CIVIL 3d Pressure Pipe Networks - What is it good for?

[AHib]

I have been playing around with the Pressure Pipe Network for the past week and have come to the conclusion it is totally useless for any civil application. It's like it was a process engineering program and has been shoved into Civil 3d.

It is crazy that the pipe information doesn't appear on the data bands in a profile.  Having to fudge a profile in civil 3d to get this information on a long section is a total waste of time.  It could be drawn in plain AutoCAD in 1/4 of the time but that defeats the purpose of using "smart" objects.  

Why can't the pressure network can't simply be designed as a alignment/profile and then the pipe object be inserted based on where in the pipe you want to design too (i.e top of pipe, invert etc).  Surely once the program knows what pipe size is being used the information that is requried to actually construct a pipe (Invert Level, depth to invert, depth of cover etc) can be easily added to the data bands of a profile.  

I even tried to turn the alignment profile into a feature line (using "create feature line from alignment") and create the pressure pipe network using the top of the pipe as the vertex elevations.  Unfortunately the feature line has completely different elevations than the profile it was created from and is missing grade breaks.... (both with dynamic turned on and off); still at least it got the stations correct....  It's not even worth continuing to see what happens once the pipe network is created from the (mystery) feature line.

The way it works at the moment I won't be recommending using the pressure pipe network in Civil 3d, but to continue using the program we currently use.  This may then influence us not to pursure Civil 3D and continue using the other program; which would be a shame as there are some great features in Civil 3D.

[rkmcswain]

anthony.hibbert wrote:

I have been playing around with the Pressure Pipe Network for the past week and have come to the conclusion it is totally useless for any civil application.

I cannot disagree with that. It serves zero purpose for us. What a shame....

[AHib]

I actually got the pressure pipe from feature line to work as expected in the end!

Not a very good way to design a pipe network, but at least it creates the pipe so it looks good in a 3d view and Infraworks/Navisworks.

[IanMathers1537]

I strongly agree.  When we purchased Civil 3d 2014, I'd been given the impression by the sales people that pipe networks was greatly improved and that the pressure networks was fabulous.  Although the layout looks great in plan view, I have many problems with the profile and had to go back to straight line work.  This is particularly evident right now as I'm trying to match the pipe to field measured points and find that you have to check/edit elevation for each length of pipe as you go.  The editor will attach to the last pipe, but doesn't see the node at the end point.