RobiNZ CAD Blog

U.S. get rid of one obsolete measurement unit, time for the rest

I only discovered the bizarre U.S. Survey foot after encountering it in a CAD file. I did the foot > metre conversion on an incoming imperial file and none of the resulting measurements made sense as were ‘a tiny bit out’. Turned out the file was actually created in U.S. Survey Feet, slightly different to normal ‘Feet’. The international foot is defined to be equal to exactly 0.3048 metres. United States survey foot are defined as exactly ​1200⁄3937 meters, approximately 0.304800609601 metres. Now this historical unit has been discontinued: The U.S. Survey Foot Has Outlived Its Usefulness – RIP |... Read more →

Can AutoCAD Architecture Projects live on BIM 360?*

A recent promotion announcing Civil 3D availability on BIM 360 Design had me wondering if AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) projects would work using BIM 360 Docs with the Autodesk Desktop Connector. If so it would be rather useful for legacy projects. ACA projects have some odd control files (xml but with different extensions) but creating a new project worked and sync'd perfectly. I could create content, model and views, add annotation and place views on sheets as normal. Not surprising given ACA was just operating in the local Desktop Connector folder and syncing up to BIM 360. Even the file access... Read more →