Hi, My Name Is......

[coondog45]

Hi, My name is John. I am a SR Engineer for a large heavy highway general Contractor. I am currently a lead estimater in our South Florida office. I have just ordered a copy of Civil 3D to see if it will work in project modeling as well as helping in quantity take offs for estimates. I will sort of reverse engineer a previous design to take off the quantities of work as a contractor needs them . I have been using ACAD for years mainly performing modeling functions for construction site planning. I intend to use modles of the earthwork as well as the structures . I also use models of the cranes etc to help plan the construction sequence. I think C3D will work great. I will let you know of any successes.

[dgordon.68443]

Hello,

My name is Dan Gordon. I work for Prein&Newhof, a medium sized company with about 80-100 employee's. We do Civil Engineering, roads, plats, subdivisions, survey, sanitary, water, storm sewer. I have used Civil 3D for about a year now starting with 2006 and currently have version 2007 with service pack 3. I took a 3 day training course that went over the basics, and then I took what I learned back to my work and started applying it to what I do. I do mostly engineering type drafting and design for everything from road reconstruction to construction drawings for plats and condo's to site plans for new commercial buildings. I have been in cad heaven ever since I started using Civil 3D. I am more excited about the capabilities of this release then I have been about any new autocad release. I hear 2008 is even better.

I could go on for hours about the new features I like, but I will stick with just a few of the most incredible ones.

1. Corridors - these are so awesome. I used to be limited to using one alignment to project a road thru a template and then export the points in order to create a surface from them. Now I can and infinite number of alignments and link them all together into one proposed surface. Intersections have never been easier to build and to show correct contours. Retaining walls are a piece of cake now as well as ponds and other things that used to be difficult in Land Desktop.

2. Profile views - This is one of my favorites. I love the ability to show the existing ground shots every 50 ft and have it be dynamic to the profile. More recently I figured out how to use the elevations on the side of the profile so that they could be dynamic also. Not to mention how easy is it to cut a profile into 1000 ft segments to show on plan sheets.

3. Styles - Styles make everything so very much more efficient. Even people who do not normally use your standards and easily and quickly put together plans that conform to your standards.

Well this is long enough... Hope to hear from more people here. seems many look in but few post here.

[randyc]

Hi, my name is Randy Casey. I see this thread hasn't been posted on for a few days, but I thought I would add to it anyways to put my 2 cents in on the LDD/C3D debate. I am an Engineering Technician for the City of Salinas, California and have been here for 4 years designing whatever is thrown at me (parks, streetlights, roads, parking lots, sewer, storm drain, etc...). Before that I worked for the Police Department for 8 1/2 years until an injury prevented me from doing my job and I had be reclassified.

The reason I mention this is because when I first got here I knew nothing about AutoCAD (or even Civil Engineering for that matter). I originally started on R14 with Softdesk, but did not use the Softdesk features as no one really knew it well enough to train me, so I used just the vanilla CAD for designs.

About a year later our department upgraded to LDT 2004. Within 3 months I got my first design project; design a basketball/volleyball court in an existing park. I know, not really a big deal which is why supervisor thought it would be a good pilot project for LDT 2004 as well a good training exercise for me. I was given the topo for the park which had been created from a recent survey and was told to go to it. My supervisor gave me some training on how to use COGO and was there for advice and help when needed, but essentially the project was mine to control. Through persistence and my unwavering determination to learn, learn, learn, I taught myself how to use LDT 2004. That and a well timed training class (which helped me iron out a few wrinkles and polish up my project) allowed me to finish my project on time.

Long story short, in the end I became the only person in our department who knew how to use any of the advanced features of LDT and was being called upon to teach the other CAD users in their projects (by this time I had been using CAD for about 2 years including my time on R14/Softdesk).

Now, fast forward to the Summer of 2006, our department has just upgraded to AutoCAD 2007 Civil (C3D, LDT, Map). I knew nothing of C3D, other than what I was able to read about in articles and see in webcasts and demonstrations. Hearing that LDT was about to go the way of the dinosaur, I made the blind leap into C3D (I attended AU 2006 and received some cursory knowledge of the program beforehand). About this same time I was given a project (ironically it was a park project, in the same park I mentioned before). This time I was to design a pad for a small "tot-lot". There were several design constraints which would require my design to be flexible.

I started out by importing my original LDT design of the park into C3D. I quickly learned how to start using FEATURE LINES and found them extremely easy to work with. Within a week I had not only completed my design, but actually had redesigned it at least 12 times (this included moving it, rotating it, adjusting slopes and elevations, etc.) all of which would have taken me weeks to do in LDT (in one day alone I had moved the pad 4 times).

Since then, I have not even started LDT on my workstation. I realize that C3D is still lacking in hydrology, and I'm still not sure what I would do if faced with a project that required it (fortunately, there aren't any on the horizon, for now, so I might get lucky and we will have C3D 2008 or 2009 before one I do get one). I still find bugs and glitches to this date, but overall it is far easier to use than LDT ever was. Once again I find myself in the position of being the most experienced user in our department. I am a senior member of the CAD standards committee as well as a lead CAD user. I have been promoted twice in the last 4 years, all based on my technical ability and my work ethic.

Anyways, long story short...again . If someone with no CAD or Civil background, like myself, can learn this software, and succeed, then anyone can. It just takes dedication and patience. Pick a pilot project if need be and be willing to learn and take any and every opportunity to attend classes, watch webcasts, read books, etc. Make time, take the initiative, twist your bosses arms, get what you need to make it happen! If you are not learning the software you or your organization are buying, then you/they are just wasting money...

[slong]

I am a registered surveyor with 24 years in the industry managing the Surveys, Design and GIS for the 4th largest MD city.

We are seriously considering a new Software conversion from Eaglepoint to Civil 3D

We have a VERY robust field-to-finish operation set up in EAGLEPOINT and want to know about conversion issues to Civil 3D involving operation code similarity (designators for drawing commands) as well as feature-code libraries and linework libraries. I saw some old post from several years ago, but wondered wether there are new enhancements.
The modular based-ness of Eaglepoint and "sales-designed division of commands" among them drives me crazy. But the network sharing of licenses I like.
We also have a pretty established GIS with ESRI product.
I did see that Civil 3D handles all the projection/transformation end of coordinates systems as GIS does (and Eaglepoint doesn't)

The other Design Software we're looking at is Carlson Civil Suite (that has a pretty suite "Switch-over-to-me deal going on right now with there civil suite (also has some sweet routines for pretty completely converting our Field to finish coding and lining libraries). I'm familiar with Carlson and see that they produce Carlson Civil Desktop companion and another companion product that runs inside Land-Desktop Civil 3D?. It looks like it enhances some shortfalls in Autodesk's product in the data-collection arena.
The Autodesk integrated inhouse development of Civil 3D appeals to me though. Does Civil 3D work with Network/concurrent license framework?
Does anyone have any comments or brand new info concerning these- and the choice I need to make in the next 4 weeks.
This will be the first change in 14 years (the last one was away from DCA/Softdesk software)
One good point is that we will need to learn something new either one we move to so we'll be doing it together ;-[


Thanks

Steve

[brian.hailey933139]

Welcome Steve. You'll find a lot of great info here.

To answer some of your questions, Civil 3D is built on top of AutoCAD Map 3D so you will have full functioning GIS capablities. You can connect directly to your ESRI shape files with Civil 3D. Civil 3D also has survey functionality. You can do field-to-finish work with Civil 3D using figure prefixes and description keys. Sinc (one of the users that frequents this discussion group) knows more about the survey side of things then just about anyone else (even most deskers).

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask away!

[Valuesize]

Hell every one just got started my post today. Been working for 2 yr doing Civil drafting and i come here ofter to look for thing that i have trouble with and try and find ppl that have to same things. But this time i could not find any one with a Spell check problem so i signed up and did a post. But glad to be and looking forward to helping out as much as i can.

[fseguin]

Patrick.

I'm from Sweden. Have been working as a surveyor for seven years and as a civil engineer for one. During time as CE i've been working mostly in c3d 2008. At my company we are making plans for parks, kindergarten, roads and parkingslots.

I tried out the demo during autumn -08 and then we decided to buy the program.

The reseller told me that I could learn c3d in 3 month. Well almost true, but i keep learning all the time. There are always a lot of news around the corner.

See you all!

//Patrick Ericson, Jönköping, Sweden.

[Matt_Drainage]

Hi,

Im Matt and currently working with Civil 3D 2008 with Coastal Science and Engineering. We currently design, survey, and nourishment of beaches and canals. Im currenlty a CAD Technician working primary on Civil 3D while I continue in school earning my Master in Engineering with Civil. So far I enjoy working with Civil because it allows such a wide variety of improvements of LDD. The company tried to upgrade to 2009 but that was quickly stopped after numerous issues over transferring files to other organization who do not use 2009 at the moment. I am learning as I go and have been helped numerous times by members of this forums to help answer technical questions, Thanks for answers and many more as time goes by..

Thanks Matt

[randy.herx]

Hi, my name is Randy Herx:

And I'm a C3D addict (among other things!)

I'm a land surveyor currently working with an engineering/surveying/planning/environmental firm in Virginia, USA. I left Florida when the market started drying out and ended up here. I am a registered land surveyor in the state of Florida and will have my Virginia license next month. I've been an Autocad user for MANY years and love convincing other people that it is the best cad package out there. I'm also an avid programmer who started out with machine language back in the early 80s, then on to basic, pascal, C, VB, a little C#, and finally ending up with VB.NET. I absolutely LOVE writing code for the company I work for and whenever I can see a repetitive task that can be shortened, I write an addon. Or if I notice Civil 3D lacking a feature, I just write some code and can generally accomplish what we are needing. Anything to increase billability in these rough times.

[Hammer.John.J]

John Hammer, L.A.

---been here a while but we're going to C3D in a few months (even though we've had it in house since 2006 on subscription, we've not used it). We're working on our template right now and have a sub committee to our CAD Committee to finish this.

We have 45 Cad Users in 7 offices in 5 different states.

*not looking forward to deployment* our i.t. department is also the survey dept., the Cad Committee is the "expert" cad users from each of our 8 departments and we do not have a programmer on staff or a dedicated CAD Manager.