Defective program

[JimMcLefresh7472]

A Surveyor does not measure land in three digits, after the decimal place, they measure in two digits.  Sometime measuring to the hundredth is difficult. 

Why does Autodesk provide the Civil Community with a program that displays most of its measurements, out of the box, in three digits after the decimal place?  A standard that cannot be used.

Why most I pay Autodesk for a defective program that I’m required to change from three to two digits in most of the label styles?  It should come out of the box as a true civil product or you should provide me with a "Hotfix" to change the settings.

To major examples are line labels.  All the out of the box labels are displayed in three digits and the distance is missing a (‘) foot mark.  A small but required item.

Edited by
Discussion_Admin

[JimMcLefresh7472]

A Surveyor does not measure land in three digits, after the decimal place, they measure in two digits.  Sometime measuring to the hundredth is difficult. 

Why does Autodesk provide the Civil Community with a program that displays most of its measurements, out of the box, in three digits after the decimal place?  A standard that cannot be used.

Why most I pay Autodesk for a defective program that I’m required to change from three to two digits in most of the label styles?  It should come out of the box as a true civil product or you should provide me with a "Hotfix" to change the settings.

To major examples are line labels.  All the out of the box labels are displayed in three digits and the distance is missing a (‘) foot mark.  A small but required item.

Edited by
Discussion_Admin

[sjg]

Under the ambient settings tab under the drawing settings you can adjust the precision for all label types and then with the new label style you create precision will automattically be 2 decimal places and within the label style just add a foot mark after the text.

[owenmull]

        "A Surveyor does not measure land in three digits, after the decimal place, they measure in two digits.  Sometime measuring to the hundredth is difficult. "

I would argue the validity of that statement. With the quality of instruments today, measurements to the hundredth are indeed possible. To the thousandth? Not really, but a lot of it depends on what exactly you are using, be it GPS, or even what type of GPS, or Total Station, or whatever. Some are more accurate and precise than others, and because the unit displays to the thousandth doesn't mean it is that accurate, you are right there, but with care, hundredth is indeed possible. It all depends on what you are doing, and what you are using. With GPS? I'd say the thousandth isn't realistically possible. With a Total Station? Most definitely is possible. It all depends.

          "Why does Autodesk provide the Civil Community with a program that displays most of its measurements, out of the box, in three digits after the decimal place?"

Autodesk provides a product that's purpose is to be customized. They can't begin to guess what you, the end user, is going to use it for, so they make it completely customizable. You are free to change any setting, label, style, etc. you wish. I don't see what your gripe about this is. Nothing is ever perfect OOTB, because everyone does things differently. Do you expect Autodesk to put out 1,000,000,000 versions of Civil 3D just to suit you?

          "Why most I pay Autodesk for a defective program that I’m required to change from three to two digits in most of the label styles?"

Again, it's not defective, you just have to tailor it to your needs/wants/desires.

           "It should come out of the box as a true civil product or you should provide me with a "Hotfix" to change the settings."

They shouldn't have to provide you with anything, as there is nothing to fix. Get over it. It is a true Civil product, and apparently, you've never run anything else. Good luck trying.

             "To major examples are line labels.  All the out of the box labels are displayed in three digits and the distance is missing a (‘) foot mark.  A small but required item."

Again, this is easily changed. Takes about ~25s. Pretty simple. In fact, in the time it took you to gripe about not knowing what you're doing, you could have already figured out how to do it. Just saying.......

[JimMcLefresh7472]

Yes, I know "Times are a changing.'  Yet I didn't need to make all these changes in Soft Desk or LDD.  Autodesk has to many programmers building these programs and have forgotten the user.

I first started using Autocad when you made the calculation then went to the key board and did mostly line commands.  I can remember when a mouse was first added to the program.  What a great advancement.

[BrianHailey]

---

@JimMcLefresh7472 wrote:

Autodesk has to many programmers building these programs

---

At least the default Manning's n value is no longer 10. 

[Joe-Bouza]

LOL

[sboon]

---

@JimMcLefresh7472 wrote:

Yes, I know "Times are a changing.'  Yet I didn't need to make all these changes in Soft Desk or LDD.  Autodesk has to many programmers building these programs and have forgotten the user.

---

Autodesk has not forgotten anyone.  What they have done is provided a product that suits most users most of the time.  I can assure you that all of the metric survey measurements coming into my office are to the thousandth, and we don't show any feet or inch marks on the labels.

The Softdesk and LDD products were created in the US promarily for the American user base.  Civil3d is a worldwide product and the settings are generic so that the largest possible number of users can use it and customize it to their needs. 

[owenmull]

                  "Yes, I know "Times are a changing.'  Yet I didn't need to make all these changes in Soft Desk or LDD.  Autodesk has to many programmers building these programs and have forgotten the user."

Softdesk and LDD were built for a very specific purpose, with a targeted objective. Civil 3D is built to be customized. It makes it sooooooooo much more versatile than LDD could ever have hoped to become.

The programmers "building these programs" have made the user's life a heck of a lot easier. Just you try doing pipe networks, or better yet, pressure pipe networks with the old software.

The problem here is between the keyboard and the chair, not the software itself. Take a class, learn C3D, and then you will find that it really is a great tool.

Mr. Brian Haley offers several classes, both online and in person, and if you can put up with his jokes, you can learn a lot. 

[Sinc]

As others have said, these settings can be easily-customized by changing the Style settings.  I too am confused as to why the default Styles are so weird, but you can fix them yourself.  Civil 3D is very customizable, it's just the default Styles that leave lots of questions.  It does seem like a lot of these things should be set correctly by default, rather than forcing the user to figure out the problems and "fix" them, but that's the way it is.

And there's actually a different problem...  If you go into things like "Edit Points" in Prospector and copy-and-paste to Excel, it includes the ' mark, which causes the data to appear as a text item, as opposed to a numeric item.  So if I do that, I generally have to do a search-and-replace in Excel to eliminate the  unwanted ' mark.

I think it all goes back to the fact that nobody at Autodesk actually USES this product.  So they don't realize how many items create additional unnecessary complications for their users.

[neilyj666]

....and if you copy volume figures it puts Cu.M. after the numbers which need to be removed...

[bigblittlerent]

Default Contour label styles to the hundredth would also 'suggest' an 'insane' amount of accuracy.

Most often label contours to the foot.

[shawn]

It's true that all of these things are easily customizable. Heck, it might even be a good thing that these settings and things are set to uncommon precisions if only because it forces most new users to learn how to control and change them for custom templates.

Another "favorite" weird default setting of mine is that the existing profile elevation label in the profile information bands are set to two decimal places of precision while the finished ground elevation labels are set to three places.

I wouldn't say the program is defective by any stretch of the imagination, but I will agree that some of the default settings make me wonder if the people that set up the "out-of-the-box" templates have ever worked in the field. It's not a big thing though. As I said it may even be beneficial in that if forces new users to figure things out faster than they otherwise might.

[sboon]

---

Another "favorite" weird default setting of mine is that the existing profile elevation label in the profile information bands are set to two decimal places of precision while the finished ground elevation labels are set to three places.

---

As far as I am concerned that setting is exactly the way it should be.  Existing profile data is based on topo shots by the surveyor which have then been interpolated to build the surface model and the profile.  Design information is theoretical, and should be expressed at a precision high enough to ensure that the intent is communicated for the layout.

This is an excellent example of why Autodesk should be doing things exactly the way they are.

[owenmull]

While you have a point, Mr. SBoon, I have found that in the field, the contractors will never ever hit the thousandth accuracy, so why design it that accurate? 

I remember I set a bunch of vertical control for a construction job we had, and we gave them elevations to the thousandths. All it did was confuse the contractor and scare them. If they can realistically build ANYTHING within a couple hundredths, you should consider yourself lucky. So why design to an unattainable accuracy?

But, to each his own, right?

[sboon]

In the past the cost of maintaining millimeter levels of precision while calculating the layout usually was not worth the effort/cost and really wasn't necessary most of the time.  Now they can reliably hit centimeter levels of accuracy so why not give them at least that, to avoid roundoff errors creeping into the calculations used to set the grades etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that design data should be provided at the level of precision that it was calculated at.  Any rounding off will happen at the very last stage, during the final layout but should not be introduced at an intermediate point of the calculations.

[ChrisRS]

Use of the term defective is an over reaction. That said, it never ceases to amaze me that almost everthing needs to be customized. I had not coinsidered your take on metric vs. imperial units. I will give you that 3 decimal places makes sence for metric, but it seems reasonable that theIimperial templacte should be geared to imperial units with 2 decimal places.

I am a fiim believer in the various 80-20 rules. If 80 percent of the styles are good, I am willing to live with or customize the 20% that i do not like. I think that out of the box Civil 3D is 20-80.

At one time in my career, I was was City Enginer for a small quickly growing city. I reviewed thousands of sheets of plans prepared by dozens of firms, samll and large. Some were even hand drafted. None of them resembled the styles of Civil 3D out of the box..

[jmccabeLSIT]

I can empathize with the OP and his frustration with C3D from the surveyors perspective.  It is by far one of the most difficult tasks I have ever encounterd and that is the massive setup required to get C3D customized for your application.  Without a doubt there is tremdous potential with C3D but it could realistically take months to massage the software to a point where you are happy with your final deliverable.(maybe years)

As a surveyor, it starts with me.  If I can't get a base map out the door my engineers have nothing to design from.  I gather from posts by other surveyors that C3D has kind of skipped over us, but part of me disagrees.  It is just the massive amount of customizing that needs to be done to get your final product quickly.

I myselft am currently stuck with the problem of importing field comments and survey feature text.  Our company has a procedure for data collection that simply cannot be changed and I have found C3D not very user friendly.  C3D is customizable so it wants you to be also.

Trying not to give up, since my career depends on it.

[Sinc]

I agree whole-heartedly, and have been ranting about this for YEARS now.

C3D is a very powerful piece of software, possibly better than anything else available (including ProE, which is far more expensive).

But there remain fundamental flaws that make it difficult for users to adopt and use.  I tell Autodesk about these flaws every chance I get (in person or on this forum), and sometimes they get fixed, more-often not.   It helps when EVERYONE who discovers these problems, reports them to Autodesk.  Autodesk views "number of complaints" as the way they rank problems.

I know some in this forum view me as being "negative", but I'm not.  I just get very vocal about what needs to be fixed, as someone who has actually worked in this industry since 1985.  After all, nothing will get fixed unless it's pointed out, so simply saying "C3D is Great" (as some do) does nothing to advance anything.  On other forums, I'm slammed as an "Autodesk shill", because I talk about how productive I am with C3D.  It's all a matter of perspective.

[peterfunkautodesk · Accepted solution]

For the OP, what template are you using when you start your drawings? I've opened up the Imperial template that ships with Civil 3D and found the following:

1. All the line labels have the ' mark at the end of the distance

2. All of the parcel labels are set to 2 decimal places

3. Some of the general line labels are set to 2 decimal places, the rest are set to 3.

4. Point labels are set to 2 decimal places

5. Contour labels are set to 2 decimal places

If you are using acad.dwt as your template, the settings are typically 3 decimal places. This template is designed for AutoCAD drawings and shouldn't be used as a starting point for Civil 3D.

We'd love to setup Civil 3D to meet everyone's standards out of the box that is almost impossible to do. We provide "Country Kits" for many areas around the world but in the US the standards (for layers, labels and engineering parameters) aren't well defined and vary from region to region.

Regards,

Peter Funk

Autodesk, Inc.

[Sinc]

---

@peterfunkautodesk wrote:

3. Some of the general line labels are set to 2 decimal places, the rest are set to 3.

 

---

I think that's a key point.  Why the variance?

And this is as of C3D 2013...  In earlier versions, all of the Imperial templates had all distances set to 3 decimal points...  It's arguable that this might be desirable for platting, as it more-closely coincides with the precision of the delta angles for curves, and can make it easier to redraw recorded plats in CAD while still matching everything, but it's not standard.

I might actually prefer having distances labeled to the nearest .001', since that more-closely corresponds to the accuracy of the delta angle for curves, and would make it much easier to redraw a recorded plat from the printed plans.  But that's not where the industry is currently at.  This level of precision means nothing as far as the real world goes, but it makes it easier to redraw things in CAD, and get things like C3D's automatic labels to match the recorded versions.

So I guess I'm self-contradictory on this point...