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Thread: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

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    Question Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Hi all,
    I work with a civil engineering firm, and we have a job in the works that I expect to be about 250 sheets.
    It's essentially a large area that will be divided up by a semi-regular grid of sheets, that will have work on each sheet.
    Some sheets will have no work in that area and will be eliminated from the set.
    We do some work in ArcGIS, and it has wonderful tools for automatically generating a 'map book' of sheets, based on a geometric grid.
    I was hoping that I'd have some option of combining SSM and maybe some other tools to accomplish something similar here.
    If so, it would save me DAYS of manual drafting, just editing titleblock information like sheet numbers, adjoining sheets, total sheets counts, etc... as well as setting up the actual sheets and views.
    Each sheet will have a single viewport, that corresponds to a grid panel in modelspace.
    Is SSM and/or any other tool(s) a way of doing this, or am I in for a huge mess of manual edits?

    I've read a bunch of introductions and watched several video tutorials about sheet sets, but so far I'm not seeing where it really saves much time.
    I even went through the steps of trying to set up a dwt with fields for all the common things I have to put into each sheet, but for some reason it's not displaying that info in the dwg.
    Also, it appears that I'd have to create each view manually, by adding it with the SSM "add sheet" command, which would take forever.
    Please tell me I'm missing some magical time saving steps here!
    -Mike
    Last edited by elmojo; 2017-12-12 at 09:00 PM. Reason: edit title for clarity

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Civil 3D's Viewframe Groups are dependent on an Alignment, and do not support a grid layout - but you can use Map Books, as Civil 3D is built on Map 3D (which itself is built on vanilla AutoCAD):

    https://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo...29BB0-htm.html


    As for SSM, it's a great time saver - once setup. That will take you some trial and error. When setting up Custom Properties, just be sure to plan for (individual) Sheet and (overall) Sheet Set Properties respectively.


    Cheers
    Last edited by BlackBox; 2017-12-13 at 03:23 PM.
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    Administrator rkmcswain's Avatar
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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    SSM can absolutely save you time, if for nothing else, than for publishing to PDF (or a hard copy printer).

    But you can also make use of fields for things like sheet titles, numbers, etc.

    Then when things change such as sheets getting added/removed/moved - you do all of your work in the SSM, instead of having to open 250 sheets.

    In my 12+ years of using and training others on SSM, the most difficult thing is getting people to understand how to use it.
    It's one of those things that you can just see the light bulb go off at some point for most users, and you realize the moment they "get it"

    The thing is, you don't actually need templates and attributes, and a lot of the other things you might read in some places.
    R.K. McSwain | CAD Panacea |

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Quote Originally Posted by rkmcswain View Post
    SSM can absolutely save you time, if for nothing else, than for publishing to PDF (or a hard copy printer).

    But you can also make use of fields for things like sheet titles, numbers, etc.

    Then when things change such as sheets getting added/removed/moved - you do all of your work in the SSM, instead of having to open 250 sheets.

    In my 12+ years of using and training others on SSM, the most difficult thing is getting people to understand how to use it.
    It's one of those things that you can just see the light bulb go off at some point for most users, and you realize the moment they "get it"

    The thing is, you don't actually need templates and attributes, and a lot of the other things you might read in some places.
    I wish I "got it"!
    I spent hours watching/reading tutorials, but never saw anything that looked like it would truly be a major time saver.
    I did find the option for a map book, but have not found any decent tutorials on how to do one. The built in help only covers the basic outline, but doesn't explain why things don't work as they should.
    I tried several times to get it to generate, and it always just fails with some vague unspecified error that doesn't help be track down the problem.
    My boss has decided I've spent about enough time on this and 'suggested' that I just do it "the way we know works", which means I now have 260+ sheets to set up and align manually.
    I can't believe this is so hard, when it's so simple in ArcGIS.
    If anyone can point me to a decent tutorial for a map book, I'd LOVE to see it. I haven't given up hope yet of avoiding manual setup on all these sheets.

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    R.K. McSwain | CAD Panacea |

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Quote Originally Posted by rkmcswain View Post
    I have not!
    That looks quite useful. I'll check it out. I don't think it will help me on the current job, due to time constraints, but perhaps I can get myself slowly up to speed on Sheet Sets, so that when the next big one rolls around I'll be ready.
    Thanks for your help guys.

    It's a shame I couldn't get the map book or sheet manager (not sheet set) functions working, as both of those seemed to have some of the features I needed for this type of job.
    Oh well, time to start manually creating sheets I guess.... :/

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Quote Originally Posted by rkmcswain View Post
    Where did that site come from?! Haha

    Must have missed that email from Autodesk, now that we're on AEC Collection Subscription.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by elmojo View Post
    <snip>

    It's a shame I couldn't get the map book or sheet manager (not sheet set) functions working, as both of those seemed to have some of the features I needed for this type of job.
    Oh well, time to start manually creating sheets I guess.... :/
    Not sure why you couldn't get those to work, but if you're going to go old school with this project, manually updating title block info, etc this may be worth considering:

    http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...=1#post1324735


    Cheers
    Last edited by BlackBox; 2017-12-18 at 05:47 PM.
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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Quote Originally Posted by BlackBox View Post
    Where did that site come from?!
    It's been around for a year or so.
    R.K. McSwain | CAD Panacea |

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Quote Originally Posted by rkmcswain View Post
    It's been around for a year or so.
    You were informed of this site by Autodesk through your work-related email, or EE, etc?
    "How we think determines what we do, and what we do determines what we get."

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    Default Re: Considering trying SSM for LARGE civil set, need advice

    Now that I've had a chance to review that info about SSM, I remember that I've seen it previously, just not in the same format. It was all part of some sort of seminar or training class Autodesk put on a while back. The version I saw was a slideshow transcript of a live presentation. Regardless, I've pretty much given up on Sheet Sets. Even with all the 'time savers', there seems to be way too much manual input and cross referencing required. It's just not worth it at this point. Maybe I'll come back to it later...

    Anyway, I've made a little lateral progress on the issue, using the (somewhat related) Map Book feature. The help file and tutorials from Autodesk were less than enlightening, but with help from Google, I've been able to muddle through and actually get it to create all my tabs from a template file and a grid defined in model space!

    One huge problem however: the viewports in the newly created tabs don't align with the modelspace geometry. The scale is pretty much correct (within a couple %), but all the new viewports are "looking" at areas many thousands of feet to the east of where my data (and the grid) actually resides. Anyone have a clue why? I've done some searching and found nothing about this problem. I tried unlocking the viewport in the template and rebuilding, but that didn't help.
    Last edited by elmojo; 2017-12-20 at 03:36 PM. Reason: spelling, grammar

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