Is using Civil 3D Cost Efficient?

ThatCivil3DGuy blogged a post asking some questions regarding Civil 3D. Rather than post my response in the comments I thought I’d make a post about it. Further down are my answers to his questions. I was talking to a coworker today about Civil 3D and I liked his take on Civil 3D as similar to the video game Supercross where you are able to create your own layout of a track on a blank canvass.

Here are my responses to ThatCivil3DGuy’s questions:

What point do you decide if a certain project will or will not use the civil3d grading features?

If it helps meet the end goal of the design, the grading tools are going to be used. From creating a temporary grading to help grade a parking lot to tying the design into existing ground through the use of daylight grading. If it can help get the job done, gradings are going to be used.

I would like get your feed back on your end on how grading is done for small commercial lots and large subdivision projects?

Gradings for small commercial lots is primarily used to grade the parking portion of commercial lots. Temporary gradings are used to derive elevations for feature lines. Once the elevations are found they are modified to finalize the design. Additionally if the site lends itself a temporary grading will be used from the building pad to derive elevations for sidewalk elevations. For large subdivisions gradings are primarily used for daylight grading. Feature lines or polylines with elevation are used for the lot pads. For the roadways Corridors are used and then pasted into the composite finish grade surface.

On top of that, has civil 3d saved you money or caused you to increase the cost of projects? What has been the positive and negatives points about Civil 3d?

This is  really a question about how well a person knows Civil 3D and how to apply the tools available to reach the end goal. Take for instance a task to add points along an alignment at 50 feet intervals and at horizontal geometry points. The person started the task by manually adding points at the intervals. Civil 3D did have tools to accomplish the task in a matter of minutes rather than longer amount of time it would have taken to do it manually. It was a matter of knowing the tools where available and how to apply them.