AussieHans,
Excellent explanation.
I also felt the same things as I worked with 12d before and now moved to C3D.
I must digress with the general trend of this thread.
I've used Civil 3d, 12d & Civilcad over the past 5 years.
12d v7 & 8 were no where nearly as good as v10 is at present. While I have more experience in Civil 3d I (and so do most employers now) choose to use 12d as it is the superior package now. 12d is much more powerful for design. CIvil 3d wins hands down for drafting though. This works well for us thoguh as we now use 12d for design and AutoCad for drafting (where previously we used Civil 3d for design and then the drafters done the drafting in AutoCad).
In Australia the war between CIvil 3D and 12d was close 5 years ago. It is over now and 12d has clearly won.
Interesting post and replies. I've recently been looking into this whole 12d vs Civil3d as well. My background is with 12d but the new company I have recently started working for is currently running both as a trial.
Now that both platforms have had further updates in the past few years, do any users have any recent and unbiased feedback they could add?
I'll try not to be biased but have just finished going through Civil 3d as i'm looking to move away from 12d to something more modern.
In my opinion, 12d is far more powerful and flexible than Civil 3d BUT the comments from everyone on the crappy look, feel and usability of 12d are very true. And to clarify, i've been using 12d for 10+ years... The interface, help menus (12d refers to them as reference manuals, they don't help too much!) and file structure are old as the hills and very inefficient. Further to this, to get the full advantage of 12d you have to spend lots of time learning how to customise toolbars and write screen layouts and macros.
As far as sharing data between projects, it's a mess! Where CAD has xref's that share everything within each dwg, 12d has model sharing and there is no way to share all models (comparable to layers) without a lot of screwing around.
I am a surveyor who also builds models from scratch for our GPS machine control as most stuff coming from engineering firms isn't good enough for us to use. In saying this 12d lacks the tools to easily generate extra data from existing data but we've worked around this over the years as 12d has far superior survey capabilities.
I've just finished evaluating Bentley Open Roads which i've found to be superior to both Civil 3d and 12d. It has both survey and design capabilities, along with a modern interface and Bentley's own cloud service makes it all so easy.
Civil 3d lacks ALL of the functions required for engineering survey in Australia as it seems the rest of the world aren't required to do any sort of QA on construction for tolerance. C3D also makes it very hard to enter alignment data from plans as it seems to require a surface to create a vertical alignment. I found 3rd party tools to do things like this but i struggle to buy a product and then have to buy more to get functionality that we need to do our job.
I love CAD for drafting and 12d for modelling and survey but will be moving to Bentley very shortly!
Hi Vaughan,
Unfortunately we didn't end up moving ahead with it, it doesn't have the survey functionality that we need. There are some add ons that we could get to do most things but not everything.
Interestingly, I learnt that survey in Australia is a lot more onerous than other countries, this is probably why it didn't have everything we needed.
12D is an obsolete crap. Too slow to use, lack of logic in menu bars. Data structure has not been updated since 90th. Export between other software programs is limited. For each type of export format, you need to pay separately. There is no analogy of free lisps database in web.
All civil designs created in 12D I had to use, looked unprofessional and had many issues. Had to deal with a few clients who’s designers used 12D for structural drawings of earthwork section. To say it was a nightmare, say nothing at all. Shifted grids, lines mismatch between drawings. Overlaps between different section of models. So on, so on and so on
Without government support, when to get a government contract you need to get 12d, this software will get out of marcket quickly.