Does anybody out there have any experience with Bentley's "GEOPAK" for survey? Toying with the idea of picking it up, but wanted to hear from a user.
thnx
I was weaned and learned cad with AutoSAD starting with ver. 10, so I know it much better than Bentley. I've played around with it during the slow times last year and it seems to be better than C3D as far as the survey part goes.(that's really not saying a whole lot) I know GEOPAK also uses the average end area method to compute volumes, where C3D doesn't--which was required for some of the work we were doing. I don't know what you are using now but if you are already using M-Station, the learning curve won't be as bad as migrating totally from AutoSAD. I took a M-Station class 15 years ago, so I'm not totally clueless, but of course I forgot a lot. Some of it came back pretty quick though.
I've actually been teaching myself Inroads via PowerSurvey. It's no walk in the park if you're not a MS guy.
Ralph
I used to be proficient with Geopak Survey, but have not used it for several years. For full disclosure I was an employee of Geopak. Following are my impressions. It is marketed, and sold to large organizations mostly DOT's so it's geared to organizations that have strict CADD, point coding standards. It is best utilized once you have set up point code libraries, that your crews utiize and you have adapted a strict CADD standard. The survey module has a lot of features. The DTM program was one of the most intuitive programs I have used for creating/editing TIN models. Geopak takes a lot of up-front training and creating standards, but it is pretty efficient once you have training and standards in place. If you are a small surveying firm doing mostly small projects and boundary surveys and you like AutoCad you may be happier with a Carlson C&G product. If you are a big organization and you like Microstation you will nore likely like Geopak.
Thanks guys. We're a small firm, but have a big client that requires MicroStation. We've been using EaglePoint, but EP is going by the way and I don't really need the entire InRoads package. I'm thinking this Geopak will fit our needs.
You might be able to use Bentley Power Survey to process your data. It has the option to operate in Inroads style or Geopack Style. It has some limitations over Inroads and Geopack, but it might do the job for you.