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.

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.

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.