I am missing my LAND menu options for importing/exporting points, point settings... etc..etc. How can I bring that back into C3D? I
1. Always report your version of Civil 3D.
2. If Land means Land Design Development, try to forget that program.
3. If there is something specific, ask, but you should have everything you need within the Create Points menu whether on the Ribbon or the Dropdown.
Bill
If you are using Civil 3D, make sure you started Civil 3D from the correct shortcut. If you click on "Civil 3D as AutoCAD", then all your Civil stuff will be disabled.
Also make sure you are on the right workspace. If you're on one of the other workspaces, such as the Map Geospatial, you'll see a lot of Map stuff in the Ribbon/manus, instead of Civil stuff.
I am Sure that when installed the civil 3d defult is to show the ribbon and the menu bar is not shown (Could be wrong there) If you do not have the menu bar - at command line menubar and set to 1. You will need the ribbon for Civil 3d 2010 onwards as there are comands that are not on the menubar. I think this is Autodesks way of migrating users to the ribbon.
To start with this will seem crappy but get use to it as this is the way its going and not so bad after a while. Top write of your screen there is a circle with a ? in the middle when expanded there is a Where is my command when open thos will show you where most of you commands reside in the defulat ribbon tabs/ menues
In response to item 2. "If Land means Land Design Development, try to forget that program." That is an inappropriate response in my opinion. Yes, Land Design Development is older than Land Desktop but that does NOT make the question invalid. Not everyone has been through the yearly changes. He may have worked for a company that saw no need to upgrade and is now with a company running newer software. The idea though that the knowledge that was gained before is now useless and requires total retraining is not totally wise. If in saying Land he meant Land Desktop, that part was merged into Civil 3d in the 2010 version so the question is TOTALLY relevant. Again, not everyone upgrades every year, especially not your bigger organizations.
As for item 3, that does not answer anything.
Not sure what you're saying there...
I've never heard of "Land Design Development" myself; I suspect Bill meant Land Desktop.
But Land Desktop was not merged into C3D in the 2010 version. Naming them the way Autodesk did has created a lot of confusion... Despite the similarity in names, Land Desktop and Civil 3D are essentially two completely different programs. There are some commands in Civil 3D that have relatively-direct counterparts in Land Desktop, but the two programs operate in fundamentally different ways. That's why some people recommend that you try to forget what you learned in Land Desktop; a lot of people who are experts with Land Desktop have more trouble with Civil 3D than people who are starting fresh, because they keep trying to do things in C3D the same way they did them in Land Desktop.
Hmmm. I think he mixed 2 together and I missed that. Prior to Land Desktop it was called Land Developmnent Desktop (LDD) which came after Autodesk purchased Softdesk.
To me it sounds like Autocad wants to make a lot more money out of retraining us LDD - Land Desktop old guys with total rewrites than letting the companies make use of the money they spent training them before. I can see when you have to change commands to enhance them but not everything requires a total rewrite.
Land Desktop had turned into something of a mess. As Autodesk was trying to add more features, it was turning into an unmanageable monster, because a lot of the core development had never been intended to support the functionality that was being added.
That's why they had to redesign a bunch of core-level stuff. They couldn't simply "tweak" Land Desktop anymore - it had too many core problems. The result is Civil 3D, which fixes a lot of long-standing problems in Land Desktop, at the cost of requiring the user to learn the new software. (And of course, C3D has its own bugs and problems, but despite that, we can still work much faster and better in C3D than we could in Land Desktop.)