California Surveyors Forums

AUTODESK'S CEO made 6.1 million last year (Pay and benefits) according to today's L.A. Times.

This is down 3% from last year. It's been tough! After using Softdesk/ LD/ LDT for over 20 years I bought Carlson and never looked back. Too much money for a program that really isn't designed for surveyor's. Glad I did so.

Hope your all having a good weekend and a safe one.

I'm thinking I might have to bit that bullet myself some day......

Lee Hixson wrote:I'm thinking I might have to bit that bullet myself some day......

Which one Lee? Carlson or the 3% pay differential? ;)

Carleson.

So tell me, just how smooth and painless is the transfer of drawings and point list data, etc., back and forth between you and your AutoCad cohorts and/or clients? Has it ever been an issue?

Assuming that you answer in the affirmative, I guess that makes my decision boil down to this: do I dare risk loosing some future employment opportunity due to my having been out of the AutoDesk loop for too long?

Lee Hixson wrote:Carleson.

So tell me, just how smooth and painless is the transfer of drawings and point list data, etc., back and forth between you and your AutoCad cohorts and/or clients? Has it ever been an issue?

Assuming that you answer in the affirmative, I guess that makes my decision boil down to this: do I dare risk loosing some future employment opportunity due to my having been out of the AutoDesk loop for too long?

LOL, that is what I thought your answer would be. \

Check with Carlson, but I believe it will still work with the latest version that you could get without the civil 3d. Otherwise they use Intellicad as a base. They can tell you the full story on that.

Like Woodcutter posted, Drawings are no problem. Points just need to be exported to a file Civil or LDD can read, usually I used ASCII. I am not sure about contours and DTM's.

And, IMSM, You can buy or nearly buy 3 seats in Carlson for the cost of 1 in Civil3D.

We've been having good luck with Civil3D and the Eagle Point Surveyor's Companion. Works pretty well. Our civil guys use Civil3D, so it is a seemless transfer from our survey dept to the civil dept. Surveyor's Companion gives real surveying solutions without the Civil3D trouble.

I still prefer my old AutoCad Eagle Point combo though. But I don't use it!

Sounds like there are lots of positives for the competitor software out there. The negative remains, however. Although I'm still unsuccessful, my 2-year job search has shown that knowing AutoCad is still a big plus; many of the openings will specifically put "AutoCad experience" as either a plus, or a requirement.

Think I'll keep waiting for a while before switching.

Most of the CAD commands are the same or very similar between AutoCAD and IntelliCAD. For that portion of the program, jumping from one to the other is pretty seamless.

The differences are in the speacialty software working on the CAD engine, the routines that are either specific to Carlson or to C3D/LDD (whatever they're gonna call it next year).

As far as providing data as a consultant to design user clients (engineers/architects), there may be compatibility issues with contour data. I'm sure there is a work around such as exporting a DTM or DEM from one and importing into the other. I had such a compatibility issue with an older version of Microsurvey and an engineering client's newer version of LDD. MicroSurvey was using 3D polylines for contours, as had Softdesk prior to LDD, but with LDD they went to using some sort of proxy objects for contours (not sure what a proxy object is, just that it's no longer a 3D polyline). Now with C3D, it's something else entirely. I'm not sure how Carlson handles the compatibility with that type of data.

As a surveyor, if looking for software for myself or private practice, for the difference in cost and the superior usefulness to the surveyor of programs like Carlson or MicroSurvey, the compatability issues would have to be almost insurmountable for me to opt for C3D/LDD.

Using either Carlson or MicroSurvey will not cause you to lose your AutoCAD skills. If you already have significant AutoCAD experience, one of the other programs would be a more economical way to keep those skills sharp while having a superior program with which to accomplish the other jobs that come your way in the meantime.

The version I have is an AutoCAD OEM engine. It's completely compatible. I do get drawings I can't open sometimes, so I simply do a "drawing recovery" and everything works fine.

The CAD commands are identical (because it IS CAD) but the cogo, contouring and other commands are unique to Carlson. It's much more geared to surveyors. It has build in legal description writers, PLSS breakdowns, least squares or compass rule and so on. If you're used to using a set of field codes, you can open a drawing and it will extract those into it's "field to finish" program automatically and assign it to layers. Who else does that?

Contours: I always explode them for clients. I did that using LDD and doing with Carlson.

Project Data: Carlson actually has a bunch of exports for a lot of programs including LDD and other I can't even remember. If you have an engineer that wants your DTM, you can give him/ her 3D break lines with the Triangle mesh (the best way I think) or export your DTM using LandXML.

Some municipalities locally wan the "fieldbook files" that LD produces. Carlson can even create one from your rawdata to give to them.

The learning curve for me was how Carlson draws points. They have 4 different ways to draw points, and it was hard to keep track of the different ways at first. However they have some videos and with a little self-education, and creation of a cheat sheet, I have it the way I want it now.

With anything, you'll need to have a few projects under your belt before you get really efficient at it.

Anyway, that's all the secretes to my time-saving strategies I'm going to give away today.