@350rocketmike yeah they need to basically take the working drawing and create a new drawing dwg and remove un needed items and change colors for you to be able to easily read on your screen on tsc7. Light yellow thin lines is not your friend lol. Now you can if they have it set up correctly use it to stake to ??make it active? or just use it as a background to aid in site orientation and such. When you have a few crews on a nasty thick topo updating so everyone knows what has been done and what has not is good also for mapping limits on irregular shaped sites as wondering through the thickness you don??t want to cut no more than necessary. Hint yellow lines. I could not see the limits but i topoed the he k out of a swamp lol. About a acre more than I needed on one area. Yellow jackets and all. I said no more yellow lines for me lol. You could probably easily take your csv files and break them up though 7000 points is a lot when you probably only need a few hundred in one area. Its just a csv file no need for cad excel would be the easiest to cut and paste. Maybe 3 beers and done. ???? just link and un link as you need them. In TBC you can make them control quality easy and quick for control points. It can be done in ta as well but a little more time consuming if its a lot of points. ?ÿMany ways to manage and organize. But it is so difficult to even find people and we all have more work than workers available. I am hiring now i need two crews as of last week when i started at the new place. I need crews equipment trucks. I need cad tech so much work. ?ÿI drove an hr and half to me contractor today on a large project i am taking over and i man was sick so i went out with the cre chief after my meeting to help him. It was good I needed to see the site and site conditions other than dots on a screen. And to see what he is up against 10 hours every day. Now I know and when I got home i packed a go bag just encase he or his i man was sick again. Its in the truck toolbox next to my farm supplies. If i have to change from office attire to boots and such i am good to go.
Always good to be the "Go-To" guy that can step up to any role in a squeeze.
(And to know those roles you actually prefer)
My PM while maybe not giving me the best DXF's or csv's (he's relatively new to CAD) will come out in the field to help me if needed. He's a field guy at heart and wishes he never took the office job.?ÿ
I will figure out how to organize but the problem is I go to a handful of smaller jobs where we have maybe 100 points or a few hundred. But I go to tens of different subdivisions on a regular basis that all have something like 3000-7000+ points. If I spend 3 beers to get one organized, okay that job is ready now for when I go back to that subdivision in a week or 2, but I'll be going to 5-10 different ones before that. So it will be a ton of time invested just to make it slightly easier on me and the data collector.?ÿ
@350rocketmike yes. I love the field as well. Yea it is tough doing your own field package and field work when your swamped for sure. Getting it all started is the most time consuming keeping it organized is not as bad you will get it figured out I am sure.
@jimcox yes for sure . I still love learning and have enjoyed being back on the land surveying side for sure. My bones and joints just don??t like the pounding wood anymore but I still have fun in the field. Hopefully I can get my outdated cad skills up and such.
For linework "backmaps" we found the following:
-save a copy of the CAD (ie. don't mess up a production file)
-remove any unnecessary blocks/texts/wipeouts/shading/surfaces/etc.
-under Civil3D, go to Manage->Purge, select pretty much everything, and blow it away
-then use the -PURGE command
-AUDIT to clean things up
-open up a default AutoCAD template (metric for us, but whatever floats your boat)
-strip it down (ie. -LAYDEL-> Name, everything)
-then -PURGE, -AUDIT it
-copy what's left (ie. what you want to see) from the first drawing into the stripped template (to really make sure it's small)
-save/export as a 2007 DXF
?ÿ
We could load it on an old Getac and a Surveyor+ w/ minimal lag.?ÿ You would isolate the points you wanted in the sub and off to the races.?ÿ If there are multiple overlaying lines, you can always use the OVERKILL command when you are stripping down the production file.
I presume the IntelliCAD based software procedures would be similar.
The main reason was the touchscreen freezing (in Access only) and lag (it took over 10 seconds to load the point manager in bigger jobs - some have 5000-7000 points in larger subdivisions)
The simple solution here is to have a control (point) job and xref previous work.
Or maybe that's what's being discussed later on; I'm still getting caught up.
?ÿ
Control, calculated points etc in a linked csv file.
Background dxf with linework - as simple as it possibly can be. <-- a very big hint here
If you need something from a previous job, either link the job or copy the point(s).
Keep It Simple, Folks - it works better that way!
Control, calculated points etc in a linked csv file.
Background dxf with linework - as simple as it possibly can be. <-- a very big hint here
I just can't wrap my head around the concept of having a planset or plat with all the linework and descriptive text already in there, then electing to spend hours zooming around the drawing file picking points and manually entering in descriptors, then more hours dragging the point labels around, then printing out PDFs and/or hardcopies so the crew has to carry around both the planset and another set of office-made drawings.
We still need points for a handful of things, but it's pretty rare.
No matter what, point files and DXFs are split up (and DXFs are always layered) so that crews can turn things on and off to see only what is pertinent to the task at hand.