New question TBC and civil3d

Have you considered the therapeutic benefits of laying waste to those items with a 12 Ga. Shotgun?

@rankin_file Well I am more of a long shot type. Say a rifle at 500 yards and just make a smiley face out of it LOL.?ÿ

I have been doing some very basic stuff with civil3d and am getting the old basic commands to start clicking in my head again. I am sure what happened today is not a norm but still good to have an alternative way of doing things. ?ÿI was deployed once and had a total station go down in the heat. I had a mission to accomplish and the high brass doesnƒ??t want to hear why they just wanted to hear when it was completed. So I finished a mapping job doing stadia topo with a wild T-3 . Had to train my guys on the fly and hand enter everything into terramodel. To get the surface and drafting done. It was slower thankfully it was almost all completed when the total station went down. 2 weeks of doing stadia my small team and I finished. 1 week later as we were packing up to return home the new total station showed up. My gunny said well I didnƒ??t know why you brought the old T-3 but it paid off. So it stuck with me. I always try to build a back up plan. Robotic Total stations and data collectors bother me. If either item goes down you have a paper weight. I have requested my crews all get a 100 ft good steel tape just encase and plumb bobs. It might save a return trip to a job.?ÿ

But yes sometimes I want to chunk anything with all the bells and whistles often. I am sure I can build these templates from scratch but it would save some time if I can get them imported and saved off so I have a back up plan the next time I hit a snag.?ÿ

If you go into the TBC Help dialog and type "workflow for sheet plotting" it gives you some tips. Also some of the Advanced Drafting tutorials (scroll down on this page: TBC Tutorials) will walk you through it.

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If you drag a DWT or DWG with title blocks in the paperspace tabs, TBC will read it and generate a sheet set with each paperspace tab as a different sheet.

Native file format is VCL, which you can export out to once you configure things to your liking.

Attribute definitions get funky when going C3D to TBC. But then again I don't really like them in C3D so I don't mind blasting them out.

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Creating sheets and generating viewports (called dynaviews) can be tricky at first, and it does take some getting used to. TBC drafting definitely follows a different model than C3D. I'm nowhere near a power user of the drafting functions; I know there are a few folks around here who are, maybe they will chime in.

@rover83 Thank you. ?ÿI appreciate the push in the right direction for sure. I will have to print me out some homework that you just mentioned for sure. My plan is to get everything set up for the emergency back up plan. Then I will do some playing around with TBC drafting on cold winter nights until I am comfortable enough to say I have a back up plan. Currently the company is teaching me civil3d and I am spending most of my time trying to be productive between doing calcs and qa/qc of field data. Your help is greatly appreciated for sure. ?ÿWho knows I might get into TBC and say why learn civil3d. ?ÿI do like the idea of keeping everything in one platform and such. Civil3d intimidates me a bit. Especially when I open a drawing and it is supposed to be NAD 83 State Plane and I find settings that say different. Then I am told it doesnƒ??t matter. That scares me . But they say it doesnƒ??t matter. Itƒ??s just a drawing. I am sure once I get more understanding of it that will help.

@olemanriver Civil3D drafting, to me, is much easier than TBC drafting, but I love it for calcs, qa/qc, adjustments etc.

If people ar telling you it doesn't matter what coordinate system you're on in Civil3D, they're not doing it right.?ÿ

@bobwesterman Noted on the datum coordinate system. I will dig into that. ?ÿIt didnƒ??t make sense to me why you would not choose the correct one either it baffled me actually. ?ÿYes Adjustments and being able to check rod heights and all is very easy in TBC. At least checking what was in data collector vs what they wrote downs in the field book. I know years ago I was given a coordinate file to set some property corners. As I started staking them i knew something was not right. Somehow they had taken SPC from TGO for the control to cad civil whatever it was. And one of the issues was usft to international feet in civil. Then the other was civil3d or whatever it was called had some wrong information for the datum and ellipsoid parameters. Anyway it has scared me ever since. I was not tye one who did the cad calks just sent out to the field to stake them. I ended up locating existing property corners and re calced long hand and set a few before the finally figured out what was going on. ?ÿI was almost fired and I was just doing a part time gig then to help a friend. They thought I was doing something wrong in the field. Twas a shift and a shift. ?ÿWe are talking almost 50 feet or so total.

Posted by: @olemanriver

I know years ago I was given a coordinate file to set some property corners. As I started staking them i knew something was not right. Somehow they had taken SPC from TGO for the control to cad civil whatever it was. And one of the issues was usft to international feet in civil. Then the other was civil3d or whatever it was called had some wrong information for the datum and ellipsoid parameters. Anyway it has scared me ever since.

I see more issues with scaling and units in C3D than I do with coordinate system selection. Xref, block, and LandXML imports can really go sideways if you're not careful. We have offices throughout both iFt and USFt states that do workshare with each other regularly, and units are a regular screwup.

That could change soon, though. We're about to make the switch to C3D 2021, and I'm both excited and nervous about the ArcGIS Connector feature. ESRI projections don't always play nice with C3D definitions (or TBC for that matter) and I can tell already there will be some growing pains.

Couple that with the deprecation of the USFt at the end of the year, and I foresee a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth in 2023. But a lot of job security for me. Not that I needed it...

@rover83 I bet. Well I have not ran ESRI software in a while but I do know they do not truly follow datums and projections completely to the T. ?ÿAnd if you start going from one datum to another around the world we always had to do those math checks outside of the software. They seem to make it work so it looks good more than truly be on datum. But maybe they have fixed it now I have no Idea. I think they are going to finish the install of 2022 or 2021 tomorrow for me on civil3d. I had 2020. When the issue happened. All I know is I have a lot to learn and I keep my hp with back up batteries right beside my keyboard. When I did tech support for Trimble years ago. I had customers that would leave South Carolina and come to Georgia TN or KY. Always international feet from SC to uSft in other states was always a 90% guess before hearing the problem. The other was geoid model sub grid so elevation is off 80 to 90 feet . Then no grid coordinates while using GPS. Scale only job or no projection no datum job settings. If I had a nickel for all those I would be sipping fine wine somewhere with my pinky sticking out. Lol. I have seen the scale thing in cad operations just last year. They used the scale factor. Not combined factor. With a job that raw data was brought into. Then just kept scaling till it was close somehow. I assume you know what happened when I checked it in the field. And took me a couple hours to reverse engineering to see what might have happened. Thank goodness i asked a few questions.

@rover83 How is the states you are working in handling the depreciation of the usft. Here I hear all sorts as they will adopt at end of year and they will wait and adopt all once the new datum and spc comes out. I would think that most would wait to do the switch all at once instead of units now and new datum later.

I think the switch must happen with the new datum, if USft was in use. You shouldn't switch what you are using with NAD83, as that just creates more confusion.

Posted by: @olemanriver

@rover83 How is the states you are working in handling the depreciation of the usft. Here I hear all sorts as they will adopt at end of year and they will wait and adopt all once the new datum and spc comes out. I would think that most would wait to do the switch all at once instead of units now and new datum later.

There's no way we'll be switching from Survey feet before the new Datums Come out. Probably not for several years after they come out. Hopefully not til after I retire.

@bobwesterman I am waiting to see how quickly things will be adopted and or accepted myself. I know it to the federal government a long time for their own agencies to adopt NAVD88 FEMA on the vertical side. Heck here some counties are still on NGVD29. What is the worst is how they donƒ??t understand that they pretty much mandate a NAD83 horizontal datum but vertical be on NGVD29. ?ÿTalking about mixing apples and oranges. If and when the new datums come out and if I understand how they are going to move the grid projection closer to the surface versus at the ellipsoid as it is now should be interesting. The vertical will be a new beast all together for many. As we will no longer work off a hybrid geod model but the geoid. Which I anticipate the bringing back of a skill set that has diminished a lot on the Land Survey side and that is running Levels. Was chatting with a surveyor and we got on the subject of running 3 wires levels. I was taken away that it was so misunderstood. He thought it was reading to 3 decimal places. The other was say 3rd order BS and FS distances need to be balanced and we have a distance between each set up say 33 ft I canƒ??t remember the exact numbers anymore. But also you have a total accumulative over the length of the course of total of BS distance and FS distances that need to not be unbalanced also. I sometimes miss running long level lines. With a crew that gets it and starts clicking is like a well orchestrated play being performed. Just smooth and steady. ?ÿBut it takes some time to develop that for sure.

@rover83?ÿ

Connector isn't a fearful thing, just a DB link up, all the parameters are set by users, so in the style or templates your CAD/IT/GIS Manager can set those in stone or not.?ÿ It's much easier than it used to be (even just 2 or 3 years ago).?ÿ We used Nearmap and raster for our imagery and at 3in resolution could confirm location on the spot.

They (AUTOCAD and ESRI) had a come together nicey nice kumbaya moment a few years ago and seem to have done a decent job of interapplication functionality from what I've experienced.?ÿ?ÿ

YMMV

Posted by: @bobwesterman

There's no way we'll be switching from Survey feet before the new Datums Come out. Probably not for several years after they come out. Hopefully not til after I retire.

I'm confident most state-level and lower projects will remain in USFt until the new datums drop.

Federal projects, on the other hand, are a different animal. I would hope they would stick with USFt (in those states of course) in order to minimize problems, but it would be within their purview to require iFt after the new year.

Once the new datums drop, I would hope that states get with the program, because the entire point is that we all get on the same page.

Posted by: @jitterboogie

Connector isn't a fearful thing, just a DB link up, all the parameters are set by users, so in the style or templates your CAD/IT/GIS Manager can set those in stone or not.?ÿ It's much easier than it used to be (even just 2 or 3 years ago).?ÿ We used Nearmap and raster for our imagery and at 3in resolution could confirm location on the spot.

They (AUTOCAD and ESRI) had a come together nicey nice kumbaya moment a few years ago and seem to have done a decent job of interapplication functionality from what I've experienced.?ÿ?ÿ

YMMV

That's what I hear. Still haven't been able to convince the powers that be to give me 2021 to play with (kind of frustrating since I am the in-house survey tech support & training guy and I sort of need to test drive stuff).

My main concern is that having Connector will drive more non-geo-savvy folks to pull in outside data sources (not the online data which is solid) without much if any pedigree.

Also C3D 2019 doesn't really do datum transformations well (or at all in many cases). I can see a lot of potential headaches when folks drop ITRF/WGS84 datasets into a drawing set to NAD83 and not understand that there's no transformation going on. It already happens to us occasionally, and bringing GIS to the forefront is going to bump that number up if Autodesk didn't get it figured out.