December 14th, 2015 Customizing with Subassembly Composer Whether you have been using AutoCAD® for one year or 15, you can attest to its power as a drafting and design platform for many industries. AutoCAD has some verticals with specialized tools to design and draft elements pertaining to different industries. One of those verticals is AutoCAD® Civil 3D, which has specialized tools to create road corridors, ditches, river beds, and more. Those tools are great the way they are, but we can make them even better through customization and by using Autodesk Subassembly Composer. In this article we will see how to use the Subassembly Composer; we will look at its components and create two subassemblies to see how it works. Customize It and Make It Yours When we customize a program or a graphical user interface it usually is because we want to modify the way things look and behave. In AutoCAD we have been doing this for years by using workspaces containing specific combinations of tools, user profiles with specific configurations for system variables, and templates with pre-existing objects and styles.

When we customize a program we enhance our productivity because we adapt it to our specific needs. With this in mind let’s take a look at Subassembly Composer. Subassembly Composer and its Applications Subassemblies are the building blocks for assemblies in Civil 3D, and we can look at assemblies as cross sections for roads, rivers, embankments, etc. Out of the box, Civil 3D has many great subassemblies for multiple applications; however, in some cases those subassemblies are limited because they either don’t work the way we would like them to or don’t do the things we would like them to. Subassembly Composer is a program where you can create subassemblies from scratch and then use them in Civil 3D just like you would with any other subassembly. Subassembly Composer has five sections: Toolbox, Flowchart, Properties, Preview, and Packet Settings.

Jan 13, 2011  With the subassembly composer, all of your changes are saved in a.pkt file that can easily be imported into Civil 3D. Note that this subassembly still needs the.dll file. When you import the.pkt file, it will automatically create that file for you in the proper location. Posts about Subassembly Composer written by Brian Hailey. April 4, 2012. So last night I installed Civil 3D 2013 (you can download it from subscription if.

Intel celeron vs i5. Support Home Drivers & Software. Downloads for Intel® Celeron® Processor G540 (2M Cache, 2.50 GHz). The Intel® Processor Identification Utility is provided.

Toolbox is where you find all the elements that make up the subassembly such as its geometry, operators that determine geometry, tools to organize these elements, etc. Flowchart is where you lay out the workflow: what comes first, what comes after, what decisions are made, calculations performed, and so on. Properties is where you set the properties for each of the elements you bring in from the toolbox; properties include geometry, calculations, and overall behavior. Preview is where you see how the subassembly looks as you are putting things together. Packet Settings is where you create and set up the subassembly parameters, targets, and so on. To understand what Subassembly Composer does, we need to review how subassemblies work, what their components are, and what they do; specifically, we need to understand codes, points, links, and shapes.

The codes used when creating a subassembly will work with the codes in the Code Set Styles, point codes will create feature lines, and links can be used for surface creation Figure 1: Subassembly parts Figure 1 shows the basic anatomy of a subassembly with codes, points, links, and shape. The information found in the help menu for each subassembly gives you more information about each subassembly, shows you its anatomy, the components for which you can override dimensions by using targets, etc. All of this information can help you to reverse engineer these subassemblies, have a better grasp of how they work, and create parametric subassemblies in Subassembly Composer. As an AutoCAD user, you are accustomed to drawing lines in a very visual way. This makes the way Subassembly Composer works seem a little weird, so when you design a subassembly it is always a good idea to start by drafting an outline by hand. Subassembly Composer also requires communicating with the program using its own language, almost like coding; in this case it uses.NET framework.