Good day,
Last year I started employment with a firm needing experienced "Civil 3D" skill sets. after starting work it quickly becam evident that Ciivil 3D was'nt being used in its intended workflow. When the company first switched to Civ they only did a three day training session with their software provider, to cover all aspects of the software (way to little IMHO). Since starting I have been assigned to multiple projects where the grading schemes were a poor mishmash of Civil 3D techniques, which in the end killed the profit in each and everyone of these projects. Management has now tasked the internal Civil 3D committee with establishing a workflow that precludes the use of modeled surfaces in favor of contour (polyline) derived surfaces. I am at a loss as to approach this situation, I have on multiple occassions sat down with the management and explained that the results they have seen so far were the result of insufficient training, and the fact a majority of the technicans are implementing Civil 3D as a 2D drafting tool (only using smart alignments and profiles, pipe networks are manually drafted in for both plan and profile..., the list goes on and on...). I am almost to the point of recommending they switch to vanilla CAD and use Lisp routines to generate their profile since thats all they use it for.
Any thoughst or suggestion on this situation may have crept up elsewhere and what the resolution may have been in that situation?
3 days training is indeed woefully inadequate - you could easily spend a week getting to grips with various aspects of styles.
Can't offer any real suggestions apart from training and looking at Autodesk University/YouTube for examples of how to approach various tasks.
I would certainly seem that they are not getting value from their Civil 3D investment but as often said the software investment is only a small part as you also need to get the users to buy in to Civil 3D which is a totally different animal from vanilla CAD.
neilyj (No connection with Autodesk other than using the products in the real world)
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This is an age-old battle that we fight all the time. It's hard to argue with just using plain old polylines to indicate contours--versus taking the time to construct a usable, legitimate surface with feature lines and grading objects--from a time consuming (and profitability) standpoint... especially with straight-up site plans with no corridors to speak of. Subdivisions are a different animal because roads dominate the initial design, and corridors beat vanilla polylines hands-down. But site plans require more patience, work, and care, in my opinion.
As a designer, I tell my supervisors that I can't create a workable grading plan on a site without using feature lines and grading objects combined into a C3D surface. I don't create surfaces just because I want to, I create them because I need them to show me where the low points are, what the contours look like, what the cut-fill situation is at any given moment, what finish floor elevations will work, what kind of slopes I need to get back to existing ground, what size retaining wall is required, etc., etc. I don't have the ability to visualize these things with vanilla polylines... I need the surface in order to create the grading.
In addition, I would agree that more training is needed, and, most importantly, working with feature lines and grading objects daily to get the worker bees up to speed so that profitability returns to the grading portion of the project.
My approach would be to have a shootout between the contour guys and the C3D gurus. The only way to settle the argument is to demonstrate which approach is most efficient.
I would first decide if your peer users are self motivated to experiment and learn on their own. If not, then it's a sink or swim situation for them. If so, then lend your knowledge when you can. If they seem to struggle with the same task over and over, make them write down the steps. They have to know the fundamentals and interface before expanding on their knowledge. You must relay that to managment in a direct way and then tell them, "the only thing worse than training our staff and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay".
If you want to persuade management what additional training could do for the less experienced folks, then do a 30 minute demo to management by taking a surface, do various color analysis, layout a road or ditch with grading using corridors, layout drainage structures, create a volume report and show structure/pipe tables. Nothing real complex, just something to show them the power of alignments, profiles, grading, volumes, etc... Management seems impressed when you can show them cut/fill numbers quickly and/or 3d renderings in the object viewer, so adjust your road profile and rebuild your corridor and run the volumes again, then grip the surface and drainage structures to display in the object viewer. Management also likes to see how civil 3d handles revisions, so make changes with 2 or 3 viewports on screen so they can see for themselves.
Did we get any better in 10 years?
I going with yes