I received this question from Erik about creating a Northing & Easting block with fields. Here is his question:

I find your post extremely helpful but I do have a question. I need my northing and easting to read a custom ucs (not world). Example, I’m giving a contractor a benchmark to work from which in world ucs is: N: 12213.19 E:-33516.2 but for ease we are setting that coordinate as N:0.00 and E:0.00 by making a custom layout ucs.
When I test the block it will only read out and display the world ucs even when I’ve set it to my custom ucs. Any thoughts? I want to place this block and have it read my custom ucs coordinate system instead of the world…

Great question Erik! Read more »

My friend and coworker @deanhuber emailed me with this tip today: Read more »

The UCS is a powerful tool in AutoCAD that allows you to control the drawing plane. It is very important to learn how to use this tool. It can be used for good and evil (for example, in a civil drawing, it is important to keep the UCS in the World Coordinate System otherwise the drawing may not line up with XREFs correctly). Every AutoCAD drafter should learn to use and manipulate the UCS correctly.

Here I will show you a couple of secret options for manipulating the UCS. Read more »

I’m not sure how this happened but one day my coworker was trying to select multiple objects after starting a command but AutoCAD forced him to select one object at a time unless he explicitly told it to do a crossing window by typing C at the select prompt. This was very frustrating!

After asking around, someone in our office figured out that “Implied Windowing” was turned off.

If you ever run unto this, here is how you fix it:

Type PICKAUTO into the commandline and change it to 1.

I started reading a new blog called Digging Into Civil 3D by trainer and author Rick Ellis.

Rick has been involved with the Civil/Survey/Mapping industry and Autodesk products since the early 90s in a variety of roles ranging from a Civil designer and CAD Manager to a trainer, consultant and author.

I’ve taken a number of Civil 3D and Map 3D classes taught by Rick including one at Autodesk University 2008. He is an excellent teacher and writer.

Check out his blog at diggingintocivil3d.blogspot.com.

I’m lazy so I like less keystrokes. For example when I am running the PEDIT command on an object that isn’t a polyline, I don’t want to be prompted with this every time:

Do you want to turn it into one? <Y>

Read more »

I love that you can link an Excel spreadsheet to an AutoCAD table. This is a very powerful tool, but I quickly discovered a problem: you can’t use .shx fonts an Excel spreadsheet.

Our CAD standards dictate that we use a .shx font but since it cannot be used inside Excel the AutoCAD table takes on the same non-standard font used in the spreadsheet. All of my AutoCAD tables linked to a spreadsheet were coming in with a non-standard font and it was a pain reformatting each and every cell. That’s when I discovered this little secret. Read more »

Civil 3D has some great tools for creating 3D models of ponds and swales. This document will show you how to use many of the tools provided in Civil 3D to create ponds/swales in 8 basic steps.

Download Tutorial (PDF – 3.66 MB)

For all you lazy drafters out there, CompliCAD offers, “a few tools to help make CAD & BIM a little less complicated.” These tools are some useful unit-conversion & scale factor tools.

Check them out…

At the request of Murph, I will show you how to create a block that will display the bearing in degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS) using an AutoCAD Field.

It’s actually very simple. Let’s get started. Read more »

Recently I was asked to create a grid that labels the Northings & Eastings on a map. There are a couple of ways you could do this: 1) If you have Civil 3D, create a point style that labels the Northing & Easting. 2) If you have AutoCAD create a block that displays the Northing & Easting with fields.

If you have Civil 3D, the point-style method works the best but today I am going to show you how to use fields to make this happen. Read more »