I have been informed that my Autodesk subscription is being migrated to Infrastructure design suite premium...for an additional $55/year unless I opt out. $55 isn't significant considering I already pay $995/year, but I'm wondering if there are any useful tools in this design suite for a surveyor. Is anyone using this suite and if so, have you found any utility in the other programs included that I didn't already have with my C3D subscription?
Thanks.
I just opted out.
Nothing I wanted.
The sales pitch on one item was that you could take a scanned drawing and import it then break it into it's components so then you would have line work "right where it should be" without going to the "trouble" to redraw the line work.
The guy couldn't beleive I'd want to pass that up.
It rubbed me the wrong way that they choose to utilize an "Opt out" vs. "Opt in" method.
This is backwards to every other vendor/client relationship we have ever had.
-----
Beware - many years ago they offered a "free" upgrade from Autocad to Autocad Map. I was told that it included all of the functions of regular Autocad in additional to GIS functions. We accepted and started paying a higher subscription fee.
I didn't like the fact that all of the workspaces, menus, tool pallets, ect. were geared around GIS functions. I have had a hard time getting it to look like plain Autocad does out of the box.
I decided I wanted to downgrade our Map seats to plain Autocad (we use ESRI ArcMap). They sent me a quote for some outrageous cost like $600/seat to downgrade.
------
If you don't like the new software it is entirely possible that they will charge you to down grade. I think they call it a "cross migration fee" or something like that. They don't want to lose the extra annual subscription fees.
-----
I'm not sure how the new suite will mesh with 3rd party add on's.
The suite includes Raster Design. It will handle vectorization and editing of raster images, however it still is a manual time consuming process. I have had very little use for raster to vector routines over the years. With that said, I have an old aerial based - hand drawn contour map that I want to digitize. Raster Design has a slick routine where you can vectorize the contours 1 by 1 and assign the elevations by intervals. I use the software on occasion.
This really chaps me. I just renewed my subscription in February and paid an additional $200 plus to for my raster design seat only to find out now that for $55 I could have done the same thing plus added a couple of modules.
As for the value of Raster Design. I do not think the value is with the digitizing portion. I use it for adding imagery from various sources and projections into my projects.
It also adds the ability to make images transparent.
Since I cannot access Raster Design from within a Carlson drawing session, I do not use it very much.