holsteinson

Support for OpenOffice worksheet would be good to for VW

VW DTM editing tools and reporting is the most simplistic one available on the market. The breaklines tools are weak The contour points editing (label, text, etc) is to cry for. There is no color by elevation option There is no strata DTM support (rock strata under the surface) to determine separate soil and rock excavated/fill volume. The resulting contours do not have the Z value assigned to them The cut and fill reporting is a sad story. There are no real cross section tool to get the area, offsets, etc from it at an specific chainage Come on NNA hire some real programmers and get this right for once! If you hire Erez Anzel from COMPUNEERING in Canada you will get this over with in no time!

VW doesnt have a direct way to import/export land survey/layout data with data collector for total stations and RTK GPS. The user has to do all kind of alternative tasks to get this survey data from the field into the drawing and viceversa for the layout work. Same goes for the lack of good set of COGO tools!

WGS-84/ITRF05/NAD83 and all other world datums and coordinates systems used for georeferencing land surveys, designs and layouts for construction MUST be supported by VW inmediately! Same goes for State Plane, UTM grid coordinates systems and their scale and elevation factors corrections. Lastly NGS and other institutions GEOID models must be supported by VW

Beware 2009 is worst to old MiniCAD files than 2008!!! you will end up with many missing features and elements! I can understand that NNA wants to force the users to update to the lastest version to generate $$$ but not to provide a transparent way to open old files it is pretty Microsoft's way!

Copy/Paste/Insert MS EXCEL worksheets into VW would be a major time saver! Same goes for exporting VW worksheets to MS EXCEL!!

This tool could have each vehicle minimum turning radius either input by users from specs sheet or brochures, or from an official vehicle database?

LandMark XML is the defacto mandatory file format for all georeferenced boundary surveys in most countries so VW should really get on this issue and stop arguing ...

How can I generate this YXZ coordinates database for polygons vertex and line endpoints in CSV text format?

Miguel sorry to break the news: This workflow and data sources you are assuming are not accurate at survey grade... again VW is distorting the GIS SHAPES imported into it by not applying the proper elevation and grid scale factors to each point!

Miguel you hit the issue right on the button! How will the FLAT EARTH "design" done in VW be CORRECTLY layout in the CURVED EARTH field if VW does NOT support coordinates sytems, datums, grid coordinates and geoid models corrections? When you import a "geographycally correct survey" into VW it is distorted or dont you get it?

Miguel Your georeferencing land surveying and layout workflow is totally wrong and obsolete... I dont know if it is because you dont have the proper modern georeferencing training or access to the surveying hardware/software or else. I cant believe that you are justifying not enforcing the legal mandates for each state to geoference all federal and state public works! I wonder how you these projects will be georeferenced and converted to as built GIS files that have to be delivered to the authorities when the jobs are done? Let's face it VW's georeferenced land surveying, GIS and layout features and capabilities are really lame in the CAD industry and that is the reality... VW needs to improve this and fast!

I have VW2009 and importing or exporting DWG files of any version of AutoCAD into and from VW2009 still has all kind of big and small surprises, odd behaivior and scaling results. You would think that this import/export DWG would be already well debugged and working correctly given the critical importance for all VW users to be able handle AutoCAD files in the professional and commercial environments

If you use this ALL 2D option while importing the land survey DWG file, do you still lose the spot elevations? When I import the 3D land surveying DWG files I never get the z value or elevation in the symbols, anybody can tell me how set up VW09 to import correctly the spot elevation symbols YXZ coordinates?

Dont waste your time with VW09 trying to use the scarse and buggy roads tools use HighRoad road design software from Creative Engineering in Australia with its excellent GUI and set of tools and you will see huge productivity and $$$$ increase instead of losing time programming and adapting.

I have just attendend the AutoCAD 2009 Civil 3D and their main focus was 3D georeferenced data preparation and design for machine control, something obviously we will never see in VW LandMark by the lame Nemetschek tech support responses on this issue I am amazed how short sighted and poorly researched is VW's new features product development team, releasing new versions with very minor features that have almost no real value for the $$$ spent for it!

The Stake Out Objects Plug-in sent by Bruce with the changed script line by Ian Hutt works great creating the YXZ coordinates list CSV file for surveying data collectors feel free to download it An improved version that automatically generates this coordinates list from all selected poligon's vertex, line endpoints and locus would be highly productive and desirable in the short term

Eric Another working CAD program with a survey and engineering module for Windows only LISCAD survey module

Eric another perfect sample of surveing COGO and layout CAD module available (of course only for Windows not for MAC) General CAD Pro Survey Module!

Thanks Bruce for this Stake Objects-Out plug-in Will try it and let you know if it solves my data collector lack of connectivity with VW09 Lets see if somebody can improve it to generate the list of objects selected only!

Eric As you can see in the link below VW has real competition for this market segment of georreferenced surveys, designs and layouts eaglepoint survey CAD

Also the user input of bearings-distances command to generate a traverse doesnt report the traverse closure error nor does it offer it adjustment!

VW09 LandMark allows input of bearings and distance to create cadastral boundaries of a parcel but as far as I have looked in the manuals, it doesnt allow the user to draw a polygon and generate from it a table of bearings and distances. Does anyone know how to generate this bearings-distances table from a selected polygon? If there isnt a VWL09 command to do this, is there a plug-in that can do it?

Miguel georeferencing is mandatory for surveys, cadastral, design, layout and as built drawings for most federal and state agencies for over 5 years and everyday more and more clients are requiring it for private project to avoid coordinate errors and duplication!

sorry Bruce my correct email is aholsteinson@holasa.biz