Civil 3d Vs. Topcon Magnet

[dbussie]

We have just purchased Civil 3d for our office and I'm  working on learning how to use the corridors to model our roads.  We had a salesman from Topcon come in yesterday and he has convinced my boss that we should do our modeling in their Magnet program.  Apparently it runs on Civil 3d.  I'm not really seeing a need for it.  Seems like we can do everything we need to in Civil 3d.  Has anyone worked with this?  Any suggestions?

Desirea

[wfberry]

I am not familiar with Magnet but perhaps using it will make it easier to transfer a dtm to their data collector.  You may or may not care to use the "stake to the dtm" feature later.

Bill

[AllenJessup]

I looked at their site quickly. It looks like it's a stand alone program that can be installed on top of Civil 3D. So you'd be paying for everything twice. Salesmen can make everything look easy in their software when they're working from stock data where all the moves are memorized and the data has been cleaned so there are no errors.

Possibly when installed with Civil 3D it would run like the front end that Eagle Point now sells. So if you have drafting staff where you need to have a workflow like Push button A then Push button B and so on. That would work for you.

You might suggest that they do another demo with one of your data sets to see what kink of problems they run into and how they solve them.

Allen Jessup

[sboon · Accepted solution]

Strongly agree with Allen on this.  Tell them that you want a 30 day license so that you can play with the software on your own, then run through a design for yourself.

Steve
Please use the Accept as Solution or Kudo buttons when appropriate

[dbussie]

They have given us one seat free for a year.  That should be plenty of time for me to construct a model with it and see how it compares to the modeling I've been doing in C3d.

Thanks!

Desirea

[StefanJohns]

We've used stand-alone Topcon Magnet Topo (previously Civilcad) at our City Council in Australia for nearly three decades now - more particularly for field surveys only these days though. This software was initially developed from a surveyor's perspective - and has automatic feature line stringing during data reduction - with 3D triangulation capability therafter. After the surveyor has completed any minor editing and "signs off" on the Magnet survey, the designer immediately exports all data to Civil3D and replicates the surface using the surveyor's imported 3D Faces. All design is then done within the Civil3D environment - since design scenarios, modifications and drafting are simpler. PS For design purposes we use the Civil Site Design add-on (rather than Civil3D's corridors)