|
AutoCAD Map 3D Answers
Struggling with AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT to access maps, drawings and GIS information?
Whether you are managing a CAD (computer-aided design) or design group, and your team is being asked to do more GIS (geographic information system) work to support the company’s ever-expanding GIS team. You don’t want to spend the money on an expensive GIS application or the time to retrain your CAD staff on unfamiliar software, but most projects require you to access and manage both CAD and GIS data. You need a solid geospatial application that will help you bridge the CAD/GIS gap.
What if your current team, with no retraining, could perform most of the mapping and GIS functions the department needs, but in an environment in which they already excel? AutoCAD® Map 3D software enables you to edit and manage spatial data in its native format using software familiar to millions of engineers. Avoid time lost to data re-entry, and help reduce redundancy by maintaining one copy of your spatial information. And best of all, use your existing workforce to maintain GIS data with tools from the CAD leader.
Organisations are constantly looking at ways to improve process and work more efficiently to meet with today’s high standards and competition.
AutoCAD Map 3D simplifies these Business Challenges.
↑BACK TO TOP
Unsure if you have got the most up-to-date data and fed up with error strewn drawings?
“I often get drawings that I need to change completely because the lines do not connect properly. How can I make my drawing error-free as quick as possible?”
“When I need data, I copy the drawing from my colleague. Then another colleague does the same. When I finish my drawing, it is edited again by another department. In the end, we don’t know which drawing contains the most recent data”
Sound familiar?
Many AutoCAD users share drawing files and data with clients, colleagues, co-workers and organizations throughout a project cycle. The source data or base maps used often vary. Substandard digitizing and poor translations from other software can introduce geometric errors that are time consuming to locate and fix. Geometric problems such as lines not connected precisely at endpoints can result in seemingly precise data that is highly inaccurate. Isolating these problems can involve hours of searching for them visually, and neglecting to fix them can result in major problems later, when others rely on the data.
Another common problem with drawings is duplicate objects in the exact same location; finding them can be nearly impossible without the right tools. If the number of items such as valves, windows, or electrical components is derived by exporting the number of symbols used in a drawing, hidden duplicates can cause costly errors.
AutoCAD Map 3D includes a series of powerful and easy-to-use tools for finding and repairing many types of geometric problems. These tools can be used individually; finding and repairing problems by type, layer, or both. They can also be used automatically, to search through very large drawings with the aid of an intuitive dialog box wizard. Once found, the problems can be repaired instantly and simultaneously. When this is not practical, the process can be performed interactively: The software identifies different problems with user-defined marker symbols. Then further user control is achieved by allowing objects that are known to be accurate to serve as anchor points to which the inaccurate objects are adjusted. This avoids issues such as moving good data to join it to bad data.
Drawing Cleanup is a tool that can check on various drafting errors like undershoots, overshoots, double objects etc. With the interactive mode you can follow up each error and decide whether is needs to be solved or not by AutoCAD Map. Even when someone has drawn lines instead of polylines you can convert lines to polylines, circles to arcs, arcs to polylines etc. After cleaning up you drawing you can build relationships between objects, so topology can be build. Once the objects know the structure of the drawing they are in, you can make analyses like calculation area, overlays, buffer zones, shortest path calculation.
↑BACK TO TOP
Do you spend hours adding text labels to drawings?
AutoCAD users have, for years, spent a large portion of their time adding text to drawings that identifies objects. Ironically, the information entered at the keyboard is often already in the drawing file, stored as object properties when the entities were created or imported or previously added in the form of object data. When this same information has to be reentered manually, many hours of redundant labour are required, but more important, typographical or transcriptional errors can be introduced. In addition, inconsistencies in formatting and placement can occur, so standards compliance can suffer.
AutoCAD Map 3D includes a powerful system for automatically adding text to objects. Templates can be defined to control the appearance, location, and content of these labels, and once they are set up properly, hundreds or thousands of objects can be labeled in seconds. When objects are created using object classification, as discussed earlier, they can contain object data fields, which can in turn be used to automatically annotate the objects, saving countless of hours of labour.
↑BACK TO TOP
Worried about accessing OS MasterMap® topography layer when land-line® is withdrawn in September?
With the withdrawal of Land-line data on September 30th 2008. AutoCAD organisations will need to develop a strategy for adoption and management of their OS MasterMap.
AutoCAD will be unable to access OS MasterMap but AutoCAD Map 3D will.
AutoCAD Map 3D enables you to associate your own data with OS MasterMap® features so you can analyse a richer database, search and query your own data fields and the OS MasterMap attributes. AutoCAD Map 3D also allows you to colour the unique polygons defined in the OS MasterMap data with the standard stylisation. This will help improve the visual appearance of the drawings and hence the interpretation of what’s actually on the ground.
↑BACK TO TOP
Do you find you cannot use data from other systems within your organisation without cumbersome import/export, and data is often lost during translation and re-importing?
AutoCAD Map 3D lets you natively access the most commonly used sources of spatial data such as ESRI® SHP files, ArcSDE® and Oracle® databases. Directly access and edit vector data, access raster imagery, remove the need for data translation processes or expensive middleware.
↑BACK TO TOP
Need to bring large GIS data sets into AutoCAD® software without compromising performance?
No problem, you can connect to relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and ArcSDE and query out vast amounts of information in mere seconds.
↑BACK TO TOP
Would you like to save drawing production time while increasing adherence to CAD standards?
When new objects are created in a drawing, many of the properties of that object, such as the layer it resides on or additional object data, must be entered manually, one entity at a time. This step can substantially hinder the data-capture process, as the operator must pause to check the source data, key in the data, and double-check the accuracy for each item. This discontinuity not only slows the process (since it is always easier to focus on one type of activity and repeat it) but is also conducive to errors in both the geometry and the information entered at the keyboard.
Object classification is an AutoCAD Map 3D feature that facilitates this process. Once classification is set up, the operator can simply select an object type from a menu and then digitize the object’s geometric properties, focusing on the editor screen and the location, while the software takes care of the similar data that the digitized object shares with like objects. This data can include properties such as layer, color, and line weight, as well as object data, as we have seen. When set up properly, object data can also be used to automatically annotate the drawings, as discussed later. Object classification significantly increases not only operator speed and efficiency but also accuracy and adherence to standards.
↑BACK TO TOP
Would you like to use high resolution aerial and satellite imagery in your drawings?
Images such as aerial photographs and satellite imagery can be inserted into any AutoCAD drawing and serve as useful background information. These images typically contain specific information about their precise location and scale, available either within the image file or in a separate data file. This information is known as correlation data, and an image file that includes it is said to be correlated or geo-referenced.
AutoCAD, by itself, is not equipped to use this correlation information, which is now included with most aerial and satellite imagery. This means time-consuming and error-prone manual correlation is necessary to properly position the imagery. AutoCAD Map 3D, however, can read this information from a wide variety of source types including Mr.SID® and ECW files and use it to precisely position the image.
To understand how powerful AutoCAD Map 3D is and how it will help your organisation increase productivity, we strongly recommend viewing a demonstration.
↑BACK TO TOP
|