AutoCAD Map 3D just got bigger…

This is a reprint from an earlier blog (March 22, 2011) that is no longer available online.

It’s that time of year again – Autodesk has announced the new annual releases, and they’re starting to be available for download from the Autodesk Subscription Center. The big news this year is the packaging of multiple complementary products as Suites allowing organizations to procure all the tools they might need for the entire design process. Along with the grouping of products, there’s increased interoperability and collaboration. It’ll be interesting to see the impact this has on the industry as firms that may not have ventured into areas such as visualization might be motivated to try them out.
Aside from the Suites, there are some great new tools included in the new products. Even the Autodesk basic platform product, AutoCAD, has some great new features. But I’ll let my coworkers talk about those – my goal is to share some of the great new solutions included in the new 2012 release of AutoCAD Map 3D. I won’t try to cover them all now, but will share items that stand out and add new notes as I explore the new tools with you.
The first thing is that now the Autodesk Topobase functionality is now included with Map 3D. Topobase was a very powerful infrastructure management software built on AutoCAD Map 3D. It brings specific industry-oriented data models for a number of areas, such as electric distribution, water and wastewater systems and land. In addition, the ability to add business rules to object editing, more advanced topology capability and reporting tools have made Topobase a very important application for utilities and municipalities. I’ll be adding more about this functionality as time goes on.
Right off, the geographic coordinate system is different. There are new transformation algorithms and creating your own is now much easier.
For the common typical user of Map 3D today, the feature data connectors are key pieces of the interoperability puzzle. One of the immediate new items is the new stylization tools. In the past, you can connect to a geospatial dataset through FDO (the Data button on the Display Manager), and create line and symbol styles based on AutoCAD blocks and Map linetypes. These linetypes were different than the AutoCAD line types stored in the ACAD.LIN style. This was a bit of a challenge for some users who had standardized linetypes based on the standard AutoCAD linetype sets.
We could create composite linetypes and stack line components to get some pretty complex and interesting line (I used to make the typical map-style roadway with a dashed yellow line stacked on thicker black and red lines to “look” like a road).
We can still do that, but now we can use standard AutoCAD linetypes (or any custom linetypes we store in our @.LIN files), as well as blocks, text (MText objects), and dynamic text right from the data. And the style tools give more advanced placement options.

So instead of using labels to put a street name, we could make the street name part of the linetype.

A couple of other items to mention – the FDO connectors now include ESRI Personal and File Geodatabases, as well as ArcSDE 10.x geodatabases, and new capability for relational databases. I’ll add more on that pretty soon.