Visual Style & Isoline Quickie

The question today, came from my Civil 3D bro up in Seattle, Bryan.

We are generating some graphics and when I switch my view to ‘realistic’, it shows the triangle edges of the isolines. I can turn them off in the view toolbar, but when I produce a camera angle of the model and switch it to ‘realistic’ I do not know how to turn off the isolines. I do know there is a dialog box like a toolpallete that I can turn it off, but I do not know where that is, can you help?

To get rid of isolines in realistic view:


1. Crack open the Visual Styles Manager (VISUALSTYLES at the command line).
2. Click the “swatch” for Realistic at the top of the palette.
3. [OPTIONAL] Right-click the swatch and select Copy.  « [Doing this you can keep the original Realistic style and make your own called “Realistic – No Isolines,” for example.

4. Towards the bottom there is a listing for Edge Settings.
5. You’ll see an option for Showing Isolines.



6. Set the isolines to none.
7. Boom, yer done!

This tip applies to AutoCAD and all related vertical products.

FlexLM License Troubleshooting

Despite my claims to the contrary; I don't know everything. No, really!

A new thing I learned this week is the environment variable FLEXLM_DIAGNOSTICS.

If someone is having problems opening up a product because of network licensing, this little gem helps you get to the bottom of it fast. I wish I had known this years ago!

On the machine having the issue, add FLEXLM_DIAGNOSTICS to the system environment variable and set it to 3 (most informative setting).
 

This variable can be set to 1, 2, or 3 depending on how verbose ("chatty") you want FlexLM to be.

1 gives you:

• License error number 
• Where FlexLM is trying to get license information (license.lic file, environment variable or some other weird thing)
• A dialog box only appears if there was a problem