Civil 3D F2F Demo

I completely agree! Overall nice video. What was that Object Viewer at the end?

The Object Viewer is built-in to Civil 3D. You just select a surface, right-click->Object Viewer. In the demo, I was using the "Shades of Grey" visual style, which I think was new as of C3D 2011. But you can still see neat things in C3D 2010 and earlier, although I think that "Shades of Grey" visual style makes it easiest to see most things.

Sinc,

thanks for sharing that, a very interesting demonstration.

We all know the hard part is in configuring all the settings ... you're an expert.

Hope you share more of this, a demo of the coding techniques used in the field and how you import them in C3d looks interesting to me: how do you code parallel lines, right turns, ... add species and trunk sizes to your tree symbols, calculate inverts ...

Nice work !

Chr.

> Hope you share more of this, a demo of the coding techniques used in the field and how you import them in C3d looks interesting to me: how do you code parallel lines, right turns, ... add species and trunk sizes to your tree symbols, calculate inverts ...

Some of that still leaves something to be desired in C3D. You can code parallel lines, but all lines come in on the same layer (not necessarily desirable). There are some nifty codes that can be used for right turns, extensions, closing figures, etc... I'll add that to the list for another demo. As for calculating inverts, I know of no good automatic way of doing that in C3D. But in our experience, that actually hasn't been very important, since the field guys often go around popping manholes and taking inverts at a different time - they (usually) don't do that while collecting topo.

As for species and trunk sizes of tree symbols, can you post a sample image of what you want it to look like? Then I'll see what I come up with. I know there's an added complication some people run into, where they also want a "drip line" radius...

Sinc,

A screenshot with some trees
We keep it simple, our tree symbols are always inserted at a fixed scale, no drip lines added.
We can add 3 texts (to each measured point or line)
here we enter the size and the species, these come in the dwg as simple text in a seperate layer. (Our Flemisch GIS system does not allow the use off attributes.)
The sizes are plotted, the species not, they're used by the designers to build lists ...

another example where the texts are added to a line instead of a single point feature. We add the housenr. and an extra descripton for the type of building.
the h constructs an inner square angle
the dd- constructs Left turns in the first and last points of the linestring
then n- places the housnr on the Left side of the building line

About the inverts ... we work the same way and note the inverts on a plot, but with the dc's capable of displaying a dxf as backround it would be easy to prepare a raw map to navigate around and collect the inverts in the dc as notes or attributes added to the measured manhole.
It could be a good alternatve for doing manholes in rainy conditions ... don't realy like it but sometimes we have to.
Now we run a VBA routine to enter and calculate the inverts and put all the annotations in the appropriate layers.

Chr.

We bring in our trees as per the old LDD days (by description keys - by layer, each type or species with its own symbol). We also modify the full desciption (through the keys) to show just the size with an inches symbol. Then we have a point group for trees that just displays the size next to each symbol (utilizing the modified full description). All you do then is move any labels that overlap something else. Way faster than the old days.

For drip lines, the guys just add a circle with the radius in feet behind the tree description. Our C3D is setup such that any linework codes behind a tree description pops up on a dedicated dripline layer.

For example: TRD 06 CIR14.5 Automatically inserts a Deciduous Tree Symbol with a 06" label next to it and a dripline circle of 14.5' radius.

Thanks sinc!

I think I'll go through it again tonite.
Nice presentation.

Thank you. We are moving from Eagle Point and Autocad Map to the Civil 3D suite soon. This was a great help in looking at the F2F of Civil. We have our EP working to perfection and have been dreading the change but maybe not so much now. We really appreciated it.

As aluded to in one of the other posts, the "devil is in the details"...

There is a whole bunch of setup that's required to get C3D F2F to work. But once you get it setup, it can work very well. As you see in the demo, I get a very high-quality design survey done in a very short period of time, but that means I also setup all my Styles, and got the field guys to use the Figure commands correctly. It takes a bit of work to get it all going smoothly, but once you do, you can do a lot, very quickly.

It's another part of that huge "learning curve" in moving to C3D... It is painful at first, but as soon as you get through it, you can do much more, more quickly, and to better consistency, than you ever dreamed of before, especially if you're still on Land Desktop. Carlson comes close, but I think C3D lets us do even more.

Eagle Point was the same way at first. Once we got all the codes created, layers managed and such then you could pretty much go from download to ready to design in an hour or so. We have been ready some of the tutorials on the cogo included and it looks similar to Eagle Point so that should not be a challenge.

Michael is going to our surveyors convention but I've asked to not go and instead be sent to some Civil 3D training. The two of us teach and support a dozen or more engineers with our software so I need to get up to speed on it and transfer all our stuff over.

I think we just ordered the upgrades from Map 3D to Civil for about 10 seats so it's coming. Any training, books or such that you can suggest will be greatly appreciated.

Deral

The textbook I recommend for most people is Mastering Civil3D available from Amazon, and several other bookseller websites.

You need to make contact with your Autdesk reseller, and get friendly with their Civil3D expert. The other resource that you will need is the Civil3D Discussion Group.

Thanks Steve. I ordered that book this morning in the latest edition. It got pretty good reviews and looks like a good tutorial and reference book.

I like this reference here: http://www.sdcpublications.com/Textbooks/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/64/

Also, here is a cool F2F demo by Richard Sincovec:
http://www.quuxsoft.com/videos/ProcessingSurveyData.aspx <

Wow. Thanks exbert. I will order the one Autocad Civil 3D for Surveyors. That sounds like a pretty good book as well. I can never have to many reference books.

I loved the video by Sinc. I'm getting excited by the stuff in the surface modeling versus our current Eagle Point design software, and especially the ease of edits and updates.

Maybe this change will not be all that much of a hair puller after all.

Deral

I just now read "up" the thread. Didn't realize the Sinc video was already here.

I, too, can recommend the Mastering book. It's no substitute for some training by a C3D expert, but if you have tight-assed penny-pinchers in your company, they may not realize that you can save SO MUCH TIME AND MONEY by getting some training to get over that initial learning curve. Even a few days of training can get you going, then you can figure out everything else yourself using the Mastering book and the various forums. If you try to only use the Mastering book, you'll have a much slower time of it.

I am definately going to seek out some face to face training. I had money in the budget to send me to our surveyors convention but I plan on using that instead for some Civil 3D training. I don't think I'll have a huge learning curve since we already have a pretty sophisticated F2F that we use with Eagle Point. I already understand the concepts of F2F so it will just be a matter of moving that over into Civil. I'm sure there will be bumps but with reference materials, hands on training and a bit of elbow grease then I can 'get er done'.

Do you do training Sinc?

Autodesk University is a great resource! It has videos detailing the use of linework codes; without the need for a .fbk file, which Sinc mentions in the video is new to Civil3D 2011. Sign up is free.