Autodesk Utility Design 2013 Release 2: The New Phone Books Are Here! The New Phone Books Are Here!

Well, maybe not exactly…but in a new release of Autodesk Utility Design (AUD) that showed up on the Autodesk Subscription Site last Friday (for those who have the appropriate subscription – Infrastructure Design Suite Ultimate, or AUD itself) communication and fiber support have been added in all areas of functionality – industry model, configuration, layout and analysis.

In addition, so additional functionality has been added. Those who were working with 2013 AUD knew that when creating new overhead lines, a 3D view of the lines and pole was created (complete with sag in the lines). Now the same 3D visualization has been added to underground facilities.

There’s a new analysis tool for overhead clearance. It identifies clearance between wires as well as with the ground.

 For those who do design based on work locations and stake-outs, a new work location block allows you to associate material and feature information with that work location.

For design output, material lists in table form can be added to the drawings with the “Insert Table” button.

An exciting new feature for a lot of electric utilities will be the new schematic layout tools. Non-schematic lines with conductors and ducts can be converted to a schematic view and then back. The new commands AUDEXPAND and AUD COLLAPSE will generate the schematic and then back to non-schematic views.

Some new electric distribution tools have been added – neutral conductor can be automatically added with the layout of primary, new span tools (create equal spans and preferred span lengths in addition to maximum span lengths), double circuit networks for overhead 3 phase systems have analysis and visualization capability, a spreadsheet-like load calculator for calculating demand load at service points, pole heights are now set by a pole height above ground pole leveling and custom status.

When you open an existing drawing with the new release, you will see a model update, and the new tools will be available.

I’ve worked with AUD for several iterations, and the current implementation is pretty exciting. It is a great tool for doing utility design. It is very easy to integrate with GIS and provide the calculations that engineers and designers need to get quality designs out faster. Watch over the next several weeks, and I’ll add some new blogs on AUD and utility design. If you haven’t taken a look at it, now’s the time.

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.

More Map 2011 info

Katie Jaques, the GIS Technical Lead in Product Support for Autodesk, is sharing some details on the new AutoCAD Map3D 2011 release - new FDO providors, and one I’m really looking forward to – Windows 7 compatibility. I made the move a few weeks ago, and I’d like to get out of the Virtual XP mode.

Check it out.

Hello, Map 3D 2011, What’s Up?

The new 2011 version (or is that “oh-eleven”) of AutoCAD Map 3D has some unique new features.

Group Draw Order

Some are not visible, such as Autodesk reworking the memory usage and making it more efficient, to visible items, such as moving the Group and Display Order toggle to it’s own place on the Task Pane.

The most substantive impact came with the incorporation of the tools to read LIDAR, or point cloud data. Subscription users got a sneak peak at this with the Subscription Advantage Pack (SAP) late last year. I commented on this in my blog right after last year’s AU.

Point Cloud Ribbon

Point Cloud Task Pane

Now the tools to display and work with point clouds are built right into the ribbon, and have been combined into the Data Connect button on the Task Pane (in the SAP, you had to go to the tools button to work with indexes before you could add point cloud data from the Data Connect button).

When I first tried to use the add point cloud data option, I struggled with adding it because I didn’t realize I had to first go to the tool bar to generate an index first. Now it’s a little more intuitive.

Multiple Coordinate Tracking

One of the primary applications driving the use of Map 3D was the capability to manage projections and coordinate systems. You can establish a coordinate system for your current drawing and bring in drawings or data sets from other coordinate systems and Map 3D will project them into the current drawing’s coordinate system. Along with this is the useful capability to “track” coordinates. The Track tool allows you to identify (or digitize) the location of the cursor in a different coordinate system. For example, I may want to get the latitude and longitude of radio transmitters for a FCC permit, but my mapping data is in a UTM system. I can use the tracking tool to capture the latitude and longitude without having to reproject the data. Likewise, if someone gives me a location from a GPS that is in lat-long and I want to add it to my UTM-based map, I can use the tracking tool to place the point. Well, in 2011, the tracking tool has been expanded to add multiple systems. You cann add additional “trackers” to the dialog box to get several on there as once. This can be really helpful to some of us working in several coordinates all the time (such as UTM, State Plane and Lat-Longs).

One new set of features dosen’t really extend the software, but may make it easier for users to take advantage of the tools. There are a number of new “assistance features.” Right on the startup screen, there are links to videos for several tasks available.

Welcome Screen Helps

That’s a short list. There’s a number of others, such as the ability to add grids and graticules, better overlay analysis (can handle a significant higher volume of features), and adding more capability to the Workflow tools (you can now add AutoCAD commands to your workflows).

So there’s some great reasons to look forward to making the transition.  Not to mention all of the new AutoCAD features – Isaac Harper blogs about them here. See you on the other side!