They stick with and pet their black familiars. There are well-established productivity reasons and metrics why all the National and International standards are all fundamentally named plotstyle based.ĬTB users don’t care. This is more useful, but it might be terrifying.īased on watching lots of organizations go through CTB withdrawal into regular STB usage, I have yet to ever have anyone say they would like to return to CTB-based publishing. Color leaves the static and becomes dynamic. If you employ STB, other more important things make the determination for the purpose of red. Why must red be Medium in the first place? The illusion of confusion exists only because we see it from our CTB-based perspective. Mental Gymnastics Matterīut now in STB Land red things might be Thin not Medium. The most important point is that there are no mental gymnastics required. The names are unquestionably faster and simpler to understand than converting the yellow you see on the screen to. Medium Screened and Thin Screened make sense instantly too.
The Concept of STB is Super SimpleĮveryone can understand there is some basic difference between a Plotstyle property called Medium and another called Thin. Good news for STB folks, and not so much for the CTB folks trying to escape fate. It is harder to convert to publish up to STB than it is to convert to publish down to CTB. STB has more properties than CTB – aka it adds the named Plotstyle property. I can pull this off in CTB by using other shades of colors, but that misses the point.Ĭivil 3D doesn’t care. My intermediate design surfaces are purple and brown and my finished corridor surface is a shade of blue.
STB says that COLOR is much more useful in model-based software like Civil 3D for many other more mission critical identification and meaningful tasks like QAQC and a host of other process workflow tasks. People’s brains are wired differently whether we like it or not. Some people take longer than others to fully recover. Remember you must retrain your brain to see the world differently. DWF works, but you probably don’t do that either. Plotting more often shortens the recovery period. During this CTB recovery period you should dutifully print something you created in your work in STB every day. Denial is a wonderful thing.ĬTB withdrawal takes six to eight weeks of abstinence like almost every other human mental addiction that is habit based. Many are prone to bouts of irrational anger about inconsequential things.
You can tell yourself that major contours can be any color, but your well-established, internal mental maps of how to get work done say something different. In CTB Land the identification of all things Civil 3D or ACAD is based on how we see their color. If I screw up the colors, my gut is screaming at me that I will spend tons of time straightening the mess out. I’ve gone and opened to damned doors to chaos or the Seventh Level of Hell. If you use CTB, your eyes still tell your brain this means you will not and cannot really publish anything. Then someone like me, an STB user, comes along and tells you that STB doesn’t care about color at all. This reality is logical, emotional, and far more personal than we want to admit. We consciously and unconsciously think about the color of things every minute of every day. If you choose to employ CTB, all publishing is based on COLOR by definition. The obsessive compulsion disorder that CTB usage develops in every user and every organization is unavoidable. Most CTB users have worked this way for years. This starts when you open the first drawing and never, ever ends. To use CTB you have to worry about the color of everything in Civil 3D all the time. STB is Much Easier and More Productive to Employ If we make reasonable concessions to a governing set of Layer Property rules and continue to pay extra careful attention to the details, we can publish in either publishing method.īecause this almost mythical capability is now included in most Framework products, does not mean all things are equal between CTB and STB. Why should the Framework? That was the big deal when Release 7 of the Framework first came out. These days the Framework for Civil 3D products are STB and CTB agnostic.