National CAD Standard

[tony1978]

I am curious how many civil engineering companies that work in California actually use the national CAD standards? If you are using it, why and who is enforcing or requesting you to use it? Do you set most of you Civil 3D layers to match the national CAD standards?

[kcobabe]

My company is as big in California as anywhere else.

First part to note is both AEC & NAVFAC are based off of the NCS.  Most companies have also based there CAD standards off of this as they are well developed and maintained.  This reduces cost which is good.

My company actually has software beyond the standards tools in AutoCAD that check the CAD files.  So they are strictly enforced the an internal audit.  They are further in force by the client that requires them.  So all in all they are enforced.

My company's typical standards are 1st Entity Submitting to (The city, government agency, etc.), 2nd Client, 3rd NCS

[sboon]

Not in California but I'll add my comments anyway.

The NCS layer set is a good starting point, but it leaves a lot of things open to interpretation.  For example, not all corridors are roads but a lot of people use C-ROAD for all corridors.  NCS also doesn't allow for layers with the object name added as a suffix, but most of the users I know do use that feature of Civil3d.

Our company started with the complete list of NCS disciplines and groups, pared it down to the ones that were relevant to civil work and then made a lot of decisions about which objects would be part of what group.  Once we had all of that documented we used it to build our template layers.

I've run into other companies and agencies who are also using NCS, but have different interpretations of the layering system.  We would put a surveyed culvert headwall point on the layer V-NODE-HWAL but another company uses V-STRM-SYMB.

Steve
Please use the Accept as Solution or Kudo buttons when appropriate

[sfore]

I'm not in CA, but.....I fought the NCS Layer format for years and simply didn't use it.  Now, I do and wish I had a long time ago.  In the past, I used E- and P- for existing and proposed features, and I wasted a lot of time transforming my Template layers.  I think the NCS discipline designator, major group and minor group(s) is great way to organize your layers.  It also makes implementing cad standards office wide easier.  Since the C3D Imperial template is shipped OOTB with NCS in mind, it only makes sense to use and expand.  Most of my NCS layers are already setup in my template, but I do keep a list of the NCS Layers handy so that I can refer to major and minor groups to create layers when needed.  We kinda view and use C- as proposed and V- as existing/surveyed.  There's other discipline combinations we use too but in a nutshell, thats it.  One thing I do change on any existing surface I create is the Object layer from C-TOPO to V-TOPO.  The 'component layers' are already preset in my existing surface style (V-TOPO-MAJR, V-TOPO-MINR, V-TINN etc...).