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Alignment masking in Civil 3D is something that I am rarely asked about. This week however, a new Civil 3D user asked me about hiding the display of a small portion of an alignment; hence this post. This will be a review for many, but I thought it may help someone else struggling that is either new to the software or has forgotten about this tool over time.
Check out the video below to see alignment masking in action.
-Alan
Historically, the word "animation" has been associated with words like "difficult", "time consuming" or "expensive". Today, using InfraWorks, it has never been easier to create an animation of a proposed design. Each animation starts with a storyboard. Storyboards represent “containers” holding customized camera movements strung together to produce an overall animation. After building and refining a storyboard, finished animations are then exported and saved to disc, allowing them to be incorporated into presentations.
In today’s installment, we'll explore the basics of the Storyboard Editor and how it can be used to produce a fly through animation. With this tool (and a handful of mouse clicks) you can quickly and easily create compelling animated visualizations.
If you are interested, the video below will help get you started!
-Jeff
Today’s tool(s) are all about making our lives easier when working with text Fonts.
In short, text fonts are like snowflakes. There are tons of them each with their own subtle differences that make them unique. Additionally, some are pretty “heavy” and should be used sparingly as too many of them can cause performance issues. (TrueType Fonts)
As a result, whether we are exchanging files, collaborating on a project or looking for ways to improve performance, text fonts are something we should be keeping track of.
For example, text fonts are not embedded in .DWG files. Because of this, if someone we are collaborating with does not send us their custom font files, the text will likely not look the same when the model is opened on our end. In the old days, we would know right away because Civil 3D would display ugly dialog boxes notifying us that the model contained missing fonts. Fortunately for us, today, it handles the situation more gracefully by using FONTALT.
In short, when opening a model, for any text font files that cannot be found, FONTALT contains a replacement font name that will automatically be substituted. Essentially, instead of asking us to provide a replacement for every font not found, FONTALT silently performs all of the replacements automatically. The default value is SIMPLEX.SHX which is vector based and mimics an old LEROY lettering machine text. However, you can easily change this value to any available font (even TrueTypes) using the FONTALT command.
While this is a powerful tool, it gets even better!!
FONTALT is essentially a one size fits all solution to the problem. In short, ALL fonts that can’t be found are replaced with the same font. Wouldn’t it be great if we could define font overrides for different fonts? For example, when Civil 3D sees Simplex, replace it with Arial. When Civil 3D sees RomanS, replace it with TimesNewRoman… Also, don’t restrict the replacement to only when fonts are missing. Process the override whether I have the font or not.
Fortunately, this can be done today!! It is accomplished using a font mapping file. (ACAD.FMP)
Check out the video below to see how to setup FONTALT & ACAD.FMP.
-Jerry
It seems like just yesterday we started the Civil Immersion Blog, and here we are now midway through our second year! To celebrate, we are once again packaging all the content we’ve created over the past six months into a single download. We’re calling it “Civil Immersion Season Two – Part 1”.
The package includes every post and workflow recording from the first half of our second year. [February 2017 through July 2017]
If you’re interested, you can download it here - https://goo.gl/D3T2F1
After downloading, simply unzip the contents into a folder on your computer or network. In there, you’ll find a .doc file containing all the blog posts with hyperlinks to the associated (now local) screen recordings. We hope that by making this content available locally, it will be easier for many firms to access and share with others inside their organizations.
Please let us know if you find this approach helpful!
Thank you for your continued support!