Survey & Civil 3D Frustration

[lctilley]

Is there a way that I edit the actual RAW data in Civil 3D? I know I can edit the Fieldbook, even though I still find it cumbersome, unless one is an actual surveyor and understands all of the terminology. What happens for the everyday survey drafter? How are they supposed to handle little things like adjusting a point, or setting a point? How much production time and by extension profit, are we going to lose trying to learn how to manipulate our field data from the survey crews, not to mention having to teach everyone else how to do it?

I'm sure you can sense the frustration here. We have been trying for the past 16 months to use Civil 3D exclusively. It hasn't happened yet. We have spent many thousands of dollars on training and time dedicated to setting up the templates and styles and the hundreds of settings that are involved in each one. Don't get me wrong, for the most part I love the software. I like the actual Civil Engineering part. It still has some issues but we have learned to make it walk and talk in our office. But that's not all we do. We are a Land Surveying office too. We had actually got pretty good at producing surveys in 06, even though parcels still force closure and writing a legal description can be a nightmare, so much so that we quit trying. We are now looking into 3rd party software that will let us work with the RAW data from the survey crews and maybe make our lives easier and raise our profit margin at the same time. We just cannot afford to spend any more money trying to make something work that doesn't seem to want to cooperate.

How about it Autodesk, can you help us out with this? How about trying to take some of the confusion and complication out of this for us? I have been a user and supporter of AutoCAD for over 18 years now so I think I have grounds to complain a little. Now, I will continue to fight my way through this and find a way to make it work for us with a profit margin that my bosses can live with or until they decide that the huge monetary investment is just not worth continuing and they move us to another software that will work better for us. I know that many of the people on the discussion group are re-sellers and they have been a great help, but many of us have to use this software every day, for 8 to 12 hours a day and the bottom line is, without us, you guys don't make as much profit, right?

If there is anyone out there that has all of this figured out please let me know so we can get in touch with you. I will be glad to take it all back if someone who actually uses this stuff day after day can tell me face to face, or on the phone that they use it with complete success and can help me figure it out too. So how about it?

[Anonymous]

CC is a nice idea, but in my experience it doesn't actually do all that much conversion in the real world. Sometimes you can get the control points to show up in the FBK, but mostly it just comments the whole file. Maybe if it was open source, it would be more useful because we could just tweak the code, but that's a lot of work.

I have to side with AD on this one in some sense, because data collector manufacturers are intentionally messing up the process in the belief that they can make a few hundred bucks by forcing people to buy their proprietary survey software add-ons. Let me know how that works out. I hope the industry wakes up and goes with FBK or, even better, LandXML pretty soon.

[Sinc]

>> Let me know how that works out. I hope the industry wakes up and goes with FBK

That's a joke, right? 🙂

[Anonymous]

My meaning is that there needs to be a common format the *entire* process. Whether that's XML or FBK, or even some common RAW format, it needs to be common.

There's always a way to get some parts of the RAW file into a FBK format, but not all of it. For instance, NE shots tend to come over very easily, but ADVA translators are harder to find, and forget finding something free that brings over setup information or curve codes. I've heard rumors from several people using several data collectors that they were told this was at least somewhat intentional, because it forces people to use proprietary plugins to do adjustments.