Civil 3D and Land Deskotp 2008 Service Packs

For those of you that don't live and breath Civil 3D like I do, you may not be aware that there an now service packs available for both Civil 3D 2008 and Land Desktop 2008. Ok, big deal. So why Blog about them? Well, you have to make sure you get the right one or it won't work for you. Remember, there are two different versions of LDT 2008.

First, the easy stuff. The Civil 3D service pack can be downloaded from the Autodesk website. Simply click here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=9909730&linkID=9240698. There is only one version of the service pack so download it and install it.

Now the tricky part, Land Desktop. For those of you that have licenses of Civil 3D, even if you aren't using Civil 3D will most likely have the Civil 3D Land Desktop Companion. If that's you, then you'll need to download your service pack here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=9909673&linkID=9240698.

If you don't have Civil 3D, you probably have Land Desktop and you can download your servivce pack here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=9909659&linkID=9240778.

Let's all hope this service pack will fix all those little bugs!

You want a solid from your surface?

Ok, so I had a customer call me up today and ask me if Civil 3D could quickly create a solid from a surface. Apparently, they create physical models of the surface for use in their wind tunnel (how cool is that?) and the equipment that creats the models has to use a solid.

Sounds like a good challenge to me. So, looking around, there seem to be several ways to do this but all of them are very time consuming, until I stumble upon this little gem. Someone out there in the great wide internet wrote a lisp routine that will create a solid out of 3d faces. So, in Civil 3D, you can display your surface as 3D faces, explode the surface (or better yet use the Extract Objects from Surface routine in 2008), and run this neat little routine and you have a solid. It took about 5 minutes to process 1,400 faces in 2008.

Now, I know I focus primarily on Civil 3D (all of my previous three posts so far) but this will work for Land Desktop as well. Just import your 3d Faces into your drawing and away you go!

If you are interested, you can find the lisp routine HERE