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.

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.

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).

Creating AutoCAD Text from Geospatial Datasets

In this tip, I’m going to convert attribute information from a data set in ESRI Shape format, and create a text label from that attribute. There are a couple of techniques, but in this case, I’ll show a quick and easy technique to create AutoCAD text labels from a connected shape dataset using an FDO connection.

Start with a new drawing, assign the coordinate system and create a connection to the data set to label.

Add the data to the map, and the dataset will show up in my Display Manager.

Once the data connection established, create a style and hit the feature label option. This will open the Style Label dialog box where all the settings are to get the labels to look the way you want.

Going down the dialog box, set the Multiline Option (the Advanced Placement option will set the text to follow the line, which you may want for certain conditions, but the text can end up in separate text entities for every letter – that may be ok – it depends on what you are looking for).

The next item is to identify what property (attribute item) you want to use for your label. If you have an attribute that is exactly what you want, you can set it and be done. In some cases, you may want to modify the value or even combine several elements of the text. To add pipe sizes, take the size and add an inch symbol (the double quote) – so an 8” line will read 8”. You could add material so the label reads 12” PVC, or if doing street names, you might want to combine the street number, direction, name and type to get a complete street name. To modify this, select expression here. This will open the Map Expression Builder dialog box.

There are a lot of options for creating text labels from data, calculations, or other elements. In this case, I want to place some text elements together. The function to combine text is concatenate, which I can find under the text functions under Concat.

Selecting the function places the text and format in the expression window. The function works on the elements contained in the following parenthesis, and the bracketed text property are place holders for the text elements. To get the pipe size and combine it with an inch symbol, replace the first Text Property with the value for the size, and the second with the “ symbol (surrounded by single quotes to show it’s a text value – ‘”’). You can continue to add pieces of text until you get the desired label. To add attribute values, such as the size, use the Property menu and the list of attributes will be there sorted by the type of field. I’ll select the size, and complete the expression – Concat ( SIZE , ‘”‘ ). For street names, an expression might be concat( ST_DIR, “ “, ST_NAME, “ “, ST_TYPE) where the “ “ is used to add spaces between the fields.

You can use any combination of data fields and other elements to create a label with this expression process.

Once the expression is set, you can set the display parameters such as size, color and font. Remember with the size, Map Space is scale relative to the model and set the height to a specific value, while device space is relative to the monitor, or view, and will change the physical height based on the zoom scale.

Once the labels are set how we want them, we can go to the Display Manager and select Save Current Map to DWG from the Tools menu.

After saving to a new drawing file, we can open the file and the labels are now standard AutoCAD text items along with the roads. The process actually takes more to write about than to actually do.

Next post, I’ll go the other direction. I’ll show how to grab labels and turn them into attributes.

Getting Your Results – Using Network Topologies

One of the important tools that AutoCAD Map 3D includes is the capability to work with topologies. It can create and manage them, and more importantly, do analysis from these topologies. Basic training classes, and all of the books I’ve seen, show how to create, manage and perform analysis with topologies.  One thing that is absent, is how to take advantage of and access the results after the analysis – it’s the cause of a lot of questions from people I work with.

Before I get on to working with the results, I want to give some background of topologies, and how AutoCAD Map 3D manages them.

Topology is a technique for managing spatial relationships between objects. It is a particularly useful technique for managing networks of objects, such as utilities or streets. The relationships allow you to trace up- or downstream to answer questions, such as:

• What customers will be out of power if this line is down?
• What is the likely source of contaminant (common point upstream) when there are a series of sites that are showing high levels of contaminants?
• What is the shortest route between two locations?

The relationships are created by maintaining unique identifiers for each point or junction and line in data tables. These identifiers are called Primary Keys. The lines will also contain fields to include the identifiers of the points from each end of the line. These are called Foreign Keys. By searching for lines that have a specific point identifier, you can find all the lines that connect to a point, and go from point to associate line to associated point to associated line, etc, much like a monkey swinging from one vine to the next.

Consider the example below.  Here is a collection of lines and points. There is graphic representation of the network, and a snapshot of the data tables from the network. Look at point # 2364.  It appears to be the end of

that particular network stream. We look for all of the lines that have either a start point or end point value equal to 2364, and we find that line # 6888 has 2364 as an end point. We then look at the other point value and find it is 2359 (the start point and end point allow a topology to show direction as well as just connections), so we search the line table for other lines that have that value. We will find line #’s 6887 and 6921. We can then continue in this process until we get the results we are looking for.  For a best route, we will evaluate the potential sets of lines that provide a connection between the two points, and use some criteria to determine the best (usually the shortest lengths) set or route.

AutoCAD Map 3D provides tools and the data structures to create and manage topologies, as well as topology analysis tools. Within the Task-based Workspace, the topology commands can be found on the Object Map ribbon on the Topology panel.   The only thing required to create a network topology is a clean network of lines (clean means that the end of one line exactly meets another line – their coordinates should match). Map 3D will create points (called Nodes) at the junction points if they don’t exist in the data.

Once a network topology is created, Map 3D will create Object Data to manage to topological relationships. The nodes will get a table called TPMNODE_topologyname (where topologyname is the name of the topology). You can use the Edit Object Data command (The Object Data panel of the Object Map ribbon) to select a node and review the table information. The ID field is the critical element (the resistance values can be used to manipulate the analysis – for example, the resistance on a point could be a time factor for an average stop at a stop sign so route can be qualitatively compared including stops, turns, etc).

You can also see the values of the object data by selecting an object and reviewing the Properties (on newer versions of map 3D).

The lines (Map 3D calls them LINKS) will get their own set of Object Data, called TPMLINK_topologyname. The line (or link) object data will include additional fields. The critical elements are the Start_Node and End_Node fields, which are how Map 3D manages the topology relationships.

The purpose of creating and managing topology is to perform analysis, and the tools are also available on the Topology panel of the Object Map ribbon.  The three network analysis tools are Shortest Path, Best Route and Flood Trace.

When completing the analysis, you have the option of highlighting the results with a color (it will go away with the next redraw), or save to a topology. You will give the results a name (my example attached was a flood trace, and I named the resulting topology FloodResults).

Once the topology is created, I can always re-highlight the topology, but it goes away with each redraw. That makes it a bit difficult to use for further analysis or to even print the results.

The easy way to work with them at this point is to save the drawing with the result topology (or topologies) and open a new drawing. In the new drawing, use the Map 3D drawing attach tools to connect to the results drawing.

In the Map Explorer of the Task Pane, the topologies from the attached drawing will be visible in a greyed out icon. This means the topology hasn’t been loaded into the current drawing.

Right-click on the result topology and select the Load Topology option under the Administration menu.

This will open a dialog box with the option to Create objects when loaded. Selecting this will recreate the topology objects in the current drawing, essentially making a copy of the topology data from the original file.

You may have to Zoom Extents to see the newly created data.

At this point, we now have just the objects and topology from the result topology we created. We can save this and have it available for future applications and uses, such as printing route maps or performing buffers, etc. In addition, the objects will have not only the object data from the results topology, but it will also have the data from the original topology and any object data from the original objects.