Scaling X & Y, but not Z

Compatibility: AutoCAD, Civil3D

If you've ever needed to scale the x and y of a selection of objects independently of the z's you'll probably have googled this and have found that the block method works very well. But have you ever tried it when the objects are polylines or 2d polylines? When you explode the block the polylines become single lines.

Convert the polylines to 3d polys before you create the block and you'll find that exploding the block doesn't have the same effect. You can do this using the command CONVERTPLINES.

Once you've scaled your block, explode it and then reset your polylines to 2d using the 3d to 2d poly command CONVERT3DPOLYS. This command can also be found in the Grading tools. If you're working in standard AutoCAD there are a number of posts on the internet offering lisps to handle this conversion.

Alpha-numeric point numbers in Civil3D

Compatibility: Civil3D

A colleague of mine asked if it was at all possible to create a drawing based on data which contained alpha numeric point numbers.

I went through the usual help and tutorial documents, discussion groups and cad blogs and came up empty. I was about to give up when I discovered a work around which gave just about the same result.
I was resigned to the fact that Civil3D would just not accept alpha Point Numbers - however it would happily accept alpha Point Names. So why not substitute one for the other?

Here's what I did to achieve this.