CAD/BIM Tips & Tricks

Avoid having to manually remove reference attachments when you’re done with them. By Eiren Smith, Axiom Product Manager It’s easy to grow accustomed to managing reference attachment settings completely manually, one attachment at a time. But when you need to make a single change (or multiple changes) to a lot of reference attachments in one…

What do you do when you need to make a change to attribute text in multiple title blocks?   For example, what if you have a project with 67 DWG sheet files and suddenly find you need to insert a new sheet between sheets 12 and 13, thereby messing up your sheet numbering and sheet…

Have you ever run into a case where you open your 3D DWG files in MicroStation and they appear to be 2D files? Well, you’re not alone! Most CAD users aren’t experts in both MicroStation and AutoCAD. So it is the norm to run into problems going from one to the other. One of the…

Did you know that you can use tentative point snaps to quickly measure distances between elements in your design files?

Easily Clean Up Noisy Raster Reference Files Do you work with scanned drawings, such as TIF or CIT graphics files, referenced to MicroStation DGN files? Do you notice that they never seem to be perfectly level and they’re often full of noise? Do you currently have to fix them outside of MicroStation, or in a…

You have been there — a project deadline is closing in and you still have to import several giant spreadsheets, containing material information, specifications or measurements, into your CAD drawing. You try to import one spreadsheet and, to your horror, they’ve imported strangely. The cells are off, the numbers are misplaced and they don’t follow…

One of the biggest headaches in getting CAD standards compliance is finding a fast and pain-free way to verify CAD standards are being followed. You find yourself with hundreds of files and you have to manually go through each one, ensuring they all follow the required standards. You spend hours upon hours, clicking, dragging and…

Translation Manager has for many years helped MicroStation users get translations between DGN and DWG done right the first time. With the latest release of Translation Manager, those AutoCAD 2010 or later users who don’t have access to MicroStation V8 can now get the help they need with translations between DGN and DWG even if…

“Most everyone recognizes that nested references can be cool — except when you’re a few levels deep and have to start keeping a spiral notebook to track them. The real goat rodeo gets started once you add inexperienced users and/or piss-poor file management into the overall mix. – Anonymous CAD Manager.”   MicroStation’s Live Nesting…

These days, it is totally normal to find AutoCAD shops designing for MicroStation clients and MicroStation shops designing for AutoCAD clients. You do all the work in one CAD application and then convert the finished product to the other platform. We have a lot of customers who are doing this sort of thing. So the…