Civil 3D 2007 – a Phenomenal Leap Forward!

I’m not the sales type, and I’m not a marketing wiz, but I’ll say it – Civil 3D 2007 will be production ready. We’ve all wanted 3D Polylines and more, but the new 3D Polyline (or 3D Polyline ‘like’) tools simply pale in comparison to what Autodesk has done with the rest of Civil 3D for the upcoming release, and you’ll love it!

We’ve been asking for enhancements, advancements, etc for quite some time, but after installing 2007 it should be blatantly obvious Autodesk was listening all along. With this release, you WILL be rolling Civil 3D into production – it is that incredible. I’m about to give you a list of my favorite ehnacements, but I hope you understand, this is in no way a comprehensive list – Autodesk has done an PHENOMENAL job with Civil 3D 2007!

New/updated functionality includes:

AutoCAD 2007
For the first time in history, Autodesk has changed both the Solids Modeling Engine, and the Rendering Engine – it’s remarkable, but that’s means a change in the .dwg file format as well – no worries though.

Data Management
C3D now ships with the Vault, and it’s outstanding at managing both drawings and data. You’ll still have the ability to use data shortcuts, but you’ll have other options as well, and you’ll love them.

Survey
Included in Civil 3D 2007, and it simply rocks. Take the Survey Toolspace from LDT, add steroids, and welcome to Survey in C3D (yes it’s built in), you’ll love it and yes, you can now import a Field Book (.fbk) to Civil 3D – but that isn’t nearly all you can do.

DTM
Remember the quick section in LDT, well it’s back in C3D! One minor difference, you import it to the drawing – but you’ll love it!

Label Styles
New label style – Notes! Are you kidding me? You have to love the ability to show a parcel label in several different viewports at several different scales without changing the text and/or creating several layers – but now you can add notes to your drawing that act the same! Outstanding!

Say you have a top of curb shown in plan; you’d like to add a label to the TC, but you’d like the label to subtract 0.5′ and label the bottom of the curb as well – can now be done! Not only can you add formulas to labels, but you can actually use a built in calculator to do it – are you kidding me!

You know that pesky intersection? You need the ability to label an alignment-alignment intersection… also need to label a station along an alignment with an elevation from a profile – yup, done in 2007!

We all do call-outs when labeling sanitary/storm etc. What held us back in 2006 was we couldn’t add a text mask to the callout – done in 2007!

Remember those pesky datum elevation labels along the left and right of a profile view in C3D 2006? We didn’t have the ability to modify the justification of those labels – done in 2007! By the way, you can now snap “nearest” any point along a finished ground profile.

Label Components can now be copied – sweet! You can also now change the display order of components.

Remember the old LDT Inquiry commands? You’ll find Civil 3D now has them (on steroids as well)!

Corridor Modeling
Wow – I’m just so impressed with the changes. Corridors now have a style; quite a bit easier to control the display of subassemblies, etc.

The Corridor surface now shows up in the Prospector, no need to export the surface, and like everything else in C3D, it’s dynamic!

New subassemblies include a channel, a channel with a parabolic bottom, a side ditch with a lid, a trench, and a trench with a pipe!

Pipes
I about fell over when I saw pipes in C3D 2007, you simply won’t believe the enhancements. You can now grip a pipe at the flowline, or the middle, or the top of the pipe. You can still have rules, but can now define rule sets (no more pipes out of the ground). Pipes now automatically create an alignment (so you can station them in plan), and Profile Views can now include a band for pipes (so you can dynamically label flow lines in the view)! Remember the profile of a structure in C3d 2006? Remember how ugly it was? GONE! The profile of a structure now more appropriately displays only the silhouette.

In all seriousness, the next release of Civil 3D is just incredible. Never in my wildest dreams did I see this coming and I think, absolutely, the gang in Manchester is to be commended for creating code that’s out of this world. If you haven’t had a Needs Assessment, or you haven’t started investigating a Civil 3D Implementation strategy, now is definitely the right time.

I’ve told clients and friends alike for quite some time I’d let them know when I thought in my honest, professional opinion, Civil 3D was ready for production across the board; consider it done.

Cheers!

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