Civil 3D core differences

[thatcadguy]

I'm going to be taking over my company's AutoCAD responsibilities soon and I keep hearing things to the effect that Civil 3D is radically different from every other flavor of AutoCAD...things like line styles, add-on compatibility, etc.

Does anyone know right offhand what's radically different in the eyes of a CAD admin?  Thanks in advance.

[lsimms1]

Autocad is a drafting tool that gives you a pretty picture.  You can associate the picture with a database (Land or something simialr) but its still just a picture.

C3d IS the database.  This database gives you a picture.  As you change the database the picture changes with it.  Everything is associated and dynamic.

You really have to change your thinking from creating a drawing, to creating a database.  This database has to be set up through styles to give you the picture you want.

Maybe consider some training for a better understanding?

[thatcadguy]

We don't really have a budget for that, but thanks for the answer.  I guess I'll just have to find out as I go.

[lsimms1 · Accepted solution]

The tutorials with the program are pretty good.  If you can go through a few of them they will give you an idea of what you are working with. 

[thatcadguy]

Okay, that I can do.  Thanks.

[Anonymous]

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@thatcadguy wrote:

We don't really have a budget for that, but thanks for the answer.  I guess I'll just have to find out as I go.

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You really don't have the budget NOT get training.  In the long run, poor or insufficient training will be considerably more expensive.  Time lost "figuring it out", or trying to make it do what you want will lead to delays in delivery or worse short-cuts in the design.  Those short cuts will corrupt the database, leading to bad information passed to construction, and major costs in rework.  C3D is not your momma's AutoCAD, that you can pick up on the fly making drawings that "look" nice.

[omc-usnr]

What size office are you dealing with?  Will you have multiple teams working on different parts of the project at the same time? Do ytou have any office standards in place now?  What have you been using (LDD, Eagle Point, Carlson, something else)?  Do you have surveyors in your office?  If so, they will need (re)training, AND THAT IS NOT AN OPTION for them.

If you are going to be the ONE who's setting things up or leading the transition, You'll need training, it's NOT AN OPTION.  Even after training, figure you will spend three to six weeks out of production setting up the styles required to bring others up to production standards.  Also, styles are a moving target.  You'll contiue to develop / modify them as you go.  You'll need to really understand the concept of drawing templates, and you will need more than one, and continue to maintain them on a regular basis.

Styles and templates managemnet should be the duty of only one person (or a special team if you have large projects).  Make sure that styles stay current in the templates.  If a drawing adds a new style, migrate that to the template.

If you have teams, you'll need to look into vault for file / project management.

Tutorials alone are not going to get it, even if you devote nights and weekends to using them.

Reid

[JamesMaeding]

I seem to hear everyone saying its all different, but the core acad is not.

I set up search paths, and even use the same acaddoc.lsp as with autocad and map.

You can use the same old menus, palettes, and .lin files you do with any acad.

You will want to make sure you load the menus needed for the verticals, of course.

What I do is start with the default profiles OOTB for full C3D and also C3D as acad, then modify.

You will find hidsden settings in the registry that determine if  C3D session is blank acad or C3D.

Also keep an eye on the default icons if making your own.  They load dbx files.

All in all though, its the same old acad with a few things added.

[Anonymous]

It's the same ol' AutoCAD as long as you're only drawing the same ol AutoCAD drawings with lines and circles and text. But if that's all you're drawing you don't need C3D at all, do you?

However, if you want to throw a developed road cross-section down an aligment curve over hilly terrain downloaded from a half a dozen different surveyors and then do complete plan profile and section drawings with cut and fill quantities you might just need a little instructions on the eccentricities of that portion of the application, especially if you're used to different (older) verticals.

[JamesMaeding]

well, I think the OP was asking if the basic of acad are the same for C3D, which they are.

As far as using the C3D portion, that is an entirely different issue, but typically the designer will be the one trained and pushing on the cad admin to get certain things in place.

It better if both know C3D for sure.

I do find it interesting that people give what I consider "conceptual design" grading situations as the thing C3D does well.

No softwrae does true 2:1 slopes yet, and the reason we do models is to help with final design plans, so that leaves a big gap in C3D abilities.  Throw in its lousy sharing quirks and you have an animal you must completely test in production before relying upon.  And if you are doing 3d pipes, just use alignments to get the 3d invert and use SWEEP to get the pipes, don't waste time on pipe networks. 

[Neilw_05]

Some have described C3D as working with databases. While that may essentially be true it does not really convey how it is different from plain Autocad in my mind.

You are likely familiar with intelligent objects in Autocad such as table objects and dynamic blocks. These objects are more than just lines and text, they are dynamic objects whose behavior is controlled by parameters. To change their display or content you need to use specific tools and settings to change their parameters.

Civil 3D makes use of numerous objects specifically designed for civil engineering design. A surface built from survey data is an object that can be displayed in many ways such as contours, points, 3D faces and more. There are also alignment and profile objects, point objects, corridor (road or channel) objects, cross section view objects and many more. Most if not all of these objects interrelate to each other and will dynamically update when changes are made to any of the fundamental components. For example a change to a road alignment will cause the station labels to update and the profile lengths and annotations will dynamically adjust according to the change in length of the alignment. Any roads built from them would also update along with cross sections, quantity and staking tables. The display of these objects and their annotation are controled by styles which are pre-configured settings that can be applied to an object to change how it's various components are displayed. For example a surface style could be defined that would display a surface object as 3D colored 3D faces according to elevation. The colored bands would update dynamically when edits are made to the surface.

Civil 3D is built on Autocad so you will have all the functionality of Autocad. The difference is that Civil 3D will provide you with these enhanced objects to facilitate your designs. If a user opens a Civil 3D drawing in plain Autocad they will be able to view and plot these custom objects, but they will not be able to edit them, aside from moving, erasing or exploding them, which you are not likely to want to do. Once they are exploded they become dumb CAD graphics and the intelligence is destroyed.

If you are familiar with Inventor or Revit then you will see similar technology in those applications.

[Neilw_05]

I forgot to mention things that will be of crucial concern to a cad manager.

C3D drawings are version specific. A 2010 C3D drawing cannot be edited in C3D 2009 and so on down the version chain. Each new release has been incompatible with the previous releases up through 2011. Thus you will have to implement a strategy for upgrading and working with different versions.

C3D is is highly dependent on resources. For 2011 it is recommended to run in a 64 bit OS with 8 GB of Ram. It does not support Multicore processors so a Dual core running at a higher speed than a multicore is better. here is a post that might help with hardware requirements: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/New-Civil-3D-work-station-specs/m-p/2583862#M118668

Also, C3D has some built in data sharing capabilities (data shortcuts) but it also can use Vault, an Autodesk document management system. You will want to reasearch the differences in your implementation.

[JamesMaeding]

and don't forget either, that you cannot use SAVEAS, or trueconvert utils to convert the drawings to lower versions.

and don't forget about the crashes if you really use C3D "custom" objects.  You really have to hit ctrl-s a lot if you are trying to retain the work you do.

[jggerth]

and if mentioning potential gotchas, note that C3D was developed on an earlier build of Map3D andAutoCAD than was finally shipped.  Things that got fixed between testing and first customer shipment in vanilla, may not have been fixed in Civil3d....