By Chris Perry, CADSoft Consulting

Color schemes are a great visual tool in views to highlight or callout specific criteria of information in the view, generally used in plan-type views.

By  Ron Couillard, CADSoft Consulting

Have you ever seen a drawing file you created with Civil 3D balloon in file size? Has this caused performance to take a nose dive?

The following steps should help you get some improvement on getting smaller file size, and hopefully better performance:

Well AutoCAD 2016 is out and loaded with a bunch of new features, and once again I will be covering a lot of them in my up-coming blogs and community sites. Although, this is a great way for or clients to be aware of what is out there, it still makes me wonder how many people really take advantage of these new tools or really learn how to use them properly to make their jobs easier?

Have you ever seen a drawing file you created with Civil 3D balloon in file size? Has this caused performance to take a nose dive?

The following steps should help you get some improvement on getting smaller file size, and hopefully better performance:

I have always been a big proponent of making 3D views with a section box to better understand design iterations and the relationship of the parts of the building model. Taking this to high detail and illustrating a segment of the model to resolve design issues quickly can result in having to make several, if not dozens, of views during schematic and design development phases.

Wanting to save a view as an image for reports?

While I typically use a premium screen capture and image annotation tool on a daily basis. I’ll suggest anyone to try this tip to take higher quality image shots within Revit as a Render image. It will store the image in the Revit Project Browser, after which the image view in Revit is exported to a standalone file for creating reports.

Civil 3D users always seem to have the need to batch export drawings for one reason or another. Years ago, there was the Pack n Go routine which would grab all dependent files and such and package everything up into a zip file. Obviously, this has been replaced by the E-Transmit routine. I had discovered issues with E-Transmit that had me looking at other alternatives. Some of the issues included not saving all files back to the format I specified as well as keeping settings and styles in the exported drawings and not stripping them out.

If you are like most people, the first time you opened your AutoCAD 2015 the first thing you probably did is start closing all of the palettes that popped up on your screen, (like everyone did with AutoCAD 2014 and so on) to get it back to the way old way you are used too. That’s typical human behavior. So I figure it is my job to explain what that palette you closed does. From there you can make the decision whether you think that this is something you feel could be useful in your normal everyday workflow to help communication with your Coworkers, Clients, Consultants or Contractors.

Here we are again, another New Year, another opportunity to look back and plan ahead!

We’ve published over 100 articles this year, featuring insights, tips, best practices and commentary on all aspects of public sector digital design. A big thank you goes out to our stable of guest bloggers and partners, including Line//Shape//Space, Synergis Engineering Design Systems, CADD Microsystems and CADSoft Consulting.

Autodesk has made some enhancements to the Cursor in AutoCAD 2015. A minor improvement was the crosshair lines that used to run through the pick box have been removed to make it easier to view what you are selecting. You can still use the PICKBOX system variable or the OPTIONS Dialog on the SELECTION tab to change the size of the pick box and the length of the crosshairs in the Display tab (or the CURSORSIZE system variable) to your personal preference.