The 2011 View Cube bug

[Sinc]

Just a quick note on this bug...

It seems to happen whenever you open an older drawing in C3D 2011 (or if you create a new drawing from a template that has not been upgraded to 2011 format).  The result is the view cube is twisted, and if you click on its "Top" view, it will rotate your drawing to a weird angle.

The simple fix for this is to go to the Ribbon View tab, and select "Top" there.  That will "fix" the view cube, and it should behave normally from then on.

[Buzz12345]

Sinc

Thanks for this. 

We'd found his problem when we opened up our old template in C3D2011, and the solution from our reseller and Adesk was to build a new template! Even with those new undocumented commands (AECCIMPORTSTYLES and AECCIMPORTSTYLESANDSETTINGS) rebuilding would take some time.

Thanks heaps

Michael

C3D2010

Win7 64bit 4GB

[Anonymous]

I found this problem in a drawing I'm woriking in.  It was brought forward from an older version (2008 or 2009) I'm not sure.  Dview is set to 0,  UCS is set to World, and the View Cube is a few degrees off.  I set the view to Top, the cube resets to 0 but the UCS is no longer set to World.

[Sinc]

It looks to me like everything in the drawing stays the same, regardless of whether the UCS is set to "World" or "Top".  The only difference I see is that the View Cube is wrong when UCS is set to "World" but OK when UCS is set to "Top".

Do you see anything different?  We're still using C3D 2010 in production, so I haven't done exhaustive testing, but everything seems to be working OK with UCS set to "Top".

I suppose the other option is to just turn off the View Cube and ignore it, and wait for Autodesk to fix it before you try to use it.

[Anonymous]

That seems to be true.  Xrefs of other drawings without this problem seem to come in correctly.  Turned off the view cube,  it seems to be slow to react to commands anyway.  Needs some more work I guess.

[clemk · Accepted solution]

I have had issues with the view cube and UCS Icon not being in agreement.  It sounds similar to what was discussed above.  The little "twist" to the view cube was making me crazy.  A nice Autodesker pointed me to a solution that worked well for me:

1. on commandline, enter command GEOGRAPHICLOCATION
2. depending on the current status of your DWT or DWG, you will have one of two dialog boxes appear.
3. Select "enter the Location values"
4. the "Geographic Location" dialog appears, and you will probably see there is a tiny angle set in the North Direction field.
5. Hit OK
6. hit ENTER (GEOGRAPHICLOCATION) again
7. now you will have a dialog box pop up to edit, define, or remove the geographic location

This whole system is used to tie GoogleEarth images into drawings. It is not tied into the survey settings.

Hope this helps!

Clem

[Jeff_M]

Wow and thanks! I've searched for the cause of this and this is the first mention of a fix. It worked great on the 2 drawings I have which exhibited this.

Thanks for posting this, Clem.

[Sinc]

Yep, seems to fix the problem.

I couldn't help but notice that my view cube rotation was set to 6.284 degrees, and 6.284 is suspiciously close to 2pi...  I wonder if that's a clue to how this issue originally arose.

[HansSMS]

This view cube thing is a bit crazy.

Finally found this post.

Followed the instructions, and the view cube now seems to display correctly.

GEOGRAPHICLOCATION:

Why is this not linked to the survey settings? I didn't even know it was there (after using Civil 3D for nearly 8 years...)

Apparently it's to do with linking Google Earth drawings: I've successfully imported heaps of Google Earth images without setting this up before. What is this function for now (since the Google Earth functionality has been wiped) except to fix the view cube? Not linking this to survey settings makes no sense.

[HansSMS]

Edit: The view cube stopped displaying correctly a few minutes later.

Went back to the GEOGRAPHICLOCATION dialog, and the values I entered had been changed. Would now not accept a rotation angle of anything but 0, which I think points due east.

What did fix the view cube was removing the geographic location.

This is all as clear as muddy water.