Alternatives to Civil 3D for strurctures/equipment/piping?

[sericksonZQUWJ]

My employer uses Civil 3D for just about everything, but I'm wondering if there's another Autodesk product we could use that would play nice with our civil drawings. My main issue is that for both structures and piping/equipment, it's all just linework which means that if we want to show multiple views of any object, they're totally unrelated to each other. So if something needs to be changed or moved in one view, we have to go through and find everywhere else that object is shown and edit it separately. Is there an Autodesk product we could use for structures, equipment, piping, etc. that can be modeled in 3D but uses .dwg format so we can easily add the drawings to our sheet set manager alongside our civil drawings?

[r.capper · Accepted solution]

Might be worth looking at Plant, depending on your license might already be available as is part of AutoCAD. (is in Autodesk AEC Collection and Plain AutoCAD)

Plant 3D Toolset In Autodesk AutoCAD | Features

[sericksonZQUWJ]

Thanks, I'll look into it!

[chriscowgill7373]

are you referring to process piping and building structures?  A lot of teams use Revit, or Plant 3D, or a combination of the two.  You can create NWC (navis works models) in the various software and import them into Civil 3D so you can determine tie in points.  Civil 3D is good for yard piping, but not really within buildings.  Pressure networks have a really long way to go before they would even come close to competing with the ease of Plant 3D for process piping.

[Joe-Bouza]

If your employer is using civil3d for everything and using native lines for pipes then he is only using civil3d as Autocad.

[AllenJessup]

Basically you can "Draw" anything in 3D in AutoCAD. Civil 3D is based on Autocad. If you draw the parts in 3D and show different views in Layouts. You can change the part in one place and have all the views update. This is the heavy hammer approach. As @chriscowgill7373 mentioned. There are other programs that have higher levels of automation.

[sericksonZQUWJ]

Thanks for all the replies! I'm new to Civil 3D, but from what I've done so far I would have to agree with all of you, it's not well-suited to drawing piping within structures. I've mentioned Plant 3D to my manager and he seems to be on board!

I found what seems to be a pretty good set of introductory videos here, but if anyone has other resources you think would be useful, I'd love to see them too!