SubscribeLarge Data sets - speed up Tiled Raster files with WMS...
With aerial photos or scanned maps, it is common to have a large number of tiled images. Using FDO’s to bring the images is in a great way to improve speed but when we are talking about many images, it can still have issues. One of these is the fact that even though FDO’s are a serious improvement over the old fashioned insert image function, it will still slow the AutoCAD Civil 3D session down, particularly for panning/zooming - another is that every time the DWG file is opened, all the images have to be resolved regardless of whether they are displayed or not - for a large area (a State in Australia for example), this can take a long long time. I know people who go for a coffee while the system is sorting itself out.
In this example, each square on the grid represents a 50MB image. We don’t want all this images on the screen at the same time but we do want to be able to zoom into an area and have them appear for just this region without too much fuss.
This solution is not simple - we use Mapguide to do the work externally to the Civil 3D session. It is well worth the effort though - the improvement in speed is amazing.
COGO functionality in Civil 3D - Interpolate Points...
I’ve just come from a conference where I was reminded of a Survey Feature that we often forget to show off in presentations - the functionality and options available in Civil 3D to create Points manually.
The scenario is that an intersection has been surveyed and the point where the 2 CL’s meet has not been picked up. The solution is to interpolate the Point from the Main road and join it to the Side Road (the dashed blue line above) so the triangulation forms properly.
This is just one of the options available in the Points > Create Points toolbar. Once you know the general gist of one of them…
STRINGER - new website + a bit of history
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http://www.stringersurvey.com/
The CadApps web page still has plenty of info, but this new one has more specifics on exactly what the software offers with a page on tech tips etc…
When you go there, make sure you click the section marked ‘Some Keyword Solutions’ to get to the interactive page (click on a button to get help on it).
For a bit of history on Stringer, click below
Large Data Sets - filtering point files
Credit for this one goes to Alec Tadman from Connell Wagner.
He came up with the innovative idea and emailed me - I just put the SQL code together (with a little help from my friends..)
The basic idea is to keep the points near the specified contour intervals (blue) and get rid of the rest (red), before building the contours.
Connect TAB/DGN to DWG - (FME for FDO for free...)
lots of acronyms - whats all the fuss about?
We love our FDO’s because we can link external data (ESRI SHP files etc) like an X-Ref. (we can do a lot more as well but we’re fond of the simple stuff)
The only problem with this is that FDO Data Connections do not have MAPINFO or MICROSTATION formats by default. These can be linked with the OGR provider but this has some problems, particularly with large data sets. The solution to all this is FME ….(feature manipulation engine - the parts we need are free…)