 60+ that our colleagues worked. Still, this person did a great job contributing to the group while maintaining a better work-life balance than the rest of us. I suspect she was getting screwed salary-wise, but she got to go home to her little bundle of joy by 5pm.
• "Engineering culture/workplace environment" The UWM study mentions this several times as the reason many women choose to leave engineering. Believe me, I get it. As a consultant I've been in offices where the dark, seldom-used ladies room is used as auxiliary file storage and I've been to offices with on-site daycare and nursing suites. Corporate culture is so different between firms.  Don't give up girlfriends! Get yo'self on LinkedIn and find another position.

Ok -I aught to find a way to wrap this up.

If I didn't need to work I still would. I frigging love engineering. I only regret that I can't do all kinds. If I won the lottery, I'd spend the rest of my life getting STEM degrees, I shit you not. When a woman voluntarily drops out of the field, I have mixed feelings of confusion and disdain.

Girls already like to make things and solve puzzles. We need to find the proverbial Goldiblocks in our careers to keep us there.


*Not counting dudes with moobs.
**But seriously, feel free to sexually harass me at any time.

Vaulty McVaulterson

If you've ever woken up in a strange hotel room, sticky and covered in glitter, wondering how the hell you got there and then suddenly realize you have Vault consulting to do in 40 minutes - well, then you know what it is like to be me.

While the glitter is fairly easy to explain*, the question on my mind is, "How did I become a Vault person?" My answer is, "If you have a modicum of logical thinking and ever checked out a book at the library, you too can be a Vault person."

This post specifically addresses an issue from a customer site that I encountered last week. I plan on posting more basic how-to's as time permits, however, the contents of this post are more on the server administration end.

Here's what it looked like when trying to create the backup manually (e.g. not through scheduled backups) -

This is an issue I encountered with Vault Collaboration AEC 2013, but it also applies to Vault Professional 2014. The client wanted Vault backups to be routed directly to their network drive, but due to permissions limitations at the organization, the backups were failing.  I whipped up a workaround/kludge/solution that easily fixed the backup situation.

Here's why the network backups were failing:

When Vault is installed on the server it creates a local user called AutodeskVault. By default, this is the user that "owns" the SQL instance. This is the user that logs in when backups are created. If you want Vault backups to go directly to the server you either need to change the default SQL user or add AutodeskVault as a user on the network with write permission to the backup directory. Since I didn't want to redo all the scripts that call the SQL database username and password, and since network security policy at this organization forbids non-human users, I opted for plan C; just make the backups locally and use Windows Task Scheduler to copy backups to the network.

It doesn't matter if it is a full backup or incremental, essentially the same thing is happening "under the hood." When you create scheduled backups in Vault, really what it is doing is creating a task in Windows Task Scheduler and generating a simple batch file to log in and create the backup.

At the end of the process I had three Vault-related tasks in Task Scheduler:

1. Make incremental backups Monday-Thursday at 6:00pm (going to C:\Vault BKUP\)
2. Make full backup Friday at 6:30pm (going to C:\Vault BKUP\)
3. Every day at 8:00pm, copy new files from C:\Vault BKUP\ to N:\Vault Bkup\  [Since I used the /d switch in the script, it should only be copying new files to the server. ]

A big thing to remember in Windows Task scheduler is to make sure you have the security setting using the "Run whether user is logged on or not" checked. 

So that's my little fix. So far so good. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, I'm open to hearing it. 

*In regards to the glitter, some lip gloss exploded in my luggage.

The Earth Moved: Civil 3D, Subsidence & Milkshakes

In recent classes I've taught, several people have asked me about how to deal with the effects of ground subsidence in Civil 3D.  This is not a question I've encountered before, as it is largely negligible in my homestate of Wisconsin. In California, however, it is not uncommon for swaths of land to drop a foot or more over the course of a long life cycle project, wrecking havoc on the earthwork quantities. How can you get good corridor data when your surface target is actually a moving target?

Setting aside the shocking environmental causes of subsidence in California's central valley (weep for the groundwater, children, and enjoy your almonds while you can) I will focus here on how to deal with it in the software. However, I can't help but throw in one of the scariest scenes from modern cinema involving milkshakes and one of the primary causes of subsidence...

Anyhoo... right, where was I? Subsidence and Civil 3D. 

You absolutely MUST use Data Shortcuts (or Vault data references). Even if you are just the proverbial "one man shop" and never intend to share data with anyone, the use of data shortcuts is critical for keeping file size manageable.

The first drawing in the Civil 3D workflow is usually the existing ground drawing containing survey data. To deal with subsidence, I recommend always using at least two surfaces. The _Existing Surface is the surface created as a data shortcut and will end up being the "workhorse" surface for existing ground profiles, corridor target surface and quantities.

The definition of _Existing Surface consists only of other surfaces pasted into it.  This allows for the original data (called Flown Data 10.5.2006 in my example) to be the base but additional surfaces can be added over it as needed. It is important to note that when you use the Paste Surface command, the order in which you paste the surfaces makes a difference on the result. Newer surfaces should take over where they overlap old data. This order can be changed in the Surface Properties Definition tab, if needed. 

So why do I recommend this instead of just swapping out point groups? Creating new, independent surfaces as new data comes in ensures that the obsolete data is completely obliterated in the areas to which it applies. You may also wish to keep a record of the old surface for comparison purposes. 

If and when the surface changes, everyone will get the update via the data shortcuts.

Is anyone else hungry for a milkshake? How 'bout a nice tall glass of saltwater intrusion?

What a Year It's Been

It has been over a year since my last blog post - but not for lack of things to blog about.  Since I last posted in June 2012 I've moved across country, changed jobs, lost 50 lbs, wrote another book, and had lots of personal changes.

I'm eager to get back into blogging because it is therapeutic and helps me remember all the technical stuff that I'd otherwise forget. In particular I'm getting more into Vault implementations and 3DS Max Design. Of course, Civil 3D is still where my heart lies and remains the bread and butter of my billable time.

So what about this new job? I am currently a Civil solution specialist with Microdesk. The work is almost identical to what I was doing with Mastergraphics, except geographically.  Replace WisDOT with CalTrans and Milwaukee with San Francisco and you pretty much get my life now.

More posts to follow - I promise!