Speaking from the standpoint of a designer/drafter user who just tried
to get a survey department to adopt Civil3D for much the same reasons
you posit, I would suggest that there are some functionality holes in
the product from a surveyor standpoint. While the recent reorganization
of the design tools in the ribbon have made the drafter's work fairly
slick, and the designer's world a 'simple' progression from left to
right across the ribbon. The questions I was posed during the
demonstration for the surveryors were:
Where is the inverse command? can I take the whole project and
intelligently migrate it from an assumed coordinate system to a public
coordinate system through the modification of a couple of control
points? Our guys use yellow-box equipment, and the answers we found
were that they would continue to need to use software from the hardware
vendor to perform geodetic adjustment. (answer both from survey vendor
and autodesk support). So, surveying package? NO. Very capable
drafting integration for pre-adjusted survey data? YES.
Linework and node/point/block placement (layer/color/style/etc) in C3D
is excellent, once you have the coding system consistent between field &
office (Learning curve mentioned by others), BUT your linework is all a
very special type of object called a survey figure, which is really
really awesome, if you need it to be a 3D object that is useful for
generation of a surface model. Oh, and linetypes don't propagate
properly. So you may end up taking all this automatic linework for
fences for example, and exploding it (twice), and flattening it, and
"pedit"ing it back together. Which is faster than finding all the
points that are coded FNC and connecting the dots, usually.
Not quite a ringing endorsement yet, eh? So, here's the bottom line.
We use civil3d exclusively for our design and drafting purposes, I
wouldn't have it any other way, it's the most amazing tool I've ever had
the opportunity to use as a designer. As long as you're not expecting
geodetic magic or other very-surveyor-specific tools to be easily
accessible, drop the third-party software and wade through the C3D
solution, all the old Autodesk Survey functionality is still in the
program, it's just in several locations, and was not intuitive for the
surveyors in the office in which I work. Whatever tools they are
currently using to communicate with the data collector(s) will still
need to be used, and if that is the 3rd party application . . . .
For us, I was able to keep us from acquiring a seat of the software you
mention, but only because of the learning curve associated with ANY
piece of software, and I demonstrated that I could do the drafting they
wanted in C3D very quickly.
The upshot for me is that I get to do a LOT more drafting work for the
survey division, which means I get to go to work almost every day of the
week, and I'm learning a lot about surveying. So I am grateful to
Autodesk for hiding the survey tools in places only a geek like me would
think to look.
Matt
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of me, my peers, or
any person real, historical or imagined.
On 3/29/2010 10:26 AM, wdbar wrote:
> Does Civil 3D have everything in it for a Surveying Package? We are currently using a 3rd party software add-on (Carlson) but I'd like to eliminate the extra fees and use Autodesk's product if it in fact is able to perform as well as Carlson.
