California Surveyors Forums

Our company is upgrading to Civil3D after many years on 2004. My attempts to do survey drafting in Civil3D in the past were slow and painful. What are people using out there as a surveying platform for Civil3D? Or are you just buckling down and learning to work within Civil3D? Any recommendations would be helpful. Retirement is not an option yet.

Have I seen this post before?

I use C3D, began in 2006. Never liked it really, always crashed but has slowly gotten a bit better with each new version since v2007.

For surveyors C3D is easier than using LDD 2004. That whole routine to build a surface is gone now. Plus the point utilities are much better these days.

I have probably asked before. We finally pulled the trigger after talking about it for a year.. By C3D I assume you mean AutoCAD Civil 3D? You continued to use even after they dropped LDD? And no problem picking it up?

From what I understand now you don't buy it you rent it and have to upgrade yearly and always a learning curve.
Crashes more than a crash test dummy.

Civil 3D. Yes C3D. It is just a tool, like anything else. I took a three day one on one course, I made the agenda, and I learned what I wanted to learn. I focused on the capabilities of the program for engineering. Surveyors need about one-millionth of C3D's capability.

Enjoy.

Mr. Land Butcher,
It must be incredibly frustrating for you when you drop cynical sarcastic bombs all over people's legitimate posts and they skip right over you and continue the thread.

Our office is just starting with a transition to Civil 3D, after 15+ years of using Terramodel. We are tied to our engineering design sections within DPW and their software choices, but I am looking forward to the change.

JKnox - I never thought I would find myself defending land butcher on these forums :-), but his post hits pretty near the mark on this one - AutoCAD products do require a lot of training to 'keep current', they are quite expensive, and Civil 3D in particular is known for being a pretty buggy piece of software.

Tom Herrin wrote:Our office is just starting with a transition to Civil 3D, after 15+ years of using Terramodel. ...

We will have to keep in touch, please let me know how it goes. We are sticking with Terramodel for now. I'm with Landbutcher on this one, and I'm going to try to boycott Civil 3D for as long as I can!

We switched to Civil 3D 2013 about 5 months ago from LDD 2009. I had been dreading the switch for a very long time but I have to say that I now prefer it.

Having said that, I will add that I was given the benefit of not having to bill my time and just learn the software so I would be able to help others in the firm. I set up the template, learned I did it incorrectly, set it up again, realized I still didn't get it quite right, and have set it up again...and there are some more changes I need to look into.

I think it's more frustrating having to read his bombs in every post on this forum. Everything appears to be the fault of the government...

JKnox wrote:Mr. Land Butcher,
It must be incredibly frustrating for you when you drop cynical sarcastic bombs all over people's legitimate posts and they skip right over you and continue the thread.

Using C3D 2014. 2D work is no problem but learning 3D, point clouds, etc. is very tough on your own.

Good Luck,

James

We've been using it for several years now. It's a big improvement over LDD. The key is to build a good template. There are millions of settings you have to set up if you do any topo or profile work. Setting up label styles is a challenge to learn. Also, the new dynamic text will make your head spin at first if you're not used to it.

The sad thing is C3D is going away and is going to be replaced with Infrastructure Design Suit Premium 2015 (IDSP 2015). I don't know how different it is. I don't think it will be like going from LDD 2004 to C3D. That was rough.

Is IDSP 2015 a replacement for C3D or just a collection of other pieces of software together with C3D? C3D 2015 is available now on its own, and I have not heard that it will be replaced anytime soon. I have been doing a fair amount of research on the transition we need to go through and have found no references to C3D going away.

Well, thanks for the input, even if I didn't learn anything I didn't already know...
Basically what I am hearing is either boycott C3D (I would love to do that but I work for a Civil Engineering firm that is using it, so that is not an option) or just buckle up and learn it, which is I guess what I will have to do. I figured the key would be creating the template, so there will be some fun ahead (That was sarcastic) I don't mind Butcher's posts. I encourage a great deal of healthy skepticism. My only comment would be if you want to defund Government, what's YOUR plan?

I guess I was hoping to hear from someone that was using a second-party survey platform that worked well with Civil 3D. The only rumor I've heard regarding C3D is that they were going to reintroduce a surveying module with C3D...anyone hear that one?

Check out SincPac. It was written by a surveyor to run inside of C3D. It adds a lot of survey functionality for a pretty reasonable price. They have a 28 day trial version:

http://www.quuxsoft.com/

It sucks disks space (and dram) and we never used more than 5% of the features.

The Forest Service engineering teams use C3D with good reason. But the Inter-mountain Region Forest Service land surveyor staff use AutoCAD (vanilla or Map3D) as our CAD engine. Our Utah staff uses Carlson Survey (add-on version), and all of our Region survey staff use BLM's geodesy LISP routines (CAPD) for township/section sub-divisional calculations, and also for Grant and Irregular boundary resolutions.

I have read that Traverse PC does the same thing as the BLM add-on routines, and is a stand alone system. I wanted to demo it, but they do not provide demos. I was not willing to pay several $1000 to see if we liked it or not.

I've tried Civil3D and just can't get the concept or just don't want to. I use Carlson Survey and it works great for me. Plus they have lots of training videos on line.

I switched to to Carlson Survey embebed (which is an autocad engine). It creates native .dwg files. I now have 4 seats and work with several engineers who use CAD.