Why Can’t Your Civil 3D Do This?

Sorry no fancy graphics or videos created by me showing Civil 3D in action. Instead I’ve borrowed videos created by the Autodesk Technical Marketing Managers and provided links to them.

• Can your Civil 3D have pipes that interact with each other? After all don’t we provide crossing pipe labels to ensure we have enough space between pipes? Why doesn’t Civil 3D provide the ability to have your sewer pipes stay at least 18” from the water line? Why does Civil 3D make you look at labels in profile view to verify the spacing?
• Can your Civil 3D know when it runs into itself? Well unfortunately it doesn’t. Have two crossing baselines? Well Civil 3D will force you to split a corridor region, create an intersection, then delete regions you really don’t need. I know Autodesk knows what to do when walls intersect each other as shown in Revit, so why not have the similar behavior in Civil 3D?
• Improved survey collection or surveying George Washington would recognize? It’s been around 266 years since a young George Washington was appointed official surveyor of Culpeper County. In the past 266 years we’ve gone from using paper and pencil to connect surveyed points to having a computer connect dots for us. Seems to me if Civil 3D was forward looking those surveyed points would connect and produce a 3d model of curbs, gutters, pavements, and fences. Why can’t Civil 3D create 3D objects from surveyed points? Well the obvious answer is Civil 3D doesn’t have real world objects. (Yes, the topic of the video doesn’t match my comments, but then again the link I used from the Autodesk didn’t match the link either.)
• Why no mentioning of the best data shortcut feature improvement in Civil 3D 2016? Probably because it was my idea (yes, many other users also had this idea, probably you the reader). I spent numerous hours advocating for the removal of the annoying dialog box that asked you to save the drawing, even though it was previously saved. Did you see John pan in the drawing and then easily create data shortcuts? It made the video a lot nice to watch without him having to stop, explain why he needed to save the drawing, and then move on to the next step. It took way too much effort on my part to get rid of the dialog box. Then why hasn’t your Civil 3D gotten rid of the other annoying places where that save dialog box shows up, even though the drawing already has been saved? Sorry, fellow users I ran out of free time to advocate for the removal of the other dialog boxes. Feel free to hound Autodesk into removing the other instances of the warning save dialog box that isn’t necessary.
• Why can’t your Civil 3D objects make the round trip directly between Civil 3D and Infraworks? Wow, the same product can open it’s own file. Is that revolutionary? I’ve been doing this for years using Excel, AutoCAD, and Word. It’s almost like Autodesk is marketing to me as this feature is being revolutionary. You know what would really be revolutionary? A world where a company builds a product from scratch and has it consume the input files natively. Like have Infraworks read in a Civil 3D file, modify the Civil 3D file’s alignments, and then when you open the Civil 3D file in Civil 3D have the alignment show the revisions. The current process feels like an afterthought, where whoever designed the product had no idea people would want interoperability that is quick and easy. I guess we are stuck with a convoluted process. In fact I often teach in an environment where two software products are used that require an export to go from one to the other. Guess what the reaction is? If you guessed the number one answer is that sounds stupid, you would be correct. I usually have to explain that they really have the best Civil 3D workflow ever. They export out of Civil 3D into a dumb drawing, add labels, and then print. They get rid of the worst part of Civil 3D in it’s bloated overhead when printing out. After all who wants to wait 4+ hours to print out a 100+ page plan sheet when it can be done at a fraction of the time in the other product. 

Are these ideas revolutionary? Or do they seem like they would be common sense and that a company with a $600 million per year research and development budget should be able to afford to implement in less than a year or two? I know my $20,000 research and development budget isn’t enough for a year or two turn around.

I’ve announced it on twitter, but you can buy this blog and my twitter account for a low price of $600,000. This is from a reduced price of $750,000 from earlier this month!

Corridor Slope Stake Report–Through XREF

Ever want to run a corridor slope stake report through an XREF? Want it as the same format as the current Civil 3D report? Well if the answer is yes to both questions then you will want to use this post from way back in April that I did.

If the answer was yes to the first one and no to the second one then you will want to download the Civil 3D 2016 Transportation Extension from the Manage.Autodesk.com website and check out that one out. The format of the report may be found below:

I missed the documentation portion of the extension, but there are some hidden gems in it that you can utilize with a little drawing setup. For instance if you want to auto populate the values the report like shown below you can.

The values are pulled from the Drawing Properties, under the Custom Tab. Add the appropriate name and the report will then pull the values from them. To run Drawings Properties type DWGPROPS at the command line. Then add the custom properties. This is what I have used to fill them in:

I did miss one in the above list and that is Author, this will fill in the Author text box.

I personally think these features are genius to have for a report, but that might just because I suggested them and ended up having to write the code for getting the corridor through the XREF for the report. No word on if Autodesk will add the corridor XREF code to the out of the box slope stake report.

Are you Frustrated by Using Civil 3D to it’s Fullest?

John Sayre over at BIM on the rocks as a new post asking “Are you Using Civil 3D to its fullest?”

Here are my top five things that suck by using Civil 3D that is costing you money. Evidently Autodesk thinks they should spend resources telling you how awesome there product is instead of fixing it and I’m here to tell you how it sucks when you use Civil 3D to it’s fullest.

1. Stage Storage

Well BIM is in the title of John’s blog, you’d think he’d at least mention the BIMlessness of the Stage Storage tool that is costing you time and money. Let me clue you in if you don’t use Civil 3D to it’s fullest there is NO basin object in the program. What does that mean? Instead of designing a basin that knows it’s dimensions, water capacity, and freeboard we are left with creating a surface or offset polylines. The Stage Storage tool then analyzes the ENTIRE surface or polylines you select. That means Civil 3D is wasting your time having you to either have a separate surface just to do the basin.

Want to do a design change. Yep, if you’ve used Civil 3D to the fullest then you know that you have to run the command again, export out the data from the tool, and then type in those values in a separate  analysis program. For the Stage Storage tool doesn’t actually have the ability to do those calculations. Seems to me a BIM program would have this capability, after all the Mechanical Engineers can analyze air flow in a buildings room in Revit.

2. Style Creation

If you are using Civil 3D to it’s fullest then you have experienced the nightmare of creating and modifying styles that is costing you time and money. Why not have a graphical selection of the various components to labels? Well that would be to easy. Now you get to wade through a possibly long list of items to change and often times change the wrong values.

Use Reference text and want to check what it looks like? Well Civil 3D makes you waste your time by exiting out of the dialog box, see what the change is, and then go back in make any changes. For Civil 3D thinks ??? is an appropriate look for reference text components. I think it’s wasting my time and costing me money.

3. Overly Burdensome Corridor Creation Workflow

Ever use a corridor to it’s fullest in Civil 3D? Well then you’ve probably experienced the random screw ups that the corridor costing you money. That random corridor feature line that decides it doesn’t want to connect to the next section and instead go to some seemingly random location. Or the way you can’t quite get it to go across the centerline for median work. For at sometime someone decided that feature lines shouldn’t cross the baseline which in turns costs you money and time coming up with workarounds to a common design feature in roadways.

4. Select Corridor Targets from an Xref

Sure when it works Select Corridor Targets from an Xref sounds good, but in practice not so much. Get into work and find that since you had to update some linework your targets now have a different handle and bam all of your hard work goes down the drain costing you time and money.

5. Pipe Networks

What a mess here in pipe networks costing you tons and tons of time and money. Want to place a pipe network for a sewer at 0.3% minimum slope and your road slopes at 0.5%. You’d think you would place the pipe network and then Civil 3D would follow the road. But you’d be wrong because someone at Autodesk decided the slopes need to be solved to the 1% place. That means you’ll quickly find your self manually moving pipes and structures to get the slope values you set in the pipe rules because Civil 3D will give you slopes at 0.3%, 1.3%, 2.3%, 3.3%, etc… A ton of time wasting Civil 3D is costing you money.

Want to go up a pipe run at a particular slope, a common task? Well Civil 3D is costing you money since Autodesk has decided you only need to place the pipes and structures once and shouldn’t have tools to easily change the slopes and elevations of the pipe networks. Civil 3D is costing you money.

Want to swap parts in a pipe network? Well Autodesk has decided it should cost you money big time. For you have a large project and need to change 50 pipes from 8” to 10”. Well congratulations you get to run the SwapPart command 50 times for a task that should be done in 10 seconds. Want to swap parts in a pressure network, well if you are using Civil 3D to the fullest you get the privilege of deleting the the parts and recreating them costing you money.

6. Add Feature Line PI

John provided a sixth item, so I will to. Adding PI’s to feature lines is costing you money when Civil 3D decides it cannot. Here are two posts illustrating the issue:

2008: Inserting PI into Feature Line jumps ship
2014: Feature Line - "Error inserting PI"

Yep, the issue has been costing us users who use Civil 3D to it’s fullest since 2008 and it’s still not fixed. I doubt it’s even on the list.

Want more info on how Civil 3D is costing it’s users money see and join the conversation in this forum post.

Many of these time consuming tasks have been automated by third party applications:

QuuxSoft
Steltman Tools
RedTransit Consultants

Plus you are likely to get bug fixes measured in months instead of years. Where as Autodesk and Civil 3D’s fixes are often measured in years if they are fixed at all despite a multi hundred million research and development budget.

Southern California Edison Layer Template

This link has an AutoCAD 2009 template with the Southern California Edison Layers already created. It also includes a Layer Filter Properties that contains the list of SCE layers. The file is provided as is and may not even be correct. Double check the current SCE layers list, but as long as they don’t change it too much it might be or might not be a good place to start.

If you want to check to make sure you’ve got all of the layers converted to the SCE layers you can right click on a layer in the SCE Layers Filter and choose Invert Layer Filter.

Civil 3D Development Time Survey

I’m looking for survey responses: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RFQD57F

The survey is to figure out how long you think it takes to do these commands. Once the survey is done I’ll post the results as well as how long it actually took me to program it.