Best Way to Learn Profile Development(Pipes/Horizontal Drilling) and plan production

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

The company that I work for specializes in Horizontal Directional Drills and Microtunnels, and I am supposed to perform drawings in Civil 3D to produce Plans/Profiles that will be used for bids. I have 3 months to learn and be ready to do the job before one of our engineers who handles this work will be leaving. Please suggest me the best sequence/ways to learn the following.(I usually need Civil 3D to do the following)

1. The client usually provides us with base map/topo and their drawings with a lot of refs. I need to load their xref etc properly.

2. I would have to create a simple alignment of pipelines in plan and cut cross-section along that alignment

3. I would have to draw vertical alignment(simple geometry) on the cross section and indicate some notes.

4. Be able to print them out into standard 11x7 pdf sheets with company logo etc.

5. sometimes I would have to take images from google earth (not topo) or pictures/pdf and draw over them to develop plans/profiles or simply snip a vertical cross-section and markup over it with some curves and lines.

6. I have been using Civil 3D occasionally for few months now but its been much like trial and error.

If you could suggest the best way to learn above workflow, I would be grateful. Looks like I donot need to learn about other area that I dont use in the job( surface creation, etc). Please guide me... Thanks 

[neilyj666]

i suggest you will need to know how to create surfaces for both existing ground and subsurface strata (as the type of strata could affect your bid and pricing) and you will need to display these on your plans.

Your request could take up a weeks training course so there is little point in trying to give you a step by step so I suggest searching on google/YouTube for relevant videos and reviewing past bids to see what was done.

[Joe-Bouza]

Hello @Anonymous  as @neilyj666  suggested. Most of your items (or maybe all of them ) are fundamental civil3d functions and the firs few OOTB tutorials will get you going. Adding notes , Images etc are basic autoCad functions. Although Civil3d can/ will automate some of the note(s) work.

Ironically, there is no entry in your list to perform Plan Production which you may want to do those tutorials too.

Maybe an oversimplification: the alignment and profiles tools just help you draw smart polylines. Think "ok, I have to draw this" and some of the anxiety will ease up.

IMO the best way to learn, and I am dating myself with this analogy is "To get under the hood and scrape your knuckles"... It hurts but only a little and for a short bit.

So start scraping your knuckles and ask ask ask questions here as you go.

[samir_rezk]

Hi @Anonymous 

There is very good recommendations already, I would like to add this great free course on Autodesk Design Academy. Although it's a certification prep course, it does a great job on introducing many features of Civil 3D. It is always helpful to have an all inclusive overview of the entire software capabilities, so that you will be better prepared and opt to use different features and tools based on different design conditions and goals.

Hope this helps,