texupport » AutoCAD Civil 3D – Tips

Missing Language Pack – ACAD.VLX Virus?

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:57:30 +0000

In an office full of US English seats of Civil 3D, our users frequently see a dialog which reports a missing language pack when opening DWG files. I can only assume that at one time a drawing file did contain an object which was worked on in a non-english version of AutoCAD or Civil 3D. Since we’re seeting this more frequently, I’m a little concerned this might turn out to be yet another piece of contagious “CAD Debris” (such as Named Layer Filters [2000-2002], Scale Lists [2008], and unused RegApps [ongoing]). According to Matt’s post in this thread, which details Autodesk’s explanation of this issue, it sounds like it’s fairly benign and the user can feel comfortable by checking the “don’t show me this again” checkbox (or, alternately, actually installing the Windows language pack).

However, it has recently come to my attention there there is also an AutoCAD specific virus being distributed in a file called ACAD.VLX which also causes the Missing Language Pack dialog. Autodesk recently posted an article about the virus. After following the steps outlined in the article, I determined that we do not have the infected acad.vlx file so my Missing Language Pack dialog is likely caused by an actual object in the drawing file(s).

What bothers me about Autodesk’s article about the ACAD.VLX virus is that there isn’t much information and I still have plenty of questions:

What is the method of infection and how is the evil ACAD.VLX being distributed?
Other than the “Missing Language Pack” dialog, is there any additional payload?
What can users do to prevent infection?
Do over the counter virus scanners catch this virus?

Hacking the Nvidia performance driver (powerdraft) into Civil 3D

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:53:00 +0000

Several months ago, Nvidia released a performance driver for AutoCAD 2009. Unfortunately, using the included installer, this driver can only be installed on AutoCAD. When you only have Civil 3D installed, you get an error which reads, “Setup was unable to find an installed version of AutoCAD 2009.”

I was able to hack the driver in to my Civil 3D 2009 installation on an XP (32) system by doing the following:

Download Powerdraft2009_XP_Vista_32_64.exe from nvidia’s website.
Run the install program and let it error out as noted above.
At this point the install program has actually unpacked the archive to a directory called C:\04-28-2008-0710\ navigate to C:\04-28-2008-0710\Disk1\win32 and copy all of the files from that location to C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009\Drv
Finally, back in Civil 3D, run 3DCONFIG and select the new Nvidia specific driver for either Direct3D or OpenGL.

Unfortunately, since I don’t have a supported video card on my notebook, I haven’t had the opportunity to test this workaround with Civil 3D 2009 (a 32 bit application) on Vista x64.

Importing color images from Google Earth into Civil 3D

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:38:00 +0000

Since Civil 3D added the ability to import georeferenced imagery from Google Earth, I regularly get comments from users who would prefer the image to appear in color. While it doesn’t appear to be a feature, with a little hacking this is actually very easy to do.

First, open your Civil 3D drawing file and make sure to set the coordinate system properly.

Then open Google Earth and navigate to the area that you’d like to import. Once you’ve centered on your project area, go back to Civil 3D and go to File -> Import -> Google Earth Image. When prompted, specify coordinate system for the image location. At this point, the georeferenced image is dropped in at the appropriate northing and easting coordinates. Unfortunately, it is in black and white.

To create a color image file, go back to Google Earth, and being careful not to reorient the display, hit CTRL-ALT-S to save the image. Save this jpg to your relevant project location.

Back in Civil 3D, open the xref palette and find the Google Earth image. Hit the “found at” button to respecify the image file location.

Point the image reference to the color jpg by selecting the file that you saved earlier. Finally, perform a regen and the color image will appear in the proper location.