Honest answer of Civil 3D

Hi Clayton.

It really depends on what type of work you are dealing with Civil 3D. It rules in surface modeling work like topographic surveying. Civil 3D is not a perfect product but definitely the most powerful product commercially available. As a BIM, Civil 3D should provide you better productivity and sustainability.

If Civil 3D lacks on some level of automation in plat annotation drafting, it definitely doesn't mean it is an inferior product. Its parcel engine is very fast and powerful that stays unmatched. Surface engine is the most powerful model in the world. Surface modeling is more than 10 times faster than of Carlson.

I have plenty of reasons why Civil 3D is still the best product out there. Carlson is more powerful but only in some fancy aspect but definitely an inferior product to Civil 3D. Carlson Survey is written specifically for surveyors while Civil 3D is a foundation product. This means that Carlson Survey employs very surveyor interface.

At the end of the day, it is you the surveyor who can tell which product can serve you better. For property surveying and very surveyor COGO operation, then I guess Carlson is for you. But beware, you can only effectively compare the two products if you're good at both of them.

I am running Civil 3D in a workstation.

Hope this helps.

If your client requires 3d then you have your answer. THE issue is points. If you spend the weeks necessary to set up the point styles, prefixes, etc. 50 to 70% can be drawn in seconds (as with FTF). In my opinion, Autocad has admitted that points are actually important by drawing lines (figures) from points. Loose the points - loose the figures. This has to burn engineers since they primarily think in lines and often dismissed the value of points.

If you are not using points to draw then the engineers with purge the points and the drawing will turn into the typical stick figure. Purge the points with lines drawn from points - gut the drawing. I love that. Get the drawing back from the engineer - points remain.

Personally, I still prefer Carlson.

Tried Civil 3D and totally hate it but will need to get use to it as FDOT is heading that way. As for now, if I have a survey drawing to get out, I turn to my trusty friend AutoCAD 2000i.

I believe that MicroStation/InRoads is a better package than C3D and I have used them both.
It does come down in some instances to personal preference, but I like what M-station has to offer. And it has far fewer crashes.

As do I. I have always preferred the way AutoCAD handles text over the way Microstation does and level management is a little easier in AutoCAD but overall, I prefer Microstation.

But with KC basically dead and with no life support available, FDOT has to look elsewhere. AutoDesk has been trying long and hard to find a way into FDOT and now they may have it.

With the new version of EFB having the ability to process within the desktop and export out everything in an .XML file, the future is looking more and more like Civil 3D will be KC's replacement.

Civil 3d 2009 and above rocks. I have installed and use versions 10, 11, and now 12 depending on the client. This has been discussed on here many times so if their are particulars you need make your search specific. Sinc (member here) has an add on software package (for sale) that seems to help many folks out as well.

I have Carlson and Civil 3D. I use both. The following is my opinion. I have had Adesk stuff since Softdesk, and have had Carlson for a little longer.

Carlson is adapted very well for land development work like subdivisions, grading, paving, drainage, and land surveying and platting. It also does a very good job on surface modeling, contouring, etc. It is very, very user friendly. Carlson takes care of bugs or anomalies very quickly, although I don't know right now of any significant glitches. Their software has always been very reliable. It is intuitive.

Civil 3D takes a modular approach and builds upon things in a database. It is harder, in my opinion, and more time consuming to get data into Civil 3D, but once you get it there, it is more easily handled if you change things up in design. Carlson will allow changes and will recompute things to, but not with as much flexibility as Civil 3D.

The statement about Carlson not doing contouring or DEM's nearly as fast as Civil 3D as it relates to processing data may be true, but we are only talking about a second or so difference, or something on that order for a 10 to 20 acre site.

Civil 3D has hydrology package that is going to be pretty good, but right now it is a PAIN in REAR to try to use, and it crashed all the way to the desktop on me all the time--aggravating. It is called Storm-Sanitary Analsysis. It is Intelisolve's old Hydraflow program with a first or second attempt by Autodesk to incorporate it "seamlessly." In my opinion it is terrible right now unless your project is simple and linear.

Civil 3D sets up templates with industry standard layers. Carlson doesn't, but you can make your own similar template.

So, which is better for me to recommend??

If you are doing land development such as subdivisions, I'd go with Carlson and would not look back.

If you are doing big industrial site development or complex land development, I'd consider Civil 3D.

I have done both, and my preference, all things considered is Carlson 10 to 1 if I had to have just one software package.

I've been using Civil 3D for about a year now and it seems to take me longer to produce a drawing from start to finish.

I'm with you.

I worked with Civil 3D for 1/2 a year and dumped it. I now use it only for a few things. It crashes, it's slow, and I spend too much time getting a drawing out the door.

I have worked with autocad since 1987 and Autocad 12 was the best. The version I now use most is 2000. It's stable and fast. If I need to get a Subdivision or boundary out the door, it's the one to use.

Does civil 3d support alpha-numeric point ids' yet or is everything still numeric point id based?

From a managerial point of view, the software can be rather expensive and unproductive if the work force allocated to the software is transient.

I don't think that it does; although, that isn't a big deal to us. We have talked about it for a while, but our clients want a numeric system and want to use the feature code/descriptor control the alpha portion of the point. It would be a nice feature, particularly when I check a point in the field, to have the check point show as an alpha point in the drawing.

For alpha's you have to use the point Name instead of the point ID!
chr.

See: http://www.thatcadgirl.com/carlson_vs_civil3d_revisited.html

http://www.tomer-il.com/uploads/F2F-DEMO3D-GEDERA.avi

The Autodesk forum thread referenced in that post, and my post within, is two years old. We were using C3D 2009 at the time.

Civil 3D continues to evolve, and the arguments for and against it do, too. It is definitely not a simple thing to assess. I'm not sure anything has become any more distinct. There are a lot of problems with C3D. But there are also lots of benefits. So how do you really determine the value?

I'm actually not impressed by any "shootout". It's too easy for that too be stacked in either direction, intentionally or not. Similarly, it's difficult to tell how things now will affect the future.

Instead, I look more at the sustained impact, in particular, the sustained impact in my direct experience. In 2007, I was a very advanced LDD user, operating a highly-customized LDD setup. We also used the majority of the software, taking advantage of almost all it had to offer. And in the field, we used robotics and GPS, with pretty efficient field crews. And we had roughly a 1:1 ratio, field crew to office CAD tech.

Now, if I work a full 40-hour week as a C3D CAD Tech, I can easily support five field crews. And they've gotten fancier equipment in the meantime, too, so they're going faster... Yet I can now do five times the work I used to do. Of course, that creates other problems... Once upon a time, we had a lot of CAD techs, so one could be out sick or on vacation, and the others would pick up the slack. Now, if I'm out of the office and something comes in, we have to either wait until I come in again, or have a CAD tech in our other office try to handle it (which is never convenient).

But barring logistics problems, we can now hire far fewer people. Which also means we need fewer seats of software. So the per-seat cost of software begins to lose its overwhelming importance... When one person with one seat of software now does the work formerly done by five employees with five seats of software, all the economics gets different... In fact, the cost of the software starts to pale in comparison to the cost of before, with more employees, and more employees' salaries+benefits, and more seats of software...

But then throw that up against the problems... C3D takes a lot of time and effort to learn. You can do amazing things with it, but not overnight. And if you have high turnover, there's nothing more frustrating than training a quality C3D tech, only to have that person leave for somewhere else. And right now, it's hard to find people already-trained in C3D.

But then again, the world is changing... Our former "Survey" bailiwick is disappearing. Things that used to be our bread-and-butter are now being replaced by technology. That will continue. So we can't really afford to operate in a business-as-usual mode. We need to evolve what we do, and what we offer.

There are some real benefits to C3D. I think that there are many ways in which it is more powerful than Carlson - for example, C3D gives far more control over appearance, while still offering Standard support. It is also much less user-friendly than Carlson. In some ways, Carlson is more forward-looking than Autodesk... They have progressed a lot further along in Survey-GIS integration, while Autodesk is still trying to define what "BIM" means without providing real integration. In other areas, Autodesk is much more forward-looking in the industry as a whole. But Autodesk often gets blinded by their vision, and loses touch with the day-to-day tribulations, which is where Carlson shines. But Autodesk provides far more support for expansion of their core software, via their APIs, which are worlds ahead of Carlson. Carlson is far more responsive than Autodesk at adding user-requested functionality, but Autodesk is far better at making it so you don't have to wait for Autodesk (well, if you want it bad enough, and either have enough money or enough computer programming experience to dig into the APIs yourself)... C3D has better support for standards, but simultaneously makes it harder to work with multiple standards (e.g. Army Corps on some projects, state DOT on others, etc.). (And similar arguments can be made when Bentley's offerings are involved... No matter what software you prefer, though, they *ALL* crash far too often for my tastes, so at least they all have that in common...)

It's a constant swirl of back-and-forth. Both Carlson and C3D have very strong points. They both have very different strong points. And they both have weak points. Personally, I think that's as it should be... If it were very clear that one were significantly better than the other, then we'd have only one real choice, and "only one choice" is the same thing as "no choice".

I think you can do very good work with either piece of software. I KNOW some (most) people will have a definite preference of one over the other. But the other thing I know is that either Carlson or C3D will let you perform work many times faster than LDD. And LDD will let you perform work many times faster than someone with plain AutoCAD.

To me, the C3D v Carlson argument is ridiculously simple. To start, I'm very comfortable with C3d and have never used Carlson, and never expect to.

All I know is that Carlson folks are continually providing service and answers to surveyors (I see it here and at other sites all the time).

Autodesk doesn't even recognize surveyors as users of its product. Check it out (I was trying to see if it was worth me going to AU this year): ]AU Classes

Expand the audience pull down (towards the right side of the screen). You can say what you want about power, bells and whistles, etc. but for surveyors who actually use this stuff every day, if the software designer doesn't even recognize you as a user, then what's the point in trying to use their software? They will NEVER listen and improve the software for your needs (which has been proven out over the last several years of C3D development - they still aren't anywhere close). We must be such a small blip for them that they just don't really care. They just want to be able to say that their program does it all, so that the engineering owners who mostly buy this stuff will get a "one size fits all disciplines product".

At this point in its development, C3D (for surveying) is really just a collection of work arounds and third part software that will make it do most of what surveyors want/need. That is RIDICULOUS. Vanilla C3D has no business being used or marketed as survey software. Until we found the Syncpac third party software, there was no way we could be more efficient than even LDD (except for topo only projects), but points and labels (what we used most) were broken.

Only those with computer skills (and ridiculous amounts of time to spend re-writing the program) or the budgets to buy third party software and the extra training required to figure out the work arounds should be using C3D for surveying. For engineering companies that have extra money to burn for such things and want everyone on the same platform, this is fine. For smaller companies that just want to get work done as cheaply and efficiently as possible, I say go with something that has proven its ability to listen to the surveyor. Autodesk doesn't want you.

...and that is my honest answer.

Thank you everyone for all your answers.