What’s new in VDC Custom CAD Tools.

The suite updates itself at sign-in, so new capability arrives without a reinstall. This page is the running record of what changed and why it matters, written for the people who use it, not a commit log.

Latest release: 1.110.0 · 31 releases listed · About the suite

1.110.0 September 16, 2026

Ground Thin reads compressed LAZ directly and can thin a surface already in the drawing - the route for an attached ReCap cloud.

LAZ files open straight in Ground Thin, Cloud Slice, and Cloud Assets - any LAS version and point format, including the LAS 1.4 compression USGS 3DEP and current flight vendors deliver. No decompress step, no export from ReCap. The decoder is the open-source LASzip library, shipped in the bundle with its notice (THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt).
Ground Thin has a second source: a TIN surface already in the drawing. Pick it in the dialog and its vertices are thinned to ground shots - the surface itself is never touched. That is how a point cloud attached to the drawing gets in: AutoCAD gives add-ins no way to read an attached ReCap cloud point by point, so run Civil 3D's Create Surface from Point Cloud with no filtering, then thin that surface here. The point file for a surface source lands in the drawing's VDC Reports folder.
The Ground Thin dialog is two columns now - Source and Thinning on the left, Output on the right - so the new source rows did not make it taller.
Straight talk in the dialog and guide: ReCap Pro exports PTS or E57, never LAS or LAZ (an Autodesk-documented limit). Export PTS from ReCap and it reads here as X Y Z; the earlier hint that said to export LAS from ReCap was wrong.

1.109.0 September 15, 2026

Press F1 for help - over any VDC ribbon button, inside any VDC dialog, or while a VDC command is running.

F1 opens the VDC guide at the command's own section, the way other AutoCAD add-ons do it: hover a VDC ribbon button until its tooltip shows and press F1; press F1 inside any VDC dialog (the same as its Help button); or press F1 while a VDC command is waiting at the command line. F1 anywhere else still opens AutoCAD's help.
Ribbon tooltips read like the add-on tooltips you already know: the title and a one-line summary, then after a moment the full description with a picture of the command's dialog and the 'Press F1 for more help' line.
Seven ribbon tabs instead of four: VDC Civil, Lots, Utilities, Survey, Sheets, Plans, QC. The Grading panel, which had grown to thirteen stacked buttons, is now Grading / Feature Lines / Terrain; otherwise nothing moved out of its panel - the panels were only re-dealt so every tab fits a normal 1920-wide monitor with every button label showing (a too-wide tab makes AutoCAD strip the text off the stacked buttons, then collapse panels). Plain-AutoCAD seats get four neutral tabs - Tools, GIS, Sheets, QC - for the same reason. The Help panel is one compact stack on every tab.
Plan Email: an attachment over 20 MB no longer bounces. Either attach mode checks the file first and, over the line, uploads it to the plan upload service and puts the download link in the body instead; the command line says so. Your saved delivery choice is unchanged for the next small PDF. The Upload mode itself (pick a file, get a link - up to 5 GB, link good for 90 days) is the way to send a large set to a reviewer outside your network.

1.108.0 September 14, 2026

Site Data - everything public about a site, pulled into the drawing in one pick.

Every NAD83 State Plane zone, not just SC and NC: Site Data, Soils, Terrain, NGS Control, Wetlands, Flood QC / FIRM, KML Export / Import, GIS Import / Export and GeoRef now know all 262 zones (every state, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam; metre, US-survey-foot and international-foot variants), with the parameters read from Civil 3D's own coordinate-system dictionary and checked against NGS. The WKID pick list in every GIS dialog lists them all; a drawing with an assigned zone code still presets and locks it.
Coordinate-system correction: Civil 3D's SC83F zone is US SURVEY feet, and the suite had been treating it as EPSG 2273 (international feet). Drawings assigned SC83F now map to 102733 (SC US ft); SC83IF maps to 2273. At Grand Strand coordinates the old mapping put pulled GIS geometry about 5 ft east and 1 ft north of true - re-pull anything you are relying on.
Edit Track (VDCWHO) is OFF by default now. The who-created / who-edited watcher was an always-on cost on every seat; it now starts only where someone turns it on (VDCWHO > Track, remembered per seat; the startup line says tracking ON / OFF). Existing stamps and the Pick / User / Since queries work as before.
Removed: the Stale Lock sweep (VDCSTALELOCKS) and its silent auto-sweep on drawing open. It only earned its keep on one office's share, and every seat paid for the sweep. VDCLOCKS, VDCWHOSOPEN and VDCVERSIONS stay; a crashed drawing's leftover .dwl / .dwl2 is deleted by hand.
Pipe QC: a pipe end that sits at a rip-rap apron, wingwall, headwall or flared end section is treated as its outfall - no open-end finding, and the pipe breaking the surface there is not 'out of the ground'. The guard can be a structure of any network (connected or just placed at the end) or a block / hatch named for one; the command line lists what it found.
Pipe QC: storm structures no longer need a drop - storm presets carry no drop rule (storm boxes run matched inverts through), sewer keeps 0.10'. A drop that labels as the standard (0.10 on a two-decimal plan) passes instead of reading '0.10 < 0.10'. An older presets.json is migrated once, touching only a storm value still at the old sample.
Quantity Takeoff and Pipe Table list pipe network parts by their DESCRIPTION - the parts-list / template text you read on plans (15 RCP, CI-H) - instead of the catalog size name; a part with no description still shows its size name. Pipe Table cells are centred. The Takeoff dialog is wider so nothing clips.
The Help button on every dialog now lands on the command's own section of the guide (it opened the top of the guide before - Windows drops the #anchor of a local link); the page it opens prints on the command line.
One release page for everyone: the update notices, the What's New window and the bundled release-notes page link to newrootsdevelopment.co/whats-new again, on every seat. Read the Full Notes opens that page (the bundled copy stays as the offline fallback), and a seat whose deployment share does not answer checks the site's published version list instead of going quiet.
Band Profiles: the two 'name contains' boxes now list this drawing's surface-sampled (EG) and layout (FG) profile names (they shipped empty), and the command line prints every profile it found before the dialog opens. Surface Profiles, Pipe Views, Storm Draft and Pipe QC likewise print 'Surfaces in this drawing: N (...)' first, and the surface list has a fallback route when the Civil surface collection comes back empty - a surface that only exists inside an xref cannot be listed or sampled; data-reference it first.
GIS data comes in with its attributes now, not as plain polylines: every GIS tool - Site Data (every row, firm data included), GIS Import, KML Import, Soils, Wetlands, Adjoiner Parcels, Flood QC boundaries - attaches the feature's fields to the entity it draws. They live in a VDC record on the entity (VDCGISINFO reads it on any seat) and, in Civil 3D, in a property set: click the object and the Properties palette's Extended Data tab lists the fields. (The Map 3D Object Data mirror is opt-in per seat - VDC_GIS_OBJECTDATA=1 - after it crashed Civil 3D on its first field run.) Site Data and GIS Import have an 'Attach each feature's attributes' box, on by default.
New tool - GIS Info (VDCGISINFO, VDC Survey tab -> Adjoiners + GIS panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): pick an object and read its attribute tables in a FIELD / VALUE grid, Copy to the clipboard, pick the next one.
Plan Email (VDCPLANEMAIL, VDC Tools tab, same button) can now send plan sets that are too big to email: pick "Upload the file I pick and put the download link in the body", browse to the PDF (or a ZIP / DWG / DWF), and it uploads in 50 MB parts with progress on the command line, then puts a download link in the message where {planpath} goes. Links stay live for 90 days. Works with Outlook or the default mail app.
Plan Email also gets "Attach a PDF I pick (browse)" - attach the file you choose instead of only the <drawing>.pdf beside the DWG - and the To line now defaults to Support@newrootsdevelopment.co for review submissions (a saved blank To picks the default up too; your own address list is untouched).
If an upload fails, the tool says why, falls back to the local path in the body, and never auto-sends that message.
New tool - Site Data (VDCSITEDATA): pick a window, the drawing extents, or a point + radius, and check off what to pull from a list of every public source that applies to the location - FEMA flood zones and FIRM panels, USFWS wetlands, USDA soils WITH hydrologic soil group, USGS lidar terrain as a ready TIN surface, NAIP aerial imagery attached over the window, NHD streams and lakes, the HUC12 watershed, road centerlines, address points, building footprints (optionally extruded to 3D by published height), city limits, zoning districts and overlays, future land use, FAA runways, transmission lines, and NGS survey control as COGO points. Each source lands on its own layer with labels, stamped so a re-run replaces it in place and Clear removes it all; an HTML pull report says what came back and where it came from. Rows for the full Adjoiner Parcels / Adjoiner Labels / Buffer Yard / Wetlands / FIRM tools queue those tools to run next.
Site Data also captures the Geolocation tab's online map as part of the pull: Bing Hybrid by default (Bing Aerial / Road and the Esri maps selectable), embedded over the window and faded 50% so linework reads over it - the Capture Area button as a step. When the drawing has no geographic location yet, the tool sets one from the coordinate system first.
New tool - Site Snapshot (VDCSITESNAPSHOT): pick one point and get the due-diligence sheet - parcel PIN / owner / deed, zoning and overlays, flood zone and panel, wetlands, soil map unit and hydrologic group, watershed, city limits, ground elevation, and the nearest NGS survey marks - as an HTML report and a summary note at the point. One outage is one unavailable line, never a failed snapshot.
The source list is editable: a sources.json beside the settings can re-point a county layer, add a utility's own feature service, or hide a row - no release needed when a county renumbers its GIS. Rows marked (verify) point at published layers whose queries have not been exercised yet and start unchecked.
Both tools ship in the plain-AutoCAD bundle too: everything lands as ordinary polylines, points, text and images there; the terrain surface and COGO outputs are Civil 3D-only and report themselves as 3D points on a vanilla seat.
New tool - Soils (VDCSOILS): USDA SSURGO soil map units for a window, clipped to it, solid-hatched by hydrologic soil group (A green, B yellow, C orange, D red), labeled, and tabulated - one row per unit with drainage, flooding, hydric and water-table attributes, then a subtotal per hydrologic group with its percentage and the total within the window - plus a CSV. The numbers a stormwater curve-number calc starts from, in one pick.
New tool - Terrain (VDCTERRAIN): an existing-ground TIN surface from USGS 3DEP lidar for a picked window, and a Compare mode that samples any surface already in the drawing at the same grid and reports lidar-minus-surface statistics (mean, RMS, range, percent within tolerance, histogram, largest differences) as an HTML report, a CSV and delta labels at the outliers. Survey QC and change detection from public lidar.
Pipe Names (VDCPIPENAMES) can now letter runs from their alignments: choose 'From each run's alignment name' and each run takes the designator of the alignment its parts reference (or the nearest alignment when none is referenced) - STORM A becomes run A, its structures A1, A2... - with runs that share an alignment numbered continuously along it and the leftovers dealt around the letters in use. A new option renames each run's alignment to match its letter (STORM {run} / SEWER {run}), previewed like any other rename and undone with the same U. The run grid shows which alignment each run resolved to and how.
New tool - NGS Control (VDCNGSCONTROL): every published NGS survey mark near the site from the NOAA datasheet API into COGO points in a point group with datasheet descriptions and orthometric heights, plus a CONTROL MARKS table and a CSV with datasheet links. Run Control Exhibit on that group for the grid-tie exhibit.
New tools - Cloud Slice + Cloud Assets (VDCCLOUDSLICE, VDCCLOUDASSETS, VDC Civil tab -> Grading panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): both read a LAS file straight from disk (never the attached cloud) through the new shared VDC.Common point-cloud reader. Cloud Slice slices at elevations, at heights above a TIN, or along a polyline / alignment and turns each slab into polylines (grid bin, RANSAC straight segments, Douglas-Peucker curves, endpoint join - every number editable). Cloud Assets finds poles, signs, trees and hydrants (height band above ground, plan clusters, PCA gates with editable thresholds, a density warning up front) and places attributed blocks at the ground elevation only after you accept each row in a review table; CSV of every cluster.
Site Data pulls the firm's own data too: Add firm data... puts a Shapefile / GeoJSON / KML or a reference DWG from the share into the pick list - GIS rows draw the features touching the window, DWG rows attach the drawing as an xref clipped to the window (live) or copy the entities inside it (editable), with a layer allow-list; re-run replaces, Clear removes and detaches. Rows are saved to sources.json (point VDC_SITEDATA_SOURCES at a shared file for the whole office).
Generic defaults: no county profile and no coordinate system are preset any more. Site Data, Site Snapshot, Soils, Terrain, NGS Control, Wetlands, KML Export / Import, GIS Import / Export, Adjoiner Labels and Buffer Yard start blank, pre-fill the coordinate system from the drawing (VDCGEOREF) when it has one, and ask for a choice before they pull. A sources.json row must use https; the summary and the pull report name the hosts a seat added or re-pointed.
New tool - Phasing (VDCPHASING, VDC Civil tab -> Sheets panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): assign entities to construction phases by pick or by layer (XData), then generate a layer state per phase and a layout per phase - a copy of your template with the other phases screened gray or frozen in its viewports - plus a per-phase quantity summary (LF / SF / EA by layer) to a CSV and a drawing table.
New tool - Plot Batch (VDCPLOTBATCH, VDC Civil tab -> Sheets panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): publishes every or checked layout to PDF named <sheet number> - <sheet title>.pdf - from the open sheet set, else the title block, else the layout name - one PDF per sheet or one merged set, PC3 and page-setup override, after a pre-flight that lists sheet-set vs title-block number and title mismatches, duplicate numbers, missing title blocks and issue-date / revision drift. CSV log; the folder opens when done.
New tools - GIS Import + GIS Export (VDCSHPIMPORT / VDCGISEXPORT, VDC Survey tab -> Adjoiners + GIS panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab). Import reads Shapefile / GeoJSON / KML with the suite's own readers, shows the file's features, fields and coordinate system, and draws it through a layer-rule grid (source layer or attribute value -> target layer, color, label field) in the drawing's coordinate system - lon/lat and the other State Plane zone transformed, unknown systems imported unchanged with a warning; attributes ride as XData; re-import replaces. Export writes the GIS as-built deliverable from an editable jurisdiction profile JSON (pipes, structures, pressure parts, parcels, layer entities -> field schema) as Shapefile or GeoJSON in the drawing's system or WGS84 with a manifest; the generic sample profile is marked verify.
New tool - Lot Drainage QC (VDCLOTDRAINQC, VDC QC tab -> Site QC panel): audits picked lots against the finished-grade surface - ground falling away from the house at least 2 percent for the first 10 ft, side swales falling from their high point along the side lot lines at 1 percent, the pad at least 0.5 ft above the street at the front line, and no ponding spot in the rear yard. Findings palette with zoom, red flags at each spot, CSV, QC log + status stamp. Read-only; thresholds editable.
Quantity Takeoff (VDCQTO): a depth list - gravity pipe LF per size per depth band from the deepest point of each pipe between its structures (rim minus invert; reference-surface cover as the fallback) and structure EA per band (rim minus sump); bands 0-6 ft then every 2 ft to 20 ft, editable; additional to the plain pipe totals. Service symbols now count as singles and doubles (block-name token DBL = double, LT / RT = single) with a lots-served line.
Help on every dialog: a Help button at the bottom-left of every VDC settings dialog opens the running command's section of the At-a-Glance guide installed with the bundle (offline; PDF fallback). Set VDC_HELP_URL to a web base and the same button opens the tool's page on the website instead.
Storm Draft / Sewer Draft: the target networks default to Storm and Sewer (the old STORM-DRAFT / SS-DRAFT names collided with layer conventions; saved settings migrate); side and outfall are dropdowns (the radio captions overlapped); new invert control - cover rule, a start invert you type, or a tie-in invert at the outfall solved upstream at the design slope with cover-forced flat pipes flagged; design slope, invert drop across each structure (sewer 0.1 ft), warn-when-deeper-than (sewer 20 ft), and draft from / to station.
New tool family - Hydrology (VDC Civil tab -> Hydrology panel): VDCDRAINAGEAREA delineates the drainage area to any picked outlet by steepest-descent flow tracing on the surface triangles - boundary, acres, longest flow path with length and slope, hatch, label, CSV; VDCTC runs the TR-55 time of concentration along a flow path (sheet / shallow-concentrated / channel by length, slopes from the surface, labels, table, CSV); VDCCN weights the curve number per drainage area from the VDCSOILS polygons and land-cover polylines mapped by layer (editable TR-55 table, exact polygon intersection, HydroCAD / HEC-HMS-ready subarea CSV with Tc); VDCSTAGESTORAGE writes the pond's stage-storage-discharge table (exact TIN volume + average-end-area + conic, outlet structures) with HydroCAD and HEC-HMS CSVs. Drafts for the engineer's review; table values and import formats marked verify.
VDCSOILS now stamps the map-unit symbol and hydrologic soil group on every polygon it draws (VDCCN reads it; older output falls back to the label).
New tool - Legal Description (VDCLEGAL, VDC Survey tab -> Boundary + Plats panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): the metes-and-bounds narrative from a parcel or a closed polyline - an optional point-of-commencement tie, one thence per course with quadrant or azimuth bearings, curve calls with radius, arc length, chord bearing and chord distance, closing to the POINT OF BEGINNING with the area in acres and / or square feet. Direction of travel enforced, preamble template with county / state / TMS / parcel tokens, MText at a picked point and a .txt in VDC Reports. A draft for the surveyor's review.
New tool - Data Shortcut QC (VDCDSQC, VDC Utilities tab -> Coordination panel): is the data-shortcut web healthy? One read-only run lists every published shortcut in the project folder with its source drawing (missing sources flagged; an optional orphan check side-loads each source to confirm the object still exists) and every data reference in this drawing - alignments, surfaces, pipe and pressure networks - flagging missing sources, broken references and out-of-date ones that need a synchronize. Findings palette with zoom, CSV in VDC Reports, QC run log. Nothing is changed.
New tool - KML Export / Import (VDCKMLEXPORT, VDCKMLIMPORT, VDC Survey tab -> Adjoiners + GIS panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): pick linework, points, blocks and text and get a KML or KMZ for Google Earth - one folder per layer in the layer's color, closed linework as polygons, names from block attributes or text; and bring a KML / KMZ back onto KML-<folder> layers, points labeled, re-import replacing what it drew before. Through the suite's State Plane transform (SC 2273 / NC 2264; the drawing's assigned system when it has one) - planning grade, not survey.
New tool - GeoRef (VDCGEOREF, VDC Utilities tab -> Coordination panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): which coordinate system and units is this drawing in, and do its xrefs agree? One dialog shows the assigned system with its zone unit, INSUNITS and the Civil 3D unit / foot settings, and every xref's system and units, with the mismatches flagged - no system, unitless or wrong-foot INSUNITS, an xref in another system. Assign writes a system (and INSUNITS) only on OK. A one-line check runs when a saved drawing opens with a problem (VDC_GEOREF_AUTOCHECK=0 turns it off). Site Data, Soils, Terrain and NGS Control now take the drawing's coordinate system automatically when one is assigned.
New tool - Profile HP / LP Labels (VDCPROFHPLP, VDC Utilities tab -> Profiles panel): the office's HP: 44+25.00 / ELEV: 45.47 call-outs placed IN PLAN on the alignment point of every high and low point of its profile - crest and sag vertical curves contribute their own high-low point, tangent breaks are labeled at the PVI. Two-line multileaders in a chosen style, offset to a side (alternating allowed), station text honoring equations. Run / Refresh / Clear with a CSV in VDC Reports. The alignment may be invisible.
New command - TC / BC Labels (VDCTCBC, VDC Civil tab -> Labels panel; plain-AutoCAD seats: VDC Tools tab): pick curb lines and get top-of-curb / bottom-of-curb pairs every 25 ft and/or at every vertex. In Civil 3D with a surface the TC is a live surface spot label and BC = TC minus the curb height (0.50 ft default, static text or a second live label through a BC style); without a surface the pair is one two-line text from the line's own elevation. Offset left of travel; re-pick replaces, Clear removes.
New command - Curb Radii (VDCCURBRADII, VDC Civil tab -> Labels panel; on plain-AutoCAD seats the VDC Tools tab): pick curb polylines / arcs and every arc gets its radius call-out (R=25.00') as text at the arc midpoint pushed outward - prefix, suffix, decimals, plotted height, offset, layer and text style in the dialog. Re-picking the same curbs replaces their labels; Clear removes them all. Plain AutoCAD, so the landscape seats have it too.
Label Feature Lines can also label curve radii: tick "Label curve radii" and every curve segment gets one live label in a curve label style whose contents show the radius - blank picks the first style in the drawing named Radius, else the curve grade style. They are wiped and relabeled with the slopes.
Label Feature Lines (VDCFLLABEL) gets a fifth points-to-label scope: only where the grade changes - spot elevations at the ends and at every vertex whose grade in and out differ by more than a tolerance (default 0.10%), so a sheet that shows spots instead of slope labels carries exactly the spots a reader needs. The summary says how many vertices were skipped as same-grade.
The At a Glance command reference (VDC Command Reference button on every VDC tab) is now navigable: click any command in the front index to jump to its section, every section links back to the index, and the PDF carries a bookmark for every command grouped by ribbon tab and panel. Dialog clips sit inside each command's section instead of a gallery at the back, and each section says plainly when a command has no dialog. Clips not captured yet show a red DIALOG CLIP PENDING box - they are being filled in.
Under the hood, the suite's live-service tools now share one GIS client in VDC.Common (envelope-as-JSON queries every ArcGIS host accepts, automatic paging, a verified NAD83 state plane transform for lon/lat sources) - the plumbing the next GIS tool will start from.

1.107.0 September 3, 2026

Profile view bands get existing AND proposed; feature line points learn tangents from curves.

New tool - Band Profiles (VDCBANDPROFILES): points every profile view's band profile slots at the RIGHT two profiles - existing in slot 1, proposed in slot 2 - instead of the same profile twice, which is what Civil 3D drops in when a view is created. Auto-detects each alignment's surface-sampled (EG) and layout (FG) profiles or matches either slot by name; bottom and/or top bands; whole drawing or picked views. Only slots that are wrong get written, so re-runs are safe and report 'already correct' - and the two slots never end up with the same profile doubled up.
Feature Line Elevation Points (VDCFLPOINTS) now spaces tangents and curves separately: straight runs at one spacing (default 10 ft), arcs at another (default 5 ft), each with its own on/off switch so a segment type can be left completely alone. Curved segments are detected automatically and spacing restarts at every PI. The summary splits the counts - points on tangents vs points on curves.
An upgraded seat's saved VDCFLPOINTS spacing carries over: the old single increment seeds both new spacings until you change them.

1.106.0 September 2, 2026

Quantity Takeoff sees everything and you pick what counts; EditTrack gets a real off switch.

Quantity Takeoff (VDCQTO) reworked scan-then-pick: one discovery scan of your drawing AND its xrefs finds every layer of linework (feature lines included), every hatch and closed-polyline layer, every block, every alignment, and every gravity AND pressure pipe network - then a check-box grid decides exactly what lands in the takeoff CSV. Check rows, name the item (two curb layers can sum under one Curb & Gutter line), choose LF or SF for closed shapes, and your picks are remembered so the next drawing pre-checks itself.
VDCQTO now takes off the things it previously could not see: road centerline LF from alignments, curbs drawn as feature lines, pavement hatches, water/forcemain pressure pipe by size with fitting and valve counts, and water/sewer service counts from the VDC service symbols.
The takeoff funnel always prints - what was scanned (host + each xref) and what was found - so an empty result tells you where it stopped looking instead of saying nothing.
Edit tracking (VDCWHO) gained a seat-level kill switch: set the environment variable VDC_EDITTRACK=0 on a machine and the watcher never hooks that seat at all - zero background overhead, queries still work. The Track toggle now also fully detaches the hooks when off. Use it to isolate performance issues seat by seat without uninstalling the suite.

1.105.0 September 1, 2026

Survey shots become 3D linework: point elevations onto your lines, in one pass.

New tool - FL from Points (VDCFLFROMPTS): select lines, polylines, or feature lines and every vertex takes the elevation of the COGO point sitting on it (nearest within a tolerance you set). Anything that is not a feature line becomes one, on its own layer. Shots that land mid-segment become feature line elevation points; vertices with no nearby shot interpolate between the matched ones or stay put - your choice. Scope the points to a group or a layer, and a CSV report of every match lands in the VDC Reports folder.
New tool - Connect Points (VDCFLCONNECT): build one feature line through COGO points at their elevations - pick them in order on screen, type number ranges (101-110,115), or mix both. U un-picks the last one. The dialog-and-loop version of tracing with the 'PO / 'PN transparent commands.
A line where no vertex finds a point is left completely untouched and reported - the tool never converts or saves on a zero-match run.

1.104.0 August 27, 2026

The who-did-it tracker stops tripping over objects it has not stamped yet.

Crash reports from one seat showed the background edit tracker hitting and recovering from an internal error for every object it had not stamped before - thousands of times inside a single save or layout switch on a big drawing. It now checks before it reads, so that error simply never happens. This is part of the crash investigation, not declared as the fix: one seat runs this build for a week, then the crash reports are re-read.
When the Properties-palette mirror only needs to update an existing stamp, the object itself is no longer opened for write - less churn on Civil 3D objects during the update.
VDCWHO Backfill now reports skipped objects (for example locked layers) separately from real failures, and prints why.
New tool - Sheet Stamp (VDCSHEETSTAMP): put the same items in the same place on every sheet. Pick the seal block, revision stamp, or standard note once and it lands on every other sheet at the identical position - and on any other drawings you add to the run, all of their sheets. Every copy is tagged, so running it again skips the sheets that already carry it instead of stacking duplicates. Not yet field-tested.

1.103.8 August 25, 2026

The Style Update report now records what it did NOT do.

A folder run's report listed the drawings it updated and nothing else, so afterwards there was no way to tell whether a folder had been deliberately left unticked or had never been offered in the first place. The drawing selection is the one choice the tool does not remember between runs.
The CSV now ends with an "Offered but NOT updated" section naming every drawing the checklist showed and the run did not touch, each with its reason: left unchecked, open by someone else, or missing. The summary says how many.
A finished run is now fully reconstructable from its own report - what was found, what was chosen, what was skipped and why, and what happened to everything else.

1.103.7 August 25, 2026

The Style Update report tells you which folder each drawing came from.

The report used to list drawings by file name alone. A project folder can easily hold both Drawings±64 Base.dwg and Drawings6-08-25±64 Base.dwg, and the summary showed those as the same drawing done twice - so a dated archive folder got swept without it being visible. Every drawing is now named with the subfolder it came from.
A drawing that gets closed while the batch is working on it used to come back as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object", which explains nothing. It now says the drawing was closed or became unavailable, that nothing was saved to it, and to let the batch finish on its own. A drawing AutoCAD refuses to open is reported as such rather than crashing the row.

1.103.6 August 25, 2026

Style Update no longer stalls part-way through a folder.

A folder run would process several drawings and then stop dead - no progress, no error, nothing to press Escape on - until you closed the drawing by hand, at which point it carried on to the next one. It was not slow and it was not waiting on you: the batch had genuinely stopped running.
The cause was how it asked AutoCAD for permission to work on each drawing. Opening and closing drawings could cause that request to be dropped, and the batch would never resume. It now takes a document lock directly, which is the right way to do this and cannot be dropped.
One consequence, stated plainly: "Purge unreferenced styles afterwards" now only applies to the current drawing. A batch closes each drawing as it finishes, so there is nothing left open to purge; the summary says so instead of silently skipping it. Run Super Clean over the folder to purge styles there.

1.103.5 August 25, 2026

Style Update tells you it is still working.

A folder run spends minutes inside each drawing with nothing on screen - no window opening, no text, and the CPU looks idle because the work is reading and writing across the project share. It read as hung, and a batch that looks hung gets closed halfway through.
There is now a live progress line in the STATUS BAR - "[8/14] 26164 Grading Plan.dwg - importing 63/152 - Profile View" - which updates through every stage: reading the template, backing up, reading existing styles, each style family, saving, closing. The status bar is used deliberately rather than the command line, because a batch switches drawings as it goes and the command line only ever shows whichever drawing is in front.
Each drawing also prints a line when it finishes, with its counts and how long it took, so you get a trail as well as a live line.
If it looks stopped, check the status bar before closing anything. A drawing with hundreds of styles genuinely takes a few minutes.

1.103.4 August 25, 2026

You can read the drawing list in Style Update now.

The "Drawings to update" list showed each drawing's full path, which on a real project is 120-odd characters of identical prefix followed by the bit you actually wanted to read - and it was cut off at exactly the wrong point. Every drawing now shows just the subfolder it sits in, with the shared folder named once underneath the list.
The dialog is also wider. It stops at a width that still fits a 1366-wide laptop, because widening alone was never going to fix a 120-character path.

1.103.3 August 25, 2026

Style Update now actually imports styles - and can no longer report success when it does not.

The first field run of VDCSTYLEUPDATE imported ZERO styles into fourteen drawings and reported every one of them "UPDATED". It was using the wrong mechanism to move styles between drawings. It now uses Civil 3D's own style-export API - the same one the Manage tab's Import dialog sits on - so styles land where they belong and bring what they reference with them.
A drawing that nothing was imported into is now NOT SAVED, is reported "NOT UPDATED", and the backup taken for it is deleted again. A run that changes nothing leaves the folder byte-for-byte as it was.
If every drawing in a run came back untouched, the summary now says so in a banner at the top instead of listing tidy per-file rows that read like success.
If you ran Style Update before this version: nothing was changed in your drawings, but they were re-saved. The .before-styleupdate-*.dwg backups beside them are the versions from before that save, and can be deleted once you are satisfied.

1.103.2 August 25, 2026

Every command now has a page in the Command Reference.

Five commands had a row in the Command Reference table but no page of their own - no diagram, no detail, nothing explaining how they work. They now have one: Export CAD (VDCEXPORTCAD), Display Plot Styles (VDCDISPSTYLES), Font Swap (VDCFONTSWAP), Service Stretch (VDCSERVICESTRETCH) and the Grade Lots rename-recovery command (VDCGRADELOTS_RESURFACE).
Font Swap in particular was worth writing up - it is the one tool on a panel of read-only audits that actually changes your drawing, and font in AutoCAD lives in three separate places. Its page explains all three and why redefining text styles alone leaves overridden notes untouched.
Every command in the suite now has a full page of its own. The check added last release now passes with nothing exempted and nothing outstanding.

1.103.1 August 25, 2026

Style Update actually finds your styles.

VDCSTYLEUPDATE shipped yesterday reporting "no Civil 3D style containers found in this drawing" on every drawing. It was looking for styles in the wrong place - it assumed Civil 3D files them somewhere it does not - so it found none at all and stopped before touching anything. It now asks Civil 3D where each style family lives instead of assuming, in the template and in every target drawing alike. Nothing was ever at risk: the failure was on the reading side, before any drawing was written.
The Command Reference sheet now has a full Style Update page - what it does, the two modes, and the safety rails - which the first release was missing.
The release process itself gained a check: publishing now fails if a command is missing from the Command Reference, and the PDF is re-rendered every publish instead of by hand. A tool can no longer ship undocumented, and the sheet can no longer go stale.

1.103.0 August 25, 2026

Push the template's styles into a whole folder of drawings at once.

New command VDCSTYLEUPDATE (VDC Utilities tab, Drawing Tools panel). Civil 3D's own Import Civil 3D Styles button does one drawing at a time and cannot be scripted, so updating a project after the template changes has always meant opening every file and clicking through the dialog. This does the whole folder in one run.
Point it at the template, tick the style families you want, tick the drawings, go. Families come from what the template actually holds, with a style count on each row - and one tick covers everything that belongs to that object, so checking Surface brings the surface label and table styles with it.
Choose whether a style name that already exists gets REPLACED by the template's version (what pushes a standard) or LEFT ALONE so only missing styles are added (the safe pass for drawings with deliberate local overrides).
Optionally bring the template's drawing settings too: units and zone, the object-layer table, the abbreviation tables, and the ambient number formats. All four are off by default because they change how new objects get built rather than how existing ones look. Any layer an object-layer setting names but the drawing lacks is copied from the template, colour and linetype included.
Every drawing written is backed up beside itself first (.before-styleupdate-<timestamp>.dwg) - there is no undo across a saved-and-closed file, so the backup is the undo. A drawing a teammate has open is skipped by name, re-checked at the moment of writing rather than when the list was built. A drawing open in your own session is updated but left unsaved, never closed underneath you.
Works on the current drawing and on every drawing open in the session as well as on a folder, and writes a CSV per run recording what was added and what was replaced in each drawing.

1.102.1 August 24, 2026

Documentation refresh.

The Command Reference sheet and the training handouts were rebuilt so they describe the deferred install and the stale-workstation notice, rather than the behavior those replaced.

1.102.0 August 24, 2026

Updates install themselves even if you never close Civil 3D. And if a workstation falls behind, it now says so.

The sync cannot overwrite files Civil 3D has open, so it used to skip and try again later - which on a workstation where Civil 3D stays open all day can mean never. It now DOWNLOADS the update to the side instead, and installs it the moment you close Civil 3D. Nothing to run, nothing to find.
You are told at startup when one is waiting: "VDC Tools 1.102.0 is downloaded and installs automatically when you close Civil 3D."
A workstation three or more releases behind, or three weeks stale, now gets a notice that cannot be turned down or skipped, and that explains why the update has not installed itself. A quiet workstation used to look identical to an up-to-date one.
Why this mattered: a machine was found five weeks and dozens of releases behind, still producing plan sets, with nothing anywhere reporting it.

1.101.3 August 24, 2026

Existing seats actually get the dedicated crossing-label layer.

A changed default only reaches a seat that has never run the tool, so 1.101.0 shipped the dedicated layer to nobody - every existing seat kept labeling onto the shared annotation layer. VDCPIPELABEL now performs that move once, announces it, and opens the dialog on the new values so you can override it on the spot.
Only the exact retired default is migrated. If you picked a layer deliberately, it is left alone.

1.101.2 August 24, 2026

Read the Full Notes now opens something.

The release notes are rendered into a page that ships inside the bundle, so Read the Full Notes opens the notes for the version you are actually running - offline, no website needed. The page carries the link back to newrootsdevelopment.co.
The page is generated from the same whats-new.json the in-product notices read, and regenerated on every publish, so the page and the dialogs cannot drift apart.

1.101.1 August 24, 2026

Never place a callout on a layer nobody chose.

Follow-up to 1.101.0: the new dedicated crossing-label layer is in nobody's template, so on a seat with "create label layers if missing" switched off it would always be absent on the first run. VDCPIPELABEL now REFUSES to label when its layer cannot be resolved, and says how to fix it, instead of quietly placing the callouts on whatever layer happened to be current - which is how they reach Defpoints and stop plotting.
Asking for layer 0 now means layer 0, rather than the current layer.

1.101.0 August 24, 2026

Crossing callouts that could never be corrected - and some that would never have plotted.

Pipe crossing labels now get their OWN layers (C-ANNO-PIPE-XING and C-ANNO-PIPE-XING-CONF) instead of sharing the general annotation layer. Run erases prior labels by layer, so sharing one meant a text check was the only thing separating this tool from everyone else's annotation - and you could not freeze or plot the crossing callouts on their own.
Refresh no longer uses the layer to decide what it can SEE. It used to, and a callout written under an older layer default matched nothing: never updated, never counted, never mentioned, and never replaced by Run either - so a stale separation number survived every attempt to correct it and still plotted. Refresh now finds every callout whose text says PIPE CROSSING, on any layer, in any of the three entity formats this tool has ever written.
Callouts found on a NON-PLOTTING layer are moved onto the label layer and flagged. This is the one to check on existing drawings: a callout on Defpoints is visible on screen, reads as reviewed and labeled, and is missing from every sheet issued for construction.
If the label layer cannot be resolved, labels used to silently inherit whatever layer was current - which is how they reached Defpoints. That now prints a warning naming the layer, and calls out Defpoints specifically.
Picking a crossing in a profile view now UPDATES an unstamped label already there instead of dropping a second, correct one beside it. Two different separations on one sheet is worse than none.
Every session now prints its version at startup: "VDC Custom CAD Tools 1.101.0 loaded." The files on disk can be newer than the code a running session holds, and that difference was invisible.

1.100.0 August 24, 2026

Pipe crossing labels: Refresh fixes the ones it used to skip, and Pick works in profile views.

Refresh now updates profile-view labels it previously left stale. A label written by an older release carries no stamp saying which crossing it belongs to, and Refresh could only ever match a plan position - so a profile label was not merely un-refreshable, it was invisible to Refresh: never updated, and not even counted among the labels it reported leaving alone.
Those labels are now identified - by inverting the profile view they sit in, by plan proximity, or by the pipe pair their own text names - and then STAMPED, so every later Refresh binds them instantly. They fix themselves the first time you refresh.
Anything Refresh still cannot bind is now listed one per line with its location and what it reads, instead of a bare count. An unbindable label looks exactly like a good one on screen; a number alone gave you nothing to go find.
Pick mode now works inside a profile view, not just in plan. Click the crossing where you are actually looking at it and the label is created there - or updated, if one is already there. Same click, whichever is needed, scoped to the view you clicked in.
Legacy labels from every format the tool has ever written are now visible to Refresh, not just the current multileader.

1.99.0 August 24, 2026

Clean DWG and Super Clean now purge what "All" never did.

New pass: empty text objects. DBText and MText that is blank once formatting codes are stripped - what a label whose text you deleted actually leaves behind. Invisible on screen and on the plot, so nobody has ever cleaned them out, and every one of them was holding a text style and a layer off the purge list. Runs before the purge for exactly that reason.
New pass: orphaned data. That is -PURGE's own Orphaned data option, and "All" does not include it - the PURGE dialog ships with its checkbox switched off, so on a drawing that came from somebody else it has almost certainly never been run.
Super Clean now repeats the full purge until a pass stops removing things, instead of running it exactly twice. -PURGE peels one level of nesting per run, so a block inside a block inside a block needed three - which is why files kept coming back still dirty. The report now says whether it finished or hit the pass ceiling.
The Super Clean settings dialog moved to two columns. It had grown past the height of a laptop screen, which would have started hiding options below the fold.

1.98.0 August 24, 2026

The suite now tells you when it changes.

New window on first launch after an update: what version you are on now, and what changed since the last one you saw. Miss a week and it lists every release you missed, not just the newest.
New command VDCUPDATE: the version this workstation is running, the version that is published, what is in it, and a button to the release page.
New command VDCWHATSNEW: replay the notes for the version you are on, any time.
You set how often it looks - every startup, daily, weekly, monthly, or never - right inside the notice, plus a Skip for a version you would rather not hear about again.
Release notes travel inside the bundle, so all of this reads correctly with the network down.

1.97.0 August 21, 2026

Abandoned drawing locks clear themselves.

Opening a drawing quietly sweeps that folder for lock files left behind by crashed or force-closed sessions, so "someone else has this open" stops being a message from a session that ended days ago.
Silent by design - it reports nothing unless it finds something. Set VDC_STALELOCKS_AUTOSWEEP=0 to turn it off.

1.96.0 August 20, 2026

VDCSTALELOCKS - clear the locks nobody is holding.

New command VDCSTALELOCKS finds lock files whose owning session is gone and clears them, with a listing of what it touched before it touches anything.

1.95.0 August 20, 2026

VDCSCANDWG - find out what is wrong with a drawing before it costs you a day.

New command VDCSCANDWG grades one drawing, or a whole folder, for the problems that make files slow, heavy, or unstable - and routes each finding to the tool that fixes it.
Read-only: the scan changes nothing. Flagged files go on to the Super Clean batch when you say so.
Follow-ups in 1.95.1 and 1.95.2 fixed a clipped Browse button on the scan dialog and stopped stale lock files from walling off the batch clean.

1.94.0 August 20, 2026

Clean DWG and Super Clean now purge orphaned toolset data.

An extra pass removes the orphaned Architecture-toolset objects that accumulate in the drawing dictionary and grow with every save - often the largest single share of unexplained file size.

1.93.0 August 20, 2026

The sheet-set family.

VDCSHEETNUM renumbers a set end to end - sheet set, layout tabs, and title blocks together, instead of three passes that drift apart.
VDCSHEETQC audits a set for the mismatches that reach the printer.
VDCSHEETMIRROR builds a derived set; VDCSHEETSHARE publishes shared layouts.
VDCSHEETPROBE reports what the Sheet Set Manager on this seat actually supports - run it once before the first Mirror or Share.

1.92.0 August 19, 2026

The parcel family is complete, and crash reports get easier to send.

The full ten-command VDC Parcels family: bulk parcel creation from linework with topology cleanup, right-of-way generation with true cul-de-sac bulbs, lot splitting to a zoning preset, sweep renumbering, topology QC, publish and reference between drawings, and a round-trip export.
New command VDCERROREMAIL gathers the Civil 3D crash reports off this workstation, zips them, and drafts the email - you still read it and press send.
VDCOFFSET now works on plain-AutoCAD seats.

Want this working on your plans?

VDC Custom CAD Tools is built by a working civil designer for Autodesk® Civil 3D® 2026 and 2027 software. See the suite or write to Support@newrootsdevelopment.co.