Carlson Survey 2012 and Civil 3D

Also, do I need a certain AEC object enabler to work with their C3D drawing?

Sounds to me like you're just going to have to break down and learn civil 3d. Not sure what the learning curve is like. But I would look into it.

Ralph

I was in the same boat. I made te swap to c3d about 2 months ago. It is a whole different ball game. It is a very powerful software but also very irritating. All the engineers in the company I work for use it. I'm still in the learning process and had to break down and tell my boss that we needed to get some one in to show us all the features and survey side of the software. I'm the only surveyor in the company using it right now because it is not very user friendly with other softwares. If you make the swap get a tech in to teach you, I've been struggling on self teaching myself.

Yeah, not the answer I wanted. Sure I'll learn some, but I intend to show a faster turnaround on these topos we do with Carlson Survey in the office and SurvCE in the field. Maybe I'm wrong, but the drafter there takes too long to get a final product out with C3D. Moreover, the crews could use the added efficiency of SurvCE with the codes, and the asscociated files Carlson Survey puts out that work with the field controllers (c.l., crds, profiles). As a surveyor, I'm not sold on C3D from what I see.

Thanks! I guess that's the problem here too..the surveyors here are banging their heads doing the most basic routines that Carlson does very efficiently. I'm not a paid Carlson representive.

Civil is a great program. I hate it myself, but this is because it is very difficult to get started up. We took those classes and basically you have to setup the styles (templates) in every area of civil. Once you have that, it turns into one really nice software package. But I am like the rest of you and like to find a software that pretty much goes right out of the box. Civil was NOT designed for surveying in any fashion (from what I can tell). Good luck and keep us posted.

It should be seem less.... I use Carlson Survey 2012 and do work for engineering firms all the time. What problems are your engineers having with Carlson files?

Civil is indeed a great program for designing ... to me the surveying part is not at the level other survey packages are.
Taking in account that every year features are added (a good thing) but that the older files are not compatible with newer versions and that the process of coding and importing data has to change year after year we opted to keep our survey software we are used too, compared to civil it is simple in use and flexible in coding. We still make a 2d dwg and convert that to a 3d dwg that basically has two levels: 3d points and 3d break lines. These are used to build a dtm in civil. This approach works very well for us.

Chr.

I process the carlson raw file and field to finish in Carlson 2011, then I export the points to a csv file and then delete them from the drawing. I name the drawing xxxx carlson raw.dwg and save it. The file is opened in C3D 2012 and all the linework is copied and pasted to orginal coordinates in a new c3d drawingand then the points are imported.

I came up with this process with c3d 2010 and maybe with 2012 it can be shortened but this is what it took to have the linework either 2d or 3d polylines (no figures) and have the points on the correct layer and point group. I tried using the carlson connect in c3d but I just didn't like working with figures and protected points. Since a lot of our points are collected with gps acad would treat them all as control ponts and they were a pain to modify.