Is Autodesk Civil 3D a chimera?
I am a County Surveyor that works within a county public works department with various engineers and engineer techs. Over the past year and a half I have been working on providing Civil3D deliverables it what I believe to be the way that I think Autodesk intends. All the points have symbology defined by my survey template (that I ripped off from the Florida Department of Transportation), most all of my survey location linework consists of full 3D Civil 3D Survey Figures defined by my points as inserted into the Civil3D Survey Database. My surfaces are created from the Civil 3D points in the drawing and the Civil 3D Survey Figures contained within the Civil 3D Survey Database. I’m sure I could do some things better, but I think I’m providing a proper deliverable.
So anyway, I have been asking the engineering techs who work with my drawings if they are able to use all of these smart dynamic 3D entities that I am creating to their advantage. The answer that I’m getting back often time is no. They use the surface alright, but having a surface entity for surfaces really isn’t all that new to Civil 3D. We had them in Land Desktop and Carlson. The don’t seem to really interact with my points all that much and actually they complain about the symbols dynamically scaling up and down when they change the scale on their drawings. They would rather them stay just they way they show on the survey. I had a similar issue when I would use annotative text in my drawings. They didn’t like my text scaling up and down when they would change scales. So I had to stop using it. It does not appear that they interact with the 3D Survey Figures at all. And sometimes they complain about them because they are difficult for them to use at all. They end up having to trace either 2D or 3D polylines over them to work with them.
When I look at things on my end, I find Civil 3D difficult to work with. It seems to make things a lot more complicated than they need to be. Early on, I discovered that it has virtually no useful survey data processing capability. I like most people use a 3rd party survey data processor (Star*Net in my case) to go from raw survey observations to coordinates that I import into the Survey Database. I find the Survey Database constraining in that I have difficulty making post-import edits to the points and it not having the COGO functionality that I am used to having with other software. I have had issues with the survey database being in one coordinate system and the drawing being in another slightly different coordinate system and Civil 3D “helping” me by doing a coordinate transformation without any warnings that it is doing so (been burned by that more than a few times). I would set all of my settings to no datum and unitless if I could, but it wont let you do that. I find it odd that feature styles for my points are defined by my drawing template, but the styles for the Survey Figures are defined by a separate file on my local hard drive (kind to hard to keep everybody in the office on the same page when an edit to the feature table needs to be made). I find Survey Figures hard to work with in general. If they weren’t used for the automatic linework function and needed for the surface, I don’t think I would use them at all. Also, the overall performance of the program seems poor. It seems like I am constantly waiting on it to complete one function before going to the next. I that can be something as simple as editing a piece of text.
So, what is the takeaway? Why should my survey department go though the pain of using a program that is difficult to use and does not appear to give much benefit to the engineers down the line? Has anyone out there seen the promised Civil 3D utopia where everything just works in either a survey or engineering department? Seems like everybody just keeps trying to work toward the perfect template that will do everything they want it to do. Is it a chimera? Has anybody got there yet? Right now, I am seriously considering transitioning over to something like Carlson Survey and just deliver an AutoCAD deliverable with LandXML file. Thoughts?
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