Civilized Development

Updated Civil 3D 2012 API Reference Guide

I am very happy to introduce the new, updated Civil 3D API Reference Guide. The new Reference Guide is the result of many months of work trying to improve the entire experience and make us more efficient in order to provide the best possible documentation. Is it perfect? No. But it is a big step forward that will allow us to work efficiently and be able to improve the documentation at a faster pace.

For the past few months, we have been researching tools that will allow us to improve the process of generating the documentation. We have established processes to create, review, and produce the materials that we will expose to you. And, we will keep working to make the experience even better.

It has been a lot of work and many people involved to get us to this point, but things will just get better moving forward. I want to thank everyone involved in this project, from the technical writers, to the UX engineers, and the development and QA team who also participated in the process. Great job everyone!

Update: Apparently, I was too quick posting about this. The updated version was still sitting on the Staging Servers waiting for us to give the OK to go live, which explains why I was able to access it, but not you. We are pushing it live now, and it takes around 24 hours for the new content to be cached around the globe; therefore, you should be able to start accessing it tomorrow January, 6th. I will update this post when we are sure the docs are live, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Plugin of The Month: Solid Cut Surface

Augusto has done it again! He has provided another cool tool for Civil 3D users. The Solid Cut Surface plugin, “uses BRep to determine the points below the solid. After determine the planar bounding box of the solid, a ‘scanning line’ is created below the solid, which is used to get sample points over this line. From each point, it tries to find the lowest vertical point that touch the solid, line a 3D scan, which result in a Point3d on the solid bottom face. The line moves forward and the process restart. It can also removes points above the surface by comparing its elevations. All those points are used to create a high density Civil 3D TIN surface that is finally simplified, removing all unnecessary points (e.g. coplanar points).”

You can download the plugin from here; although you may need an Autodesk login account.