Free January ADN Plugin of the Month, Solid Cut Surface for AutoCAD Civil 3D, Now Available

Each month a member of the Autodesk Developer Network, not-necessarily an Autodesk employee, brings you a plugin that includes the source code. You can use the plugin as provided or extend it to meet your needs by working with the source code. The goal is to show you how easy it is to extend the power of Autodesk design applications. This month’s plugin is:

Solid Cut Surface for AutoCAD Civil 3D on Autodesk Labs

The plugin was developed by Senior Developer Consultant, Augusto Goncalves, who happens to be an Autodesk employee, but plugins can come from any ADN member. As its name suggests, this plugin generates an AutoCAD Civil 3D TIN (triangulated irregular network) Surface below an AutoCAD solid element.

There are some issues you should be aware of.

• Users of AutoCAD Civil 3D may encounter problems with points at the same elevation, or drastic changes of elevation (e.g., the plane of the surface changing). In these situations, the generated surface is less accurate in these areas. Users can manually add breaklines to adjust the behavior.

• High density values can cause the application to hang due to the large volume of points generated. For these situations, users should consider starting with small values to obtain initial surfaces.

The plugin is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012. So please take a cut at using this technology preview, and let us know how it turns out at [email protected]. To get started, you should:

1. Download the zip file.
2. Unblock the zip file.
3. Extract the contents of the zip file.
4. Follow the instructions in the read me from the zip file.

Tessellation is alive in the lab.