Top 5 New Features of 2012 Products

AutoCAD 2012 - Top 5 New Features

• Associative Arrays - a much more intuitive way to create and update arrays
• Content Explorer - organize and search your symbol libraries and pull in content from other drawings easier and quicker.  You can even search text and attributes within drawings.
• Inventor Fusion - a powerful new 3d modeling application that integrates with both AutoCAD and Inventor
• Auto-Complete Command Entry - start typing a command and a list of commands that starts with those letters populates and filters as you type more letters
• Improved Grip Functionality - grips no longer just stretch, they lengthen, change radius, and modify geometry now

Revit Architecture 2012

• Worksharing – Worksharing has greatly improved in Revit 2012.  You can now graphically identify many aspects of elements, such as the ownership status, specific owners and which workset they belong to.  There are also balloon notifications for worksharing requests to make it easier to collaborate so that you can access a feature that someone else has borrowed.  These work with Revit Server.
• Citrix Support – Using Revit with a cloud computing model has recently been on many users radar because of Revit’s large file sizes.  Having an out of the box solution to this using Citrix is a great step to getting a server setup for users to access Revit.
• AutoCAD DWG Export – The Revit DWG export has been improved to create a more workable AutoCAD DWG.  You can now assign properties such as dimension styles, layers, linetypes, and fonts.  These settings can then be saved and reused when you are finished.
• Create Parts and Divide the Model – This allows you to break common elements such as walls into the individual pieces.  Each of these individual pieces can be manipulated and scheduled individually.
• 3D View Lock – This makes it much easier to annotate 3D Views. Previously, 3D views could not be annotated so this can be a great tool for presentations and to enhance the clarity of your details.

Revit MEP 2012

• All the Revit Architecture Updates – Revit MEP has all of the updates that Revit Architecture has, which are all great new features.
• System Browser – The improved browser makes it easier to find elements in your model.  You can hide and find elements by type.  You will also find that model elements will highlight as you select them in the system browser.
• Placeholders – These elements can be used in the early stages of the design to reserve space when you are still unsure of the final locations.  Very useful for collision detection when you know the approximate location of elements, but not the final design.
• Sloped Piping – Its now easier to create sloped pipes with more control.  You will be able to see the elevation and slope of the pipe and use that to connect sloped pipes directly to each other.
• Parallel Conduit and Pipe Runs – This lets you automatically create parallel conduits and pipes.

Revit Structure 2012

• All the Revit Architecture Updates – Revit Structure has all of the updates that Revit Architecture has, which are all great new features.
• Multiplanar Rebar – It is now possible to create rebar that accurately models what you want constructed.  Rebar with bends in multiple planes are much easier to create.
• Rebar Display – Self-intersecting rebar displays properly and will be shown as bent over and on top of itself.
• Analytical Model Color Coding – You can now select “Differentiate ends of linear analytical elements” to help identify where the structural elements begin and end.
• Enable Analytical Model – There is now a simple feature that let’s you select if a physical element is structural.  If you deselect the “Enable Analytical Model” parameter then it will not be considered in the analytical model.

Map 3D 2012

• Topobase functionality – Map and Topobase, Autodesk’s enterprise GIS solution, are now integrated.  See our series on “What is Topobase?” for more information on that product.  All the Topobase tools are available in Map.  The Map 3D Enterprise version allows you to take it to the next level and run on an Oracle Spatial backbone.  When you run Map 3D Enterprise, you will have a powerful and full-fledged GIS system.
• Data Model Administration – Centralized control over the workflows and data structure you want to maintain for your infrastructure when using the Topobase functionality.  This works with either the data store in a DWG or in Oracle.
• Improved Styling and Labeling for Feature Data Objects (FDO connections) – Additional options for line styles, symbols, polygon styles, and labels help create more robust maps.  Additionally, being able to control label placement solves a lot of gripes that you may have had with FDO labeling in the past.
• Autodesk Storm & Sanitary Analysis – Map 3D comes with and integrates with the Autodesk Storm & Sanitary Analysis program.  This is available with both the normal version and Enterprise version of Map 3D.
• DWG Output Wizard – This improves the conversion of FDO objects to AutoCAD DWG objects.  All the enhanced styling and labeling capabilities carry over to the DWG reproduced just like your new fancy styles.

Civil 3D 2012

Styles and Settings Import

The first tool that we had seen coming down the pipes for a long time were the new Style and Settings Management tools.  For the last couple years, we’ve had an increasing amount of access to these parts of Civil 3D in the application programming interface (API).  You might have used these in our CMI Tools.  Autodesk had a nice framework that made it easy to plug-in and grab these styles.  However, the new built in-tools are really superior.  They allow you to copy, replace, purge, and find styles in use all with a graphical interface. If you’ve ever built a Civil 3D Template, you know that some of tasks become nearly impossible without a lot of manual hunting or custom programming.

Label Rotation

This has been a feature everyone has been waiting a long time for.  Traditionally, we’ve used workarounds with generic labels or multiple label styles to get around this restriction, but now individual labels can be rotated independently.

One Section Cuts Multiple Corridor Baselines

This is an amazing new feature that might be too late for that project that you’ve already completed but perfect for the next one.  Often times, you’ll have adjacent alignments and design corridors for both alignments.  Each of these would be a separate baseline, meaning that you could not show both of them in a cross section.  This is now no longer the case.  If there’s one reason that you should be able to convince the project manager to upgrade and do the project in Civil 3D 2012, this might be it.

Catchment Areas

Determining time of concentration has always been a laborious process.  I would often start with the Catchment Area command (which would create polyines) and then move onto using the Water Drop command to fine tune the polyine areas.  Many PEdits and BPolys later, I would end up with suitable areas to begin calculating the time of concentrations from.  The new version gives us dynamic catchment groups, catchment objects and flow paths.  It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seen a group of new object types in Civil 3D that I can see an immediate benefit from.

Check for Tangency

There is now an option to specify whether Civil 3D will check for tangency.  This is a very simple tool, but one that can really help if you are not using constraint based design.  I think that Civil 3D has always assumed that everyone uses the nice floating and free options in their alignments for everything, which would force everything to be tangent.  As you probably know, this is not the case, many alignments are defined from polylines.  With these alignments, it would be nice to know if there are any non-tangent segments. Maybe you would draw a lot of little extra objects to check, but there’s always a chance you could miss something.  Now, there is an entry in the design criteria that lets you do that.This is just a sampling of some of the Civil 3D improvements, as there are many other tweaks and changes to truly make it a better product.

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