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About the Author

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DannyCounts
I was recently certified by Autodesk as a Civil 3D Implementation Certified Expert or ICE. I have worked in the Civil Engineering industry since 1987. In 1994 I started my consulting business doing training and consulting for Civil Engineering customers utilizing Autodesk civil engineering technology. I started L.A. CAD in 1999 and we are currently the 3rd largest Autodesk partner in the U.S. Studied Civil Engineering at Long Beach State, graduated in 1996.

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Digging In...

Monday, September 08, 2008

 

Civil 3D 2009 Side by Side compatibility warning

This issue was discovered and documented by John Rodriguez, Technical Specialist for Civil 3D at U.S. CAD.

As most of you are aware by now, Civil 3D just like its Land Desktop counterpart is not backward compatible when considering the intelligent objects that it creates. This has been the case since the beginning of Civil3D timeline. There are mechanisms that can be used to help “Port” supported objects that have been created from newer releases (LandXML) and “exportLDTdata”. This will work for some of the more basic model objects like surfaces and alignments but not for all objects.

ü An AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 drawing can be opened directly by any application based on AutoCAD 2007 or later. However, while the drawing version is the same, the civil model version is different. Therefore users who open an AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 drawing in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2007 or 2008 will be unable to modify or interact with the Civil 3D model. All base AutoCAD operations will be enabled.

I stumbled across an unexpected situation that needs to be known by anyone running 09 Civil3D side by side with previous releases. I was recently developing a Styles Template that was based on 2008 Civil3D. As I was nearing the completion of the template I wanted to test it out using some pre-made data that I had. At first everything worked as planned without a hitch until I inserted a file that only contained AutoCAD primitive lines, arcs and polylines. I was immediately unable to access any right click short cut menus. The objects still appeared on the Toolspace-Prospector but accessing them seemed unavailable?

I have seen warnings in the past when opening a file that contained Civil3D objects that had been created using a newer version of Civil3D.

In this particular instance I was only inserting a block that did not contain any Civil3D objects but had been saved using Civil3D 2009. There were no warnings when inserting the block that my current 2008 drawing would be placed in a state of “proxy” and that all of my Civil3D commands would be disabled!

Yikes…… What this means is if someone opens a detail block or perhaps general notes drawing or even a title block and inserts it my Civil3D drawing and its contained objects will be null and void in terms of usability!
As my testing continued I found that if I XREF’d the same Civil3D 09 saved file that the 2008 Civil3D drawing was not affected.

Posted by DannyCounts @ 10:37 AM
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