Wait… What? We had an update? Heidi Boutwell You bet we had an update! If you have yet to check your subscription for Civil 3D at Autodesk.com or manage.autodesk.com, then you’ve missed a big product update. That’s right. In August 2015, Civil 3D published Productivity Pack 1. Then during AU in November, Civil 3D came out with Service Pack 2. Coming soon will be Productivity Pack 2. These were very quiet launches, but let me tell you now—there’s a ton of new features in those productivity packs. Looking to the future, most, if not all, of those productivity packs will be moved into the next release of Civil 3D. So download your productivity pack now and start trying out some of those new and useful features. So what’s so big about this new Productivity Pack? Well, in Productivity Pack 1, we were given these new features: • Earthwork Plan Production—Create a grid of labels that annotate differences in volume between surfaces. • 3D Solids from Pipe Networks—Create AutoCAD 3D solids from Pressure and Pipe Networks, which include objects such as pipes, structures, fi ttings and appurtenances. In Productivity Pack 2, coming very soon, you can expect to see these new features: • Property Set Defi nitions—Add intelligent BIM information to Civil 3D objects as property sets, such as corridors, feature lines, alignments, subassemblies and AutoCAD entities. This meta data can be used within AutoCAD Civil 3D or in downstream applications, including Autodesk Navisworks and BIM 360 Glue. • Autodesk Civil Engineering Data Translator— Translates AutoCAD Civil 3D fi les to fi les that can be used in Bentley ® GEOPAK ® and Bentley ® InRoads ® , and translates GEOPAK and InRoads fi les to fi les that can be used in AutoCAD Civil 3D. • Extract feature lines from a corridor—Extracts feature lines from Civil 3D corridor model. You can extract a series of feature lines simultaneously, defi ning their station range using corridor regions or closed polygons. The feature lines can be used as grading base lines that remain dynamic to the corridor model. • Rail Turnouts and Crossings—Creates and edits rail turnouts and crossovers, and create a turnout table along with supplying a turnout catalog. • Create Feature Lines without specifying a destination site. You can now create a feature line and NOT designate a site that the feature line must go into. • Coordinate Geometry Editor—The Coordinate Geometry Editor enables you to enter, edit, and analyze 2D traverse data using a variety of input formats. www.cadlearning.com 17