End of the Road

[AussieHans]

Its been a long 5 years (we started on Civil3D 2005, now on 2009 SP2), of continuous bugs, crashes, parcel problems, grading problems, incompatibility issues, disappearing feature lines, workarounds, installation issues. Yesterday I watched one of our drafties, and the amount of audits, recovers and tricks she was continuously applying to keep the drawing going was frightening.I had a read of most of my posts, and it brought back memories of literally hundreds of hours of troubleshooting, re-doing work, install/uninstall: One long continuous battle, forever hoping the system would mature.

We simply can't and won't afford it anymore, there are other options.

Even this forum has become hard work as my login only works about once every four times, probably because I'm using Firefox...I'm on my fourth or fifth username.

To all the users of this forum who have helped me over the years with problems, John Hickey, Jason, Dana, Sinc and many others a huge thank you, you guys have been a lifeline. The AutoCAD help has a huge section missing, all the DONT'S. These can only be found here, and without them Civil 3D would have died in our office a long time ago. Or did you bastards just prolong the agony??? (Just kidding...)


See you later......

[Sinc]

Beta-testing for 2010 is pretty much over at this point. Last I heard, the release build for C3D 2010 was not yet locked in, but that should be happening soon. Then it goes to production, and the disks are shipped as soon as they are ready. Subscription customers should start receiving disks in probably a month or so. (This is pretty much the same thing that happened in previous years.)

Autodesk should get a demo download for 2010 posted around the same time.

-- Sinc
http://www.ejsurveying.com
http://www.quuxsoft.com

[GaryElswick5627]

Sinc,

You've been working to hard, I was talking about the "release" version pre SP1,2 & 3.... with tongue somewhat in cheek.

I did read somewhere in these groups that it would be any day now.....

It does help to get away from these groups for a few months and not be subjected to the emotional turmoil here. There is life outside of C3D you know. It IS one of many tools that we use, not a world unto itself.

Gary E.

[Anonymous]

I've been evaluating Power Civil and C3D as well
Gary. So far I am more proficient in Power Civil but I haven't used it to
develop a full set of documents. What is your take on it?

style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

<GaryElswick5627> wrote in message
href="news:6156082@discussion.autodesk.com">news:6156082@discussion.autodesk.com...

Just
now implementing 2009 in anticipation of 2010 and all the "Survey"
improvements. Won't hold my breath though. Have been using ACad since 2.5 and
long ago learned not to believe the sales hype. Have been going back and forth
between implementing both PowerCivil and C3D for a year or more, but when the
phone rings and something needs to get out the door I use LDD to get the job
done since I am very familiar with it. So why C3D, certainly not because of
all the accolades on these newsgroups, but then I realize people come here
with problems not praise. To all the early testers of this program, thank you.
I still see 2009 as you talk about 2006, usable for some things but do I
really want to base our work product on something this buggy. We use a number
of tools and am amazed at what people consider acceptable in defects. Example:
We use a GPS network with centimeter level accuracy in REAL TIME. The
components consist of a constellation of earth orbiting satellites, ground
based receivers that decode nano second time signals from the satellites to
determine position, a cell phone with a blue tooth connection to the receiver
and at the same time contacting the network state wide stations to get the
real time corrections mostly consisting of ionospheric atmosphere corrections.
Then in 3-5 seconds from hitting the measure button the output, based on
Geiod03 grid gravity measurements, is recorded in a choice of different 3D
coordinate systems. Then this data is dumped into software that crashes when a
cad operator picks a line or point. Wow, the moral at Auto Desk must be
unbelievably low.... Pouring fuel on the fire: when 2010 is available for
download do we have to go to http://myfeedback.autodesk.com/ and sign up as a
beta tester or is that implied? Gary E.

[GaryElswick5627]

Wow, the 3 usual suspects working on weekends as usual.

Neil, I have been following your posts both here and, uh, over there, and what I know about PowerCivil I like. The major difficulty I have with PC are the language differences, being raised on AutoCad learning the uStation terminology was like Greek to me. Pluses: have not had a single crash. Since we are a survey company I have not had the need to use nearly as much of the program as you have from what I have seen from your posts in both places. It would be nice if we could combine certain key aspects of them, they both have good points and, uh, some not so good points.

We will use both because that is what clients want. Have a billion dollar client that only wants pdf's as the work product, but then have many smaller clients that want a dwg digital file as the work product to be used as a base. Another billion dollar client only wants dgn files but will grudgingly accept a dwg. They also use our product as a base to design from. Working on obtaining a third billion dollar client that also only wants dgn, don't know yet if they will accept dwg or not.

Note we do no DOT work if that is what you are thinking, these are large private companies. IF I were starting today with the above client base then it would be PowerCivil and deliver exported dwg's when required. But with the LDD years of knowledge.....

Have been implementing both when things are slow and have 12D waiting to be given a good test, have heard some good things about that program also. As we need additional seats the market at that time will determine whose company we obtain them from.

[Anonymous]

Actually I am not on the clock so I am not
officially working, but I do spend quite a bit of my personal time educating
myself on this stuff since I can't get it through my company. Besides, it would
cost a bloody fortune if we had to pay for all the support I need in this
venture so the only practical option is to dig in and start working through it
on my own.

Being a Civil tech I haven't delved into the survey
tools much although in reading the help file it looks like there is a LOT of
stuff there for surveyors. I was playing around with the subdivision wizard and
COGO parcels yesterday. It is certainly not nearly as easy to eidt parcels as is
C3D, but then there are some nice advantages to COGO parcels vs. storing the
parcels as graphic elements.

My current workflow has been to do my grading
design in Power Civil and export the surface models, profiles and alignments to
LDT via XML. I then save the grading DGN to DWG and reference it into the
construction drawings so I can create the annotation details in ACAD. This is
because the rest of the staff only use LDT and need to access the documents in
DWG. Until we commit to Power Civil or C3D there is going to be some translation
overhead on my  part whether I use C3D or Power Civil. I have done some
road design in C3D as well. On one project we needed to establish several
options for access to a landlocked parcel in very hilly terrain. We had to
use GIS contours AND DEM's for topo. I used both C3D and Power Civil to
compare the workflows and ease of use. Power Civil was very good for handling
the large datasets such as the DEM's Aerial imagery and contour surface models.
It's performance is phenominal with Imagery. Microstations smart lines were
great for laying out rough alignments since the curves stay tangent when
the PI's are moved around. Howver it requires commining the alignment to
COGO in order to create detailed profiles. Once committed to COGO it is more
difficult to edit the alignments and profiles when changes are required. Power
Civil's tools for finding slope paths were great for establishing routes up the
steep hills. Civil 3D on the other was great for route finding with it's
dynamic alignments and compound or reverse curves that stay tangent as the PI's
are moved around. Also being able to tweak vertical cuves in profiles and
getting instant results was very powerful. However it could not handle the DEM
surface models that I needed to use for sight corridor analysis nor could it
handle the imagery. This led to great frustration after many attempts to get the
data into the project failed and I had to resort to Power Civil to complete the
task of merging the roads into the DEM for a sub-consultant to use for their
view corridor analysis.

I have a long way to go in this evaluation process
as I am basically without support other than forums and a few folks at Bentley
who are willing to help out when I get really stuck. I really do like working in
Microstation and wish we could standardize on it, but then ACAD has superior
annotation scale implementation which is very powerful so it is a hard call to
make. If ACAD didn't fall on it's face with it's performance issues it would be
a bit easier to make a decision but as it stands now I'm still having to
straddle the fence.

<GaryElswick5627> wrote in message
href="news:6156119@discussion.autodesk.com">news:6156119@discussion.autodesk.com...

style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">Wow,
the 3 usual suspects working on weekends as usual. Neil, I have been following
your posts both here and, uh, over there, and what I know about PowerCivil I
like. The major difficulty I have with PC are the language differences, being
raised on AutoCad learning the uStation terminology was like Greek to me.
Pluses: have not had a single crash. Since we are a survey company I have not
had the need to use nearly as much of the program as you have from what I have
seen from your posts in both places. It would be nice if we could combine
certain key aspects of them, they both have good points and, uh, some not so
good points. We will use both because that is what clients want. Have a
billion dollar client that only wants pdf's as the work product, but then have
many smaller clients that want a dwg digital file as the work product to be
used as a base. Another billion dollar client only wants dgn files but will
grudgingly accept a dwg. They also use our product as a base to design from.
Working on obtaining a third billion dollar client that also only wants dgn,
don't know yet if they will accept dwg or not. Note we do no DOT work if that
is what you are thinking, these are large private companies. IF I were
starting today with the above client base then it would be PowerCivil and
deliver exported dwg's when required. But with the LDD years of knowledge.....
Have been implementing both when things are slow and have 12D waiting to be
given a good test, have heard some good things about that program also. As we
need additional seats the market at that time will determine whose company we
obtain them from.

[AussieHans]

We are still retaining Civil 3D as a delivery option to clients. But the daily bread and butter calculations are all moving to TerraModel, partially due to standardization issues with us merging with a larger company, but mostly in an effort to increase efficiency.I've just been through another nightmare of a drawing last week, a detail survey of a road intersection, and an estimated 5 hours turned into about 25 with all the crashes. Twice the plan turned into an unrecoverable file, on of which I shipped to the client without knowing it was corrupted. I also observed some real scary stuff, like surface triangles from points that weren't there, holes in the surface all over the place. The outer boundary keeps getting detached somehow, had to delete and add it back about 20 times. I've never seen this sort of rubbish in TerraModel. The biggest thing going for TerraModel is that the Raw Data Editor thinks like surveyors, and provides excellent reporting. And it talks to every bit of gear we have or will conceivably purchase.

We are trading in or losing a lot of the power of AutoCAD in the process, especially the presentation or CAD editing. It was not an easy decision, and I can still see a lot of advantages in Civid3D, otherwise we wouldn't have stuck with it for 5 years.... I'm prepared to forfeit those just for the stability alone. We purchased a top of the range computer with a $800 video card, best processor available, 4GB DDR3 RAM, just to please Civil3D. The result was a slap in face, really. Crash crash crash, jeez I'm so sick of it.

[Civil3DReminders]

Did you add contours to the surface and use the default options? This adds point data to the surface to minimize flat triangles. If you don't want them uncheck the three options that are checked. For the holes do you have minimum triangle length set in the surface properties?

The surface is built in the order the data was added to the surface. So if data outside the boundary was added after the boundary it will connect triangles outside the boundary, then it would appear to the user that the boundary isn't being applied properly. While I do wish you could pin the boundary to be the last thing applied, you can move the boundary to the last thing used to build the surface in the Definitions tab of the surface (in 2009).

Christopher

http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/

The vBook: Civil 3D 2009 VBA Customization

http://style.civil3dreminders.com/intermittentblockoftheday/

[AussieHans]

No contours, just a point group and breaklines. The more edits I made the worse it got. Eventually just removed all definitions, and put the surface back together. This was fine for two days, then the problems started again. Again removed the point group and all breaklines, put them back in, and now the surface seems to stay put.I'm just annoyed that I managed to send a surface with holes to the client, I didn't realize they had started appearing.

Crash crash crash. Audit. Crash. Recover. Crash

[mspatz]

AussieHans, I think you may have a bad install, bad memory, bad hardware matching, a bad graphics card, bad network latency (lost packets) , a bad template, or bad something else...

I agree that Civil 3D seems very touchy with hardware and etc. but we have ~15-20+ users a day with Civil 3D and don't have near the issue.

Were you the author of a comment that I read where a user placed the content on his C: drive (local) to take home and work and didn't have any issue that he usually has? If that is the case look at your network. It also brings up a point I have been trying to make on this DG. Using Vault might be key!

We use Vault and checkout to our C: drive. We didn't start this way, we initially checked out files to a network drive (P: for projects) but during our consultant training the group of trainees were crashing (in 2008) where the trainer (checking out to his C: drive) was not (mostly using the survey features and working with the survey DB). So we switched to making our Working Folder (checkout location) "C:\Civil 3D Projects" and issues cleared-up.

Just thought I would offer that. I agree if this is the case it is sort of BS; how can you make software that doesn't work over a network share when 98% of the companies work over a network share. But at the end of the day if it makes a big different, so be it.

[AussieHans]

After running Terramodel (new projects) and Civil3D (Exsiting projects) side by side for about six weeks, some crash statistics:

Civil 3D: 31 crashes. Countless AUDITs

TerraModel: 0 crashes. No AUDITs.(There is no AUDIT command....)


Every crash is the result of an inherent bug in the software.

[mspatz]

Dude, 31 crashes. Something has to be up with tempate, hardware, network or something. What were you doing at the time of 31 crashes? How big was the project? Was is created in an old version?

I'm working up on 2 months w\o a crash and I'm using corridor models to grade in pond berms (detailed) and swales. I assume you are NOT using grading objects or at least you are exploding them. If you are not that is just crazy and 31 crashes will follow.

I'm all over pipe works (nothing really to crash there), featurelines, assemblies, parcels (they are a little crazy but no crashes) and alignments and profiles. Again we have, on average, ~18 users a day on C3D and if any one of them would crash 31 times on a project my phone would be off the hook!!! As it is, I maybe get 2-3 calls a week for advise on modeling or to solve an issue; silly stuff like when I click "Surface Properties" I crash which is fixed with a simple repair or re-install.

Actually I just recevied today two emails on how much time C3D has saved time on projects due to client \ design change; so YES, I'm feeling pretty good.

Were you working on Sample lines and Cross sections? Are their other users at your firm that are using Civil 3D full time that you can compair too (huge for us)?

[GaryElswick5627]

Hey Dude, no program should crash for any reason. What is so dangerous about picking an incompatible template or object that the program itself just disappears. There is a total lack of proper programming practices, i.e. error checking, in auto desk software which comes out as bugs for some people that don't follow "best practices". It is taught in programming 101.

As an example if a program is expecting a number as input and the user inadvertently enters a question mark, that is NO reason for the program to go belly up and disappear, yet that is exactly what is happening with C3D. With 2010 being released momentarily the first thing I'll be checking is stability and then the new features such as the new "survey" enhancements.

Jeesh I identify more and more with Becker every day.

Gary E. Edited by: GaryElswick5627 on Apr 15, 2009 8:12 PM

[AussieHans]

Been working with surfaces mainly, also parcels. I just have to select a group of cogo points (about 1000) and move them collectively a few metres and Civil3D crashes. This is in a blank drawing with no other objects.

I don't care anymore about what I may be doing wrong, maybe it's my network, maybe my graphics card, maybe my templates. I'm sick of laboriously reading up about all the don'ts on this Forum and other websites.

Other software has no issues with my hardware, network or my methods. To me this makes the other software better for certain purposes.

[Anonymous]

31 crashes ???


Statistics crashes http://civilfix.blogspot.com/2009/05/autodesk-civil-3d.html

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2007
Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 Service Pack 1A 2006-Jul-18 1
Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 Service Pack 2 2008-Nov-05 24
Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 Service Pack 3 2007-May-28 42

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008
AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2008 Service Pack 1 2007-Aug-22 34
AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2008 Service Pack 2 2008-Jul-23 58

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 Update 1 2008-Aug-28 42
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 Update 2.0 - deletes
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 Update 2.1 2009-Apr-27 71 !!!

will be greater than 100 crashes in 2010 C3D? Edited by: Ztn on May 22, 2009 11:28 PM

[brendanbutt]

I had to weigh in on this debate. As a long time Acad and LDD user since the Softdesk days, I also found the whole transtion to C3D a frustrating mess. I keep wishing and hoping but when is it going to be there? For newcomers who haven't used it's predecessors, C3D looks pretty good but it is sad seeing so many companies misled by the marketing.

We switched to InRoads with AutoCAD and have never looked back.

I use the InRoads Suite which includes Rail Track (formerly InRail & MXRAIL) exclusively on AutoCAD for transportation design. I have never used Microstation for project work. Because InRoads sits on top of the CAD platform and stores external data files, you can work in either package and easily share content. It also has a fairly steep learning curve but is more intuitive for a LDD user and is a better laid out app.

InRoads uses a preference file for all settings including symbology and styles. The template library and roadway designer are a pleasure to use. I don't use PoweCivil because I don't like the Microstarion interface but the new version, PowerCivil for North America, has a site modeller which is fully dynamic and imports LDD data. This will also be incorporated into InRoads this year. So, you get the best of both worlds with InRoads - AutoCAD and the worlds leading civil design tools. Bentley's support line is amazing too - one call direct to their tech experts and programmers, not some reseller who wants to sell you additional services and custom implementation.

I still have hope for C3D but can't afford to be unproductive.