Autodesk has released the next update for Civil 3D 2021. Find the release notes here. Here are some highlights:
This article was originally published by Bluebeam, Inc. on the Bluebeam Blog.
ne of the downstream effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has been a strong projected uptick in cloud software conversions. With employees increasingly working remotely, software needs to be available anytime, anywhere. Software doesn’t have to be cloud-based to be remotely accessible, but many chief information officers (CIO), even at midsize companies, have had cloud transformation on their roadmaps, and the pandemic has provided the occasion to ask: if not now, when?
Moving key software applications to the cloud, which has already taken place across the construction industry, will have significant implications for the organisation – most obviously on the IT team that has been maintaining the software on-premises. In financial terms, the cloud-based construction management software transformation is a change from licensing software and paying annual maintenance fees to an on-demand and pay-as-you-go model. You rent the application instead of buying it.
For end-users, a smooth cloud migration may be almost imperceptible. For instance, a user logs in to their cloud-based construction software application, works with colleagues on finalising a set of documents for a large office building project and passes them on for approval without even a hint of consideration of the technology making that series of interactions possible.
Here are answers to common questions construction professionals may have about cloud collaboration in the construction industry and the technology behind it.
It’s not on your computer anymore. It’s on a remote server, being delivered to you whenever and wherever you need it. Is that something to be concerned about?
According to Jim Prothe, marketing director at Magenium, an IT solutions consulting firm based in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, there are good reasons to be excited about the change.
‘A friend of mine has a business that rents an office in a Chicago suburb’, Prothe said. ‘Last summer, another tenant in their building had a fire over a weekend. All the sprinkler systems turned on, and the application server was toast. They had to spend the next two weeks rebuilding that server from month-old tape backups. So, they lost a month of data, including all their billings. If they’d been operating in a cloud environment that had an outage in a region, they’d have had built-in failover capacity; they would have been able to spin up capacity in another region, and their business would never miss a beat.’
It’s no longer in the company’s server room – or, in cloud computing parlance, it’s no longer ‘on-premise’. Where it’s situated depends on where your business is located and what kind of cloud you’re using.
There are at least three different kinds of cloud service infrastructure that drives cloud collaboration in the construction industry:
As an end-user, the type of cloud probably won’t affect the availability or performance of the software.
There are at least three different levels of commitment your company could make to its cloud transformation:
Some of it is local – but the bulk of it is in the cloud. The physical location of the server generally makes little or no difference to the end-user, other than in exceptional circumstances involving regulatory compliance. Under Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, enacted after the Enron accounting scandal in the early 2000s, financial services firms often need to be able to specify to regulators where their account data is being stored. Other regulations come into play if they operate internationally. You can ensure, contractually, that your data stays within a certain region or on a certain server.
The server’s physical location isn’t entirely irrelevant when it comes to cloud collaboration in the construction industry. The speed at which data packets travel their tortuous routes across the internet is breathtaking, but if the server is far enough away, the end-user will experience a noticeable performance lag. This is why public cloud providers – and large organisations that host their own private clouds – have multiple, redundant servers distributed among regions. The infrastructure will be designed to route your data through the nearest server and to reroute to the next-nearest server if your region’s system goes down.
‘Generally, the large cloud service providers give you the option to choose the region where your primary servers will be located’, Prothe said. ‘Nearly every metropolitan area will have its own dedicated servers.’
In the short run, it’s cheaper to rent than to buy. The SaaS provider can price services inexpensively because it enjoys huge economies of scale.
From an accounting standpoint, there are benefits in reducing capital costs and increasing operating expenditures. Cloud service contracts generally come under operating expenditures. ‘During the 2008 financial crisis, capital budgets evaporated’, Prothe said. ‘Businesses still had to operate and moving applications to the cloud was one way to keep going. In some industries, we’re seeing the same thing happen because of COVID.’
Renting cloud software reduces the burden on a company’s IT services, because it has less infrastructure to maintain. ‘A friend of mine who runs an HVAC engineering company complains about the burden of supporting on-premises software’, Prothe said. ‘It constantly needs to be patched, and each time that introduces a new security vulnerability. The investment in IT resources to manage those changes is pretty daunting for a small engineering firm.’
Some companies express concerns about their most sensitive data, but the cloud can be more secure than having your own data centres.
A global company like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft may have thousands of full-time security people, assisted by artificial intelligence tools designed to spot or even prevent service interruptions or hacker intrusions. Their automation tools can detect unusual activity across the network, such as odd data traffic, and analyse it quickly to size it up as a potential threat. And, of course, traffic over cloud networks is encrypted end to end. The provider’s reputation is riding on the strength of that encryption.
‘Your instinct may tell you to maintain close control over important applications’, Prothe said. ‘But you need to ask yourself who is better at maintaining a secure infrastructure – a cloud service provider whose survival depends on their reputation for security, or your IT guys?’
There is one, obvious downside: users need to have a reliable internet connection.
Still, start-up costs are cheaper, although cloud software can cost more in the long run. ‘We have a lot of companies move applications from on-premises to the cloud, and they often need help optimising their spend’, Prothe said.’“You can spend a lot of money quickly in the cloud. You spin up a lot of power, and you pay for it on a monthly basis, so you may not notice it. You can often dial down the power you consume during off-hours when people are less likely to be online.’
If the data structure in the cloud application is different from that of the on-premises software, the data may have to be cleaned up, restructured and normalised. Migrating data to the cloud can be expensive, cumbersome and risky if undertaken without expert help.
It depends. Some companies are using only the basic applications like email in the cloud; some are ‘cloud-first’ – the default, when introducing a new application, is to adopt the cloud version.
It also depends on the application. Many software companies are themselves moving to a cloud-first product development roadmap, gradually transitioning their long-time customers from on-premises installations to their cloud offerings. Many new software vendors are likely to be cloud-only.
So, the next time you log on to use any cloud-based application to review a design or communicate a set of document changes, now you know how the technology behind those transactions truly works.
Autodesk has released the next update for Civil 3D 2021. Find the release notes here. Here are some highlights:
L’article de blog d’aujourd’hui présentera des outils qui simplifieront vos designs de terrassement, en utilisant tout le potentiel des Lignes caractéristiques de terrain sans avoir à passer par les outils de Talus de Civil 3D.
Cela dit, nous utiliserons l’outil Auto Grader de la suite d’outils CIM Project développée par CTC Software.
Contre :
Pour :
En résumé, si un sondage à tous les utilisateurs de Civil 3D demandait quel est l’outil de design le plus instable du produit, la grande majorité répondrait la création de Talus. Les « bonnes pratiques » dans son utilisation, comme la simplification des lignes caractéristiques de terrain et des surfaces de rattachement pour les entrées en terre, sont très efficaces pour contourner les « plantages », mais demande également de faire des compromis sur la qualité et la densité de notre donnée de base.
Vient à la rescousse la suite d’outils CIM Project de la compagnie CTC Software, avec son outil Auto Grader.
Auto Grader est un outil de création de talus à part entière exploitant les lignes caractéristiques de terrain pour créer des designs de terrassement. Étant complètement indépendant des outils de création de Talus de Civil 3D, il a sa propre interface, ses propres combinaisons de critères de pentes et sa propre approche pour standardiser et reprendre des designs d’un dessin à un autre.
L’interface d’accueil permet de gérer les Grading Families liées au dessin courant, et comprend notamment :
Creating sheets has always been a time-consuming process and needs to be addressed quite early in the design for preliminary submissions.
While sheet sets can help us with global information updates across sheets with the use of fields, they cannot alter or create layouts and viewports.
Civil 3D does offer a solution for creating multiple sheets in one fell swoop. But, where these tools fall short is in flexibility and updating.
CTC Software has come up with a set of tools to bridge this gap in flexibility and updating. This workflow can integrate seamlessly into a company standard with only the addition of 3 blocks and a few designated layers.
Sheet Generator ties in with sheet sets for information updating, and has the power to update Plan & Profile sheets if the alignment or scope change throughout a project.
Instead of View Frames spliced by matchlines, Plan Viewshapes inserts blocks as viewport area extents and closed polylines representing the actual shape of the viewports in layout sheets.
Profile Views takes advantage of native tools to split up profiles for each sheet.
Networks to Views adds all desired networks to profile views, but only assigns parts to the views they are visible in.
Adjust & Move on Profiles allow for efficient tweaking of the profile views to best line up with Plan Viewshapes.
Profile Viewshapes overlays the extents of the profile viewports onto the profile views for designers to make any last adjustments.
Create Layouts takes the plan viewshapes and profile viewshapes, adds matchlines to either depending on settings, adds north arrows, and creates sheets that can be added to a new or existing sheet set.
The true power of this tool set is the Update layouts command. As plan viewshapes change or shift this tool can write that change out to the affected layouts. It will adjust viewport shapes, north arrows, matchlines, layout names, and ripple through the sheet set.
CTC also has great tutorials for all their tools on their Youtube Channel.
As an excellent solution for any life sciences business with full support for E-Signatures and E-Records compliance, Accruent’s Meridian provides 3 key features:
Here are some big numbers that prove Meridian is one of the top document management platform choices:
Accruent’s Meridian technical document management solution can assist life sciences companies overcome the common issues found when dealing with vast amounts of asset information while maintaining full compliance requirements required by the industry. Teams will always have access to the latest versions of documents that are fully approved. Through electronic signature control, your business will accelerate time to market by managing change control faster and with full traceability for audits.
What can your company achieve with Meridian?
Always be in control of your technical data.
Deliver new products on time.
Reduce audit issues with less risk of noncompliance.
Empower your teams with improved communication.
To learn more about Meridian solutions and how they can help your team, please contact the SolidCAD Meridian team.
What is a profile?
One of the most essential features in Bluebeam that will help all users to organize themself is maybe one of the less known; Profiles.
Profiles in Bluebeam are important. It is not just about having a custom interface. It’s more about having an organized tool that will make you more efficient to work and you will be able to deploy at large in your department. In addition to the interface, by exporting a profile, you export everything you customized in Bluebeam (including Tool Sets and Markup list columns). So everybody is unified in their work.
How to create a profile
When you start Bluebeam, you will first go to the Revu menu and click to see the menu show up. Then go to Profiles and select Manage profiles:
A dialog box will open, and you will be able to add a new profile:
Click on Add… and another window will open (don’t worry there is no more after that)
Add your name or your service/department name and click OK. Your screen will flash (don’t worry it is not exploding) and now you are in your profile.
You will notice it looks like the previous one you were in. That’s normal. Revu doesn’t want you to create everything from scratch so it uses the last profile as a canvas you will work on.
But the first step is done. Let’s customize it:
How to custom my interface?
Before customizing your profile, you will need to ask yourself what you need to do with Bluebeam. This little brainstorm will be valuable to know what we will show and we will hide.
From there you have 3 ways to do it.
The first will simply consist of right-clicking where the current icons are to bring up the toolbar’s menu.
Then select from the available menu the toolbars you think you need. When you have done this, the selected bar will be displayed in your interface.
Now we will see how to create your own toolbar.
To do this, right-click at the top of the screen to bring up the toolbar menu and select Customize
A dialog box will open to allow you to customize existing toolbars and create your own toolbar
In order to facilitate the understanding of this part, we will identify each part and detail them:
1- Toolbars
These are all the toolbars that currently exist in Bluebeam and this is also where you will be able to create your own
2- Items
These are the tools which are the toolbars that we select in part 1.
3 – Orders (and Categories)
This is where all the tools Bluebeam offers are located. These are classified by category
To create your own personalized toolbar, click on the 
icon and a window will show up
Name your toolbar as you wish and click OK
After that, we are going to select the tools that we are going to need for our most common tasks and add them to our custom bar.
The tools that we will put must be the ones we want to have at hand because they are the ones we will use most often
Finally, let’s see the 3rd and final way to add tools to your custom bar.
When you navigate the Bluebeam menus to choose a tool, you will notice a pushpin next to the name of the tool. Click on it to bring up the menu of toolbars.
Select where you want to add this tool (in which bar) and now the tool is available on your toolbar.
Remember to save everything by going in Revu →Profiles→ Save Profiles before closing Bluebeam.
Export a profile
To export a profile and everything in it, go to Revu → Profiles → Manage profiles.
Select the profiles to export and click on Export. Choose the location where your profile will be exported. Copy/paste it into an email and send it to everyone who will work with it from now on.
Civil 3D 2021.1 introduced several new features including a new compass when creating a pipe run. This is excellent news, but depending on your modeling requirements, it can cause an issue if you leave in a new setting.
In the examples below, the parts list has no bends, and they are not needed for this design. The pipe runs as required to be drawn like a polyline. While working with a customer, I ran into this issue, but I could not find the solution, and surprisingly, neither could Autodesk. Thanks to my esteemed colleague, Colin Gaudet for discovering what turns out to be a very simple solution.
This is the behavior from 2021.0 and it is the expected behavior.
This is the behavior after installing 2021.1. The compass indicates that there are no bends and it will not allow any angle to be drawn, only a straight line.
The SettingThere is a new setting to allow pipe runs to be “snapped” to known bend angles. Turn off the new setting to return to the expected behavior when there are no bends. The compass remains, but it now allows any angle to be drawn.
This article was originally published by Bluebeam, Inc. on the Bluebeam Blog.
As many organizations across the globe begin to bring employees safely back into the office after months of remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, facilities managers are emerging as critical players in the transition. And Bluebeam Revu is essential in making it happen.
While employees have been busy adapting to working remotely, facilities leaders have been spending much of the last six months preparing for employees’ inevitable return to the office—whenever that may be.
For many, that day won’t come until later in 2021. Several large companies including Google, Facebook and Salesforce.com have announced that their employees won’t be required to return to company offices until as late as August 2021.
Others are considering embracing remote work indefinitely. Twitter is giving employees the green light to consider the option, which will allow many of its employees to permanently escape the high cost of living around the company’s home city of San Francisco. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has said that the social media company will eventually move toward having half its workforce remote by 2030. The Menlo Park, California-based company also just hired a director of remote work as it plans for the shift.
Not everyone, however, is embracing the remote work movement. Reed Hastings, founder and co-chief executive of Netflix, recently told The Wall Street Journal that he hasn’t seen any positives from full-time remote work. “Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative,” he said.
Organizations are anxious to get employees safely back into the workplace, and determining what that will look like is a complex process, according to Candice Stong, a project manager on Bluebeam’s facilities team. This team manages the construction technology company’s global office portfolio, including its Pasadena, California, headquarters as well as offices across the United States, Europe, the U.K. and Australia.
“To say it’s been crazy over the past six months is an understatement,” Stong said. “We all work from home now, but, eventually, we’re going to be back in the office. So, we have focused on what that will look like according to the requirements set forth in the various safety protocols.”
All workspaces are not created equal, and for most organizations, updating the workplace to meet the various public health protocols is necessary. In recent years, many companies embraced open, flexible, activity-based spaces, along with densely populated workstations with assigned seating. Others adopted a flex-work model using “hot-desking.”
These strategies, which allowed for increased density, have created a challenge given physical distancing requirements in a post-COVID environment. For Bluebeam, clusters of workstations situated closely together wouldn’t suffice to maintain the six-foot physical distance between employees necessary to meet public health protocols. Narrow hallways would have to be re-routed into one-way paths.
Rules around conference room occupancy and use would need to be instituted. In-office kitchen areas would need to be reimagined, along with the common areas and other informal gathering spaces.
Additionally, floor markers, as visual cues, ensuring physical distance requirements are met, as well as zones for temperature checks, are markings that were included on the return-to-office plan documents.
As the early weeks of all-company remote work settled in, Stong began receiving inquiries from vendors offering to assist Bluebeam with workspace reconfigurations and occupancy management solutions considering the likely post-COVID requirements to come. “With access to Revu, utilizing outside resources to manage the return-to-office workspace planning didn’t seem to make sense,” Stong said she remembered thinking at the time.
Given the uncertainty of the pandemic and how our workspace would need to adapt to continuous changes in health protocols and government agency requirements, Stong said she needed to be more self-sufficient with creating relevant workspace plans and be swiftly responsive to changes.
“Being solely reliant on third-party vendors to map out the future of our workspace would take time and money,” she continued.
The larger situation surrounding COVID-19 was seemingly changing each day, which meant occupancy management and workspace reconfigurations required for a safe return would need a quick-and-nimble approach. An approved plan one week might become obsolete the next.
Even for facilities managers that choose to work with an outside resource, it would be smart for them to collaborate in the reconfiguration effort as much as possible. This way, if and when last-minute changes do come to light, the facilities manager can work with the plan documents themselves to institute the change—all without having to wait for the contractor or architect to respond under potentially tight approval deadlines with regulators.
“I think the challenge is facility teams now need to know their buildings better than ever,” said Ryan McGuinness, Bluebeam’s North American enterprise sales director, who interacts often with facilities managers at construction and architecture firms. “They’re trying to do whatever they can with the tools they have, but then they also need to communicate that information to the masses.”
What’s more, facilities managers’ ownership of the return-to-office plan and redesign allows them to take advantage of learning how to use some of the tools their architectural counterparts use to plan and plot out changes. Of course, becoming an expert in the tools architects use for design—like Revit or AutoCAD—is likely unrealistic. Luckily, there is another industry standard tool that is easy to adopt, putting the power in facilities managers’ hands.
That tool is Bluebeam Revu, whose intuitive PDF markup and editing capabilities make it a manageable but powerful tool for facilities managers to learn when it comes to creating, managing and communicating return-to-office workspace plans.
Aside from detailed and industry specific reconfigurations and markups that will need to take place in workspace plan documents, it’s likely that many non-technical company stakeholders will eventually need to view and sign off on any final plans. This makes Studio in Revu, Bluebeam’s cloud-based document management and real-time collaboration portal, a valuable tool for accessible document communication and approvals.
“I see a lot of our customers being able to use Revu’s advanced markups to give a visual story of what’s going on with their current layout and with what needs to be changed,” McGuinness said. “And then also being able to communicate that through Studio to anyone involved. Studio is going to give you an audit trail of all those markups.”
There are specific tools and capabilities facilities managers should be using in Revu when embarking on return-to-office planning.
Basic Markup Tools: Simple markup tools like rectangles and circles, etc., can be used to identify and manage occupancy and physical distance requirements, with fill colors to designate, visualize and communicate various seat assignments. “You could do colored rectangles and place them over desks, but they can still have opacity,” said Andrew Gaer, Bluebeam’s technical account management director.
Custom Line Styles: Revu allows users to create custom line styles to designate different things. For instance, if a facilities manager wanted to present changes in “path of travel” on the return-to-work plan documents for specific hallway traffic, they can use a custom line style that has text in line with that, according to Omar Sheikh, Bluebeam’s senior professional services manager. “It could also be a text box even that says, ‘Temperature Check Station,’” Sheikh said.
Image Markups: Revu allows facilities managers to take photos of certain things in an office or use web-based images to indicate hand sanitization stations or floor markings and include them in the PDF for employees to view and reference. Gaer said this tool could be used to take pictures of temperature check or hand sanitation stations, for example, so office workers can see exactly where they should look for when they return to the office.
Sketch to Scale: This allows facilities managers to create shapes such as circles or rectangles to the exact scale needed for an office plan. If a facilities manager wanted to designate an area as off limits, for instance, they could use this tool to create a rectangle with the exact dimensions of the real-life area. Also, if a facilities manager wanted to create a circle designating six feet to mark up areas requiring strict physical distancing protocols, they can use this tool to do it.
Legends: The markups Legend is able to help facilities managers create a plan document that will ultimately be simple to understand for any collaborators or viewers either marking up, approving the plan document or using the plan when back in the office.
Calibration: This tool will allow facilities managers to determine the proper scale for the plan document. This will ensure all measurements moving forward will be accurate—an important element considering that proper distancing and spacing is required in a return-to-office plan document.
Studio: Once an initial draft of the return-to-office plan document is ready for review and additional collaboration, facilities managers can manage the document (or set of documents) in Studio Projects, Bluebeam’s cloud-based document management solution. They can then start a Studio Session to invite several different reviewers or collaborators to add notes and make markups of their own in real-time no matter their location.
Tool Set: Facilities managers will likely need to make changes to their plan for multiple locations within their organization, so they’ll want to add these newly created tools to a Tool Chest in Revu so they can easily be accessed for future use.
Today’s blog post will be focused on revealing the industry’s best practices for Civil 3D – Pipe Networks.
Explore the techniques to build Civil 3D gravity pipe networks and edit them using the new CTC Pipe Designer, Part Tagger, and Part Swapper all from CTC’s CIM Suite.
CIM Suite will help you to:
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