Property Alterations: Get Elevations from Layer Names

New Autodesk Infrastructure Tools

There’s some new tools in the Autodesk Infrastructure world. Autodesk has just released a few new products for the geospatial world. The Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler is the production release of the former AutoCAD Labs Project Galileo. It is conceptual modeling application that let’s you mix and match GIS, BIM, CAD and image data to quickly get a view of potential design options. You can create very realistic views of an entire area, both above and below the surface. One of the cool things is the ability to include and show underground utilities generated from your GIS data.

Another new tool is not really new at all, but a redesign of an existing powerful system. AutoCAD Utility Design has been released, and it’s the new implementation of the former Autodesk Utility Design. The name change to AutoCAD represents the movement towards a powerful standards-driven tool built within the powerful design and documentation environment of AutoCAD.

AutoCAD Utility Design is built on the AutoCAD  and AutoCAD Map 3D technologies. It combines template and workflow-based design tools with GIS to create in intelligent 3D connected network model for the electric utility industry. Autodesk added easy-to-use templates and workflow tools built on a powerful rules base to create consistent designs based on engineering standards. AutoCAD Utility Design includes engineering reports and documentation as a by-product of the design, rather than having to go back through the design to pull data and manually compile common reports. It includes engineering tools for calculating voltage drop, cable tensioning, sag, pole sizing, guying and others. The model is also designed to allow integration with existing supply, EAM, and other enterprise systems.

In a former life at an electric utility, I helped implement Autodesk Utility Design and did some planning for integration with the GIS and Asset Management Systems. I also had the chance to do some trials with Project Galileo while it was in the Autodesk Labs. I’m pretty excited for these new releases and am looking forward to working with these.

Street views in AutoCAD Map

OK, first off – a disclaimer. I’m blogging about a new software tool – I have no connection whatsoever with Earthmine – I just think it’s a cool new tool for AutoCAD Map users, so I’m sharing.

Thanks to Google Maps, Sketchup, and other visualization tools, there is a stronger interest in seeing things from a 3D and realistic perspective than ever before. There’s a new tool for AutoCAD Map 3D that shows some interesting promise for GIS users. Think of the streetview from Google Maps, and now incorporate that kind of view interactively into your GIS applications. Earthmine combines a new collection process collecting stereo photos as well as point cloud information to create a 3D photographic view of an area. Now take that view, and integrate it with your geospatial data in AutoCAD Map 3D.  You get to see the photo model, with your data right in the model.

I see some exciting applications for asset management – municipalities, utilities and campuses, as well as land developers.

So while you “look” around the street, your data shows up in real locations. So you can see the streetview with your valve or manhole location where it might not otherwise be visible in the photograph.

Or get an idea of the subsurface utilities under the street while looking at the model.

It’s a major step forward in the technology. The data itself is coming from Earthmine servers that either you can host, or have Earthmine host. It appears that you can license model information from their partners, or create your own photo models. Imagine making a 3D view of your new development or campus with your geospatial data superimposed. It brings to mind a number of possibilities. Aside from the tools for viewing the data in AutoCAD Map 3D, Earthmine also has a mobile 3D mapping system so you can have your own photo car to drive around (or pedal). I’m pretty excited to see how this technology advances in the coming months and years. I’m looking forward to getting a closer view of this new tool.

Don’t forget your AutoCAD tools – Qselect

Sometimes when using vertical versions of AutoCAD (like AutoCAD Map, Civil 3D, Architecture, etc), is that you can get entrenched in the vertical tools and forget that it is still AutoCAD, and so you have all those rich AutoCAD tools available. Recently while working with a client, one of these came up. The tool in question was QSelect. Now, I don’t know when QSelect initially showed up – for years I used LISP routines to do advanced selection, and one day several releases ago I stumbled across QSelect. It has been a great friend to me ever since – particularly working in the GIS world.

In this case, they have a drawing with areas defined as numbered zones. The drawing was created to show boundaries in individual sheets rather than build polygon data sets. There are labels along the lines throughout the data, duplicating where they will show on the sheets.  

These drawings have been in use for some time, and they wanted to turn these into a polygon feature class. Generating a polygon feature class is pretty basic, and there are several ways. I like to get a clean data set without slivers or gaps, so using Map’s topology tools are a great way to get clean data and converting to a feature set is easy. The process forces you to clean the polygon data, and then create the topology. One challenge is that you can only have one centroid in each polygon. The text labels already exist, so they are perfect to use as centroids. The problem is there are too many. Erasing them individually is painful as well. You could write, or find, a LISP routine to prune down the number of labels. Or you can use the QSelect. With QSelect, I can build a selection set by querying various properties of the objects. In this case, select an object type (MText), a property (contents=the actual value of the text) and set an equals operator to find MText objects whose contents = Zone 36a (you don’t use a text identifier such as “” here).

Now I have a selection set of all the text labels in Zone 36a (you can see by all the grips on the selected text). The next step is to escape to drop the selection set (so we can manipulate it later). Now start the erase command, and when it prompts to select objects, type P to get the previous selection set (this grabs all of the queried text labels). Now change the selection prompt to remove mode (removes objects from the selection set) by typing R, and pick one of the labels to remove it from the selection set and enter to complete the command. At this point, there will only be one label for that polygon. Do this for each polygon, and you will be ready to use them for labels.

Now, I wouldn’t use this for a dataset with thousands of polygons, but it is a quick and easy way to remove some tedium when preparing a relatively small dataset.

Map 3D Projection Rounding – It’s Just Cosmetic

Last week, I was attending Arizona Professional Land Surveyors Annual Conference, Tom Homan, a GIS Coordinator for Gila County did a great workshop on working with AutoCAD Map. While he was preparing for his presentation, he was working with AutoCAD Map 2012, and ran across a potential problem. He found what looks like a problem with the coordinate projection used in the Arizona State Plane projections. While looking at the details for the projections, he noticed the Scale Factor was showing a 1.000000 rather than the expected 0.9999. That may not sound like much, but that’s 1 in 10,000 units, or a foot across a little less than two miles. This is a pretty big difference across a large are, such as an Arizona County (the counties in AZ are typically larger than those of most states). Now, Gila County, AZ is a mountainous area with a lot of vertical change which can really cause havoc with projections.  To deal with this, they use some custom Low Distortion Projections. He also found a similar problem when creating these custom projections. After saving, the projection file was rounding up to 1.000000 as well.

So after digging a little bit, and reviewing the projection definition dictionary, the correct scale factor was built into the files. I also created some data, did some reprojections, and exported out to a shape file to see how the projection file (PRJ) turned out, and sure enough, it was creating the correct scale factor. It looked like it was a cosmetic issue with the dialog box form. So, after creating a support case with Autodesk, Nathan Moore validated the issue as a form display parameter rather than a functional problem with the dictionaries. The issue is also present in Civil 3D 2012.
So, the good news is the projection tools in Map 3D still work great, and with the new tools much easier to work with.

BIM and Geo – Playing in the Sandbox

Bandwagon – a party, cause, movement, etc., that by its mass appeal or strength readily attracts many followers - Dictionary.com

Geoworld magazine published an article this month from Liam Speden, the business line manager for Autodesk’s infrastructure planning and conceptual-design solutions. The article is called “Are You Ready for BIM?”

I’ve been avoiding the topic myself as the phrase has become a bandwagon topic. A lot of people are talking about it, but far fewer understand what it means, and so that water gets pretty murky. Now that the subject is going mainstream in the geo industry, it’s time to start clarifying. BIM means a lot of things to different people. I hear some folks talk about it as a type of software, using BIM software where they would have said CAD software in the past. In reality, it’s somewhat more than that. It’s more of a process, or methodology – a paradigm. It’s also a standard defined by the National Institute of Building Sciences.  More and more owner organizations, particularly government,  are requiring designs that comply with these standards, such as GSA, Corps of Engineers, and recently the US Air Force.

Wikipedia describes it as “the process of generating and managing building data during its life cycle[1]. BIM involves representing a design as objects – vague and undefined, generic or product-specific, solid shapes or void-space oriented (like the shape of a room), that carry their geometry, relations and attributes. BIM design tools allow for extracting different views from a building model for drawing production and other uses. These different views are automatically consistent – in the sense that the objects are all of a consistent size, location, specification – since each object instance is defined only once, just as in reality.” 

Of course, Autodesk has embraced the concept with it’s vertical construction products as well as Civil 3D for horizontal design. Autodesk has numerous resources of information available on the subject, starting with their BIM page. 

So, what does all this have to do with GIS and geospatial technology? Well, more and more often, the geo technologies will be required to integrate. While there are many similarities, there are some differences that will interfere with a smooth transition in much the same way as the CAD to GIS (or in reality Design to As-Built) continues to plague organizations. It is important for geo professionals to understand this technology. I’ll be exploring the relationships and integrations in the comingposts. Stay tuned and join me in the expedition.

AutoCAD Map 3D just got bigger…

It’s that time of year again – Autodesk has announced the new annual releases, and they’re starting to be available for download from the Autodesk Subscription Center. The big news this year is the packaging of multiple complementary products as Suites allowing organizations to procure all the tools they might need for the entire design process. Along with the grouping of products, there’s increased interoperability and collaboration. It’ll be interesting to see the impact this has on the industry as firms that may not have ventured into areas such as visualization might be motivated to try them out.

Aside from the Suites, there are some great new tools included in the new products. Even the Autodesk basic platform product, AutoCAD, has some great new features. But I’ll let my coworkers talk about those – my goal is to share some of the great new solutions included in the new 2012 release of AutoCAD Map 3D. I won’t try to cover them all now, but will share items that stand out and add new notes as I explore the new tools with you.

The first thing is that now the Autodesk Topobase functionality is now included with Map 3D.  Topobase was a very powerful infrastructure management software built on AutoCAD Map 3D. It brings specific industry-oriented data models for a number of areas, such as electric distribution, water and wastewater systems and land. In addition, the ability to add business rules to object editing, more advanced topology capability and reporting tools have made Topobase a very important application for utilities and municipalities. I’ll be adding more about this functionality as time goes on.

Right off, the geographic coordinate system is different. There are new transformation algorithms and creating your own is now much easier.

For the common typical user of Map 3D today, the feature data connectors are key pieces of the interoperability puzzle. One of the immediate new items is the new stylization tools. In the past, you can connect to a geospatial dataset through FDO (the Data button on the Display Manager), and create line and symbol styles based on AutoCAD blocks and Map linetypes. These linetypes were different than the AutoCAD line types stored in the ACAD.LIN style. This was a bit of a challenge for some users who had standardized linetypes based on the standard AutoCAD linetype sets.

We could create composite linetypes and stack line components to get some pretty complex and interesting line (I used to make the typical map-style roadway with a dashed yellow line stacked on thicker black and red lines to “look” like a road).

We can still do that, but now we can use standard AutoCAD linetypes (or any custom linetypes we store in our @.LIN files), as well as blocks, text (MText objects), and dynamic text right from the data. And the style tools give more advanced placement options.

So instead of using labels to put a street name, we could make the street name part of the linetype.

A couple of other items to mention – the FDO connectors now include ESRI Personal and File Geodatabases, as well as ArcSDE 10.x geodatabases, and new capability for relational databases. I’ll add more on that pretty soon.

LIDAR isn’t for Dummies

Have you been hearing about LIDAR (or point clouds) but are unsure what it really means or how to use it? Here’s a new resource you can check out. Autodesk and DLT Solutions have teamed up to create a concise guide to the technology.

Don’t let the name fool ya, the Dummies Guides are a great way not to be a dummy.

Hope everyone has a great new year!

2 bits, 4 bits, 64 bits? Getting Your Links Back

New technology is great, but sometimes presents us with some challenges. 64-bit computing is giving some great gains in performance, but has provided some unique challenges as well. The primary challenge is that 64-bit architecture and the older 32-bit architecture have some interoperability issues (interoperability challenges seem to be the GIS professionals constant companion), and applications on either architecture have some problems communicating. Microsoft has worked around this by providing an emulator to allow 32-bit applications to run on 64-bit systems, which is why we can still run most of our old 32-bit programs. One of the areas that has been later in development has been drivers for Microsoft’s Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). These ODBC drivers allow Windows to serve up, or publish different database for applications to use.  The drivers for Microsoft’s Jet database (The engine used by Microsoft Access) were unavailable.

What difference does this make to the GIS user? Well many of the datasets we use rely on ODBC to make the data available to our software. AutoCAD Map 3D used these ODBC drivers to access data through FDO as well as Map data links (link templates). In 32-bit versions of AutoCAD Map 3D, we can drag an Access (Jet) database or Excel file onto the Map Explorer and have it become a Data Source that I can view the data or use it to link to AutoCAD objects. Users who have moved to 64 bit systems (such as myself), could no longer do this. We also couldn’t use the FDO connectors to connect to many of our databases, as they were based on ODBC drivers as well. Microsoft released new drivers, and this made FDO connectors available, but the link templates were still unavailable. That’s because the Link Templates rely on ODBC as well. AutoCAD Map has calls to the Microsoft Jet drivers to make the drag and drop possible. The problem is that Microsoft never released a 64-bit Jet driver (at least in name). Instead they have released the Office Access Connectivity Engine (ACE). The new drivers for ACE were available after the Map release so it wasn’t part of the 2011 release.

The good news is that you can load those drivers and use your Link Templates again. You can’t drag and drop, but you can manually create the links. You’ll have to manually establish the data set through ODBC, and then you can connect to the data in Map 3D. The Autodesk Map 3D support team has a blog with a link to the drivers, instructions, and a video on manually setting up the ODBC connection and connecting in Map.

Keep in mind, Microsoft has set the default install for Office to be 32-bit, so you need to make sure you select the 64-bit version to get the new drivers. When I first installed Office 2010, I accepted the defaults assuming it would load the 64-bit version. As I found out, with the 32-bit version of Office installed, you can’t install the drivers. In that case, you’ll need to uninstall the 32-bit version, and reinstall the 64-bit version of Office (or the drivers). I understand you can load the 64 bit drivers, and then reinstall your 32-bit version of Office (2010 or previous version) – I haven’t tried it since I have made the jump to Office 2010. Let me know how it goes if you try it.

Time for an advantage…

Autodesk has released the new Subscription Advantage Packs for the 2011 products. These Packs give some additional tools to the software users and provide a little extra value to those users on subscription. Last year, we got cloud file capability with AutoCAD Map 3D.  The Packs are downloadable fromt he Scubscription Center, and are now available.

In addition to the added AutoCAD tools which my coworker Isaac Harper blogs about, one of the tools I’m looking forward to most is the new FDO providers. There is a new FDO Provider for ArcGIS allows direct, editable connections to Personal and File Geodatabases as well as SDE connections. These data stores are becoming increasingly popular, particularly as portable GIS data stores. The new FDO Provider opens up more possibilities for managing spatial data without conversion right inside AutoCAD Map 3D (or Civil 3D as well).