A Geotechnical Award-Winning Class at Autodesk University 2022

This year was my 10th consecutive year teaching at Autodesk University.  It was held in New Orleans which was a change. Still, many professionals attended from all over the world to attend classes, view exhibitors, network, and collaborate with people from everywhere.

But for me, the event’s highlight came about a month after the conference, and I received news that I won the speaker award for Best Lecture Autodesk Class, Investigating the Geotechnical Modeler in Civil 3D. The award is based on reviews from people that attended the class and views of the online content. I feel very honored to receive it.  This class to say the least was on the last day last time and I was concerned I would not get a good crowd. It was the best class I have ever presented and attended, it was fun. You all were incredible; the comments, interruptions, laughing, and collaboration was so much fun. You know what?  Let’s do this again in November in Las Vegas at AU2023, I will do my best to answer all of the questions you asked me during that time. I can’t thank everyone who attended enough for making that a very memorable experience.

Since the time of the class, I have started working for Autodesk and am currently Senior Content Designer working on the Desktop Connector Team. With our new platform services portfolio, the connector is vital for migrating our data to the cloud.

Look for more content provided by myself and the team at Autodesk with the Desktop Connector. We are currently developing great things to be presented in 2023

How about an AutoCAD fun tip? For those who would like to see how things were way back when I started (a long time ago) try this fun but quick way we used to access commands via the screen menu in AutoCAD

The Screen Menu

Where the magic happened was the Screen Menu. With the Screen Menu and the digitizer, we could navigate through commands in AutoCAD to get to where we needed to be. The screen menu would be docked on the side where you would select a command, and another menu would pop up.

Do you want to see how it was to work pre-ribbon and windows in more of a DOS environment with the screen menu? At the command prompt type:

(setvar “screenmenu” 1)

For example, in the image below I selected FILE then the menu came up for all the options when I selected file starting with New.

Selecting AutoCAD (as shown below) will always take you back to the default menu. If you are using the dark screen mode, it may be hard to see, but you can easily change that by changing the COLORTHEME system variable from 0 to 1

Now that I am with Autodesk look for me to post additional information about the Desktop Connector and stay connected with the team using the Geotechnical Modeler in Civil 3D.

Proposals for Autodesk University 2023 are coming up soon! I hope to see you again for Round 2 of Implementing the Geotechnical Modeler in Civil 3D.  I will collaborate with product teams to continue to help make this tool a valuable resource in Civil 3D. I also plan to explore the Collaboration for Civil 3D and all of the enhancements and changes over the past year. One of these is the Sheet Set Manager for the Web.

Have a great rest of your weekend wherever in the World you may be.

Sam