Very poor interoperability between Civil 3D and Bentley OpenRoads/OpenRail

[martin.folber]

As a large Civil Infrastructure design company working in Autodesk Civil 3D and Bentley OpenRoads/Rail environment, we have big problems how to hand over finished 3D models (corridors) as perfect closed polyface mesh entities to Civil 3D for further processing. 

Neither AutoCAD nor Civil 3D is able to handle with such data. Only way how to exchange some data is export/import to LandXML, which is of course very limited.

There are 3 missing features:

1) How to work with Polyface meshes entities, these objects are not very well implemented and their API is approaching to zero - no intersection with anything, no geometry parameters, no crossing and projecting these entities to profile and cross-section views etc...

2) Sometimes is necessary to create Civil 3D TOP surface from these closed polyface meshes and generate their "outer envelope"

3) All BIM data (Bentley Items) are lost during transfer, when they could behave as properties in property sets...

Thanks

Martin

[soonhui]

Hi @martin.folber , but this is as much a problem for Bentley as it is for Autodesk, right?

[martin.folber]

Hi @soonhui ,

you are right, especially regarding handling data (properties). On the other hand, exported DWG from Bentley SW has correct geometry in closed polyface mesh entities, where neither AutoCAD nor Civil 3D are not able to somehow work with them. We would be able to develop something, but there is also no support in API :(. So users are entrapped between these two "worlds"...