Civil 3d Question

[clopez_tcs]

Hello All:

I have some questions. Is anyone using Civil 3d in production or is it still a test version? What does everyone think about Civil 3d?

I have been trying to get my hands on Civil 3d for some time, however, our IT Manager will not release it to the design team. We have a AutoCAD Civil Design Subscription, however, he says we cannot down load the software. I thought all Subscription members could download Civil 3d. Any suggestions???

Carlos Lopez
Kimley-Horn & Associates

[mjfarrell]

See this thread here http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...ade+civil+2006

As to the subscription program, I am highly opposed
to this marketing scheme, so I can't tell you.

[stephen.cowling]

Hi all,
Given the small number of tentative posts in this forum, and the relatively large number of views, I would guess my situation is far from unique.

I'm using Land Desktop 2005 with Advanced Road Design (an Australian product which overcomes the lack of intersection and culdesac design in LDD). Mostly doing small subdivision designs with local traffic conditions.

I do the bulk of my drafting in Map, and just the road design in LDD/Advanced road. We're on subscription, so Civil 3D turned up of its own accord. We had the trial version before, but didn't even install it.

I've tried Civil 3D, got my head around some of the style setup and realised that to justify the setup time, I would need to see some fairly substantial time savings, extra design integrity and the ability to do more things in Civil 3D. I also feel that without being able to change over to C3D completely, the wow factor would have to be even greater.

I'm not seeing this yet, so I can't afford to look much harder.

Michael Farrell seems to be about the only person I've seen who is openly unhappy with the new software. Michael, thanks for all the responses you've given; I don't know how you do it. At this stage, I tend to agree with him - the number of shortcomings make me too nervous to keep throwing time at learning to use it.

I'm not denying that there is potential there. Multiple document interface, but the are some stability problems when two designs are running together. Viz Render is a cool idea, but I don't know how to use it. The surface display modes etc are nice, but they're not much more than eye candy to me. Grading groups or whatever they're called should be brilliant, but I haven't had an excuse to play yet.

Anyone else?

[mjfarrell]

Stephen,

The manner that I used to approach 3d was pretty simple.
I locked myself in a room with it, and only the survivor emerged!

I also spent a great number of hours reading the help file first,
and then trying to interpret into real world English.
I took a short list of things that I normally teach in my Land and
Civil Design classes and combined that with typical design elements
present in most projects and found how one does those things in
3D. I did not perform any of the tutorials, as these fail to completely
illuminate what is set up and what one must set up on their own
well enough. I did pick the apart for details and then created my
own scenarios to verify that I understood how they worked.

I started with a blank screen, a long list of questions and slowly
found the answers to them.

Depending on how one currently employs Land and how well one
really understands how those design tools work together, the
Leap into the 3D methodology is really not that bad.


As to using Viz Render, my experience with it is that it isn't too bad
for some half decent site renderings, however those are typically within
the realm of the Architect and the Landscape planners not Civil
at large unless one is in Master planned communities or Land Planning.
The link to Viz render is established by issuing the VIZRENDER command
at the command line. It helps to have your Polyline and camera for a fly
around positioned in 3D before using render.
For my taste, I would prefer to use the full Viz or Max product for these tasks.

[srsherrill]

Michael,
Regarding the lack of any reference to piping in Civil 3d . . . Our IT person, whom you may remember from another thread, maintains that piping design can be addressed through customized sub-assemblies and that may well be the only provision Autodesk will ever make to use piping in 3d. Have you examined the sub-assemblies enough to tell if this idea has any merit? Since most of my responsibility is sanitary sewer design, I am having a difficult time getting excited about this package.
The Dinosaur

[mjfarrell]

I just took a look for this functionality in sub assemblies,
True one might be able to represent pipe in a plan view
I see no such manner to translate that into a profile view
and or the ability to do hydraulic calculations to up size the
pipe based on percent full or calculate the HGL or or EGL
,or plot laterals or interferences with a sub assembly.
Also no ability to attach storm flow to inlet structures
or do perform any of the Hydrology calcs as currently exist
in Civil design.

Me thinks it would be time to perform substance abuse testing on the IT guy.

AutoDESK has simply punted on this for now. I think their best tactic
would be to combine the good bits of 3D into Civil Design and fix the stuff that doesn't
work in both packages and stop trying to sell us something as different when
it really isn't.

[srsherrill]

Thanks Michael,
It looks like I will have to be content with trying it for some plat work which brings a new question. The program comes with an unbelievable number of standard annotation settings, none of which I would consider using on a plat. I have found how to adjust them to meet my requirements, but these settings all seem to reside in the drawing file. Is there any way to make these changes effective for any existing or new drawing? I tried making a copy of a template file and adjusting the settings, but the program would not recognize the resulting file as a template. If I have to change these settings for each drawing, I may just wipe the program from my computer now.
The Dinosaur

[clopez_tcs]

I use all of Civil Design and Land Development Desktop components on a daily basis.(Cross Section, Pipeworks, etc.) The trial version that I obtained from AutoDesk of Civil 3d lacks allot of functionality of it's Civil Design/Land conterpart. From everyone’s post, I gather they have not worked out Pipeworks, Hydrology, Cross Sections, and Profiles.

It seems to me that AutoDesk might be separating all these products to increase revenue. I just do not understand why AutoDesk would purchase CAICE.... I hope they decide to embed the program within Civil Design and not take the Cross Sections Module out of Civil Design.

Carlos

[mjfarrell]

Steve,


One can use the Toolspace Master view, and use the Settings Tab,
NOT the Prospector TAB, to drag and drop styles from a template into
ones drawing file and then do a save-as DWT that will then contain
your desired setting.

Once your template is establish, a simple right-click NEW drawing is all
that is required at that point to create a drawing from that template.

To quote the vendor's representative for whom I provide training and support
for (in the eastern US) when I asked for "a demo version" of Civil 3d.

"Michael, AutoDESK is keeping those hard to get even for us the vendor.
Their reason is that the product is NOT intuitive enough for a user to evaluate
on their own."
To this end AutoDESK is bust offering a special consultancy service that's
purpose is to assist the users in establishing ONE EACH of their own styles
for various features and object styles. WOW, one style each! How generous
is that?http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...linkID=3549293

For myself, I've decided on a completely different approach to assisting my
clients integrate 3D into their current work-flow. My process will involve
all of the same set-up as these consultant services offer, only the user will
establish their own style settings as part of the instruction which will
be an overview of Civil Design tools that are compared and contrasted against
the partner tool that exists in 3D. My desired goal is to give them deeper
understanding of how and when to use 3D to do what it does best, and where
and when the Civil Design tools should be applied in the project cycle.

[mjfarrell]

Carlos,

The cross section functionality is in Civil 3D only they call it
Section Plot in the Corridor tools menu.

The most notable of the tools that it does lack are the Pipes,
Hydrology, and Sheet Manager.