CAD Managers

[#1]

> Careful, Owen is listening.


--
Owen Wengerd
President, ManuSoft <>
VP Americas, CADLock, Inc. <>

[#2]

James-

I have 12 years of civil microstation experience.  -  and some basic autocad.

How long takes to learn  civil3d  and be productive,  pass the certification exams...

Are you familiar with Rick Ellis,  dvd course on cd3 ?

[#3]

learning time on c3d depends on if you understand other civil progs. If just "mapping" skills from one to the other, less time.

The wonderful thing about C3D is that the more you know it, the more workarounds you must invent.

I'm still wondering how to deal with data reference objects that I need for design, in a base file, but do not want them xreffed to the sheets. You can make no-show, or freeze, but they still cause the "synchronizing references" activity in the sheets whish majorly slows things down. I currently just dref surfaces, do things with them using tools we wrote, then detach.

How in the world do people work that must keep the surfaces attached to bases?

[#4]

you keep 1 "base" drawing that is 2d, and has no references in it.  Then x-ref that drawing into others to create your surfaces, profiles etc.  The "plot drawings" pretty much just have the 2d base plus the data shortcuts required for each.

Almost need a flow chart so you don't end up with circular references.

This really sounds more confusing than it is.

[#5]

well, the root problem is the idea of sharing data via an object in a drawing.

Those objects are heavy, and load on open, not just when you need them.

Almost any other system would work better, Autodesk should have loked at this closer in the beginning, but was so caught up in the idea of dynamic objects, that sharing issues were left unattended. Now we have this conflict.

The answer is to make data external, and available, but not accessed til needed.

So maybe share data via some different type of attachment, not xref, and not dref.

Then allow users to make objects from data if desired.

Most of the time, data is invisible though (labeling of elevations in plan, profiles are not present for grading plans).