It’s a bird? It’s a Plane? It’s just Super AutoCAD Civil 3D.

InstantOn Basic 5 and Jump Kit 5 for AutoCAD 2014 and the rest on the Release 5 product line is on the street.

Take Five and Jump Ahead

Whew! We been busy -3 nearly simultaneous releases of three major products and all the included parts and pieces.

If you prefer to continue to toddle along in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012, we’ve got you covered.
If you’ve already embraced the new ACAD drawing format change in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 and want to work back and forth between 2013 and the latest and greatest AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014, we nailed them too.

Why should you give a hoot? Well…

Our products provide the largest, most consistent, and real world proven, Style libraries for AutoCAD Civil 3D.
We make AutoCAD Civil 3D work productively right out of the box.
We continuously develop, maintain and improve our Style, Label Style, and Set tools.
We provide the most in-depth content coverage for AutoCAD Civil 3D available anywhere at any price. Our tools upgrade to each new release without issues – we build to last and we guarantee it.

A Standard to Build Standards On

If you’re a government agency we help make the new CAD Standards required to make Civil 3D work a slam dunk.  You’ll be NCS compliant tomorrow. You can quickly and easily tweak our libraries to match and improve you current standards in days instead of the typical customization timeframes of months or years. Whether you do it yourself or have us help you Make It Work, our Production Solution products are designed and built from the ground up to build local standards from.

Personalize Don’t Customize

If you’re are commercial civil engineering or survey firm we make most of the production, development, and ongoing maintenance issues of employing AutoCAD Civil 3D go away for a song.
Whether you’re large or small our Production Solutions for Civil3D allow you to focus your talent and skills to get More work done.
We add More business intelligence to your internal intellectual capital.

Work The Same Publish on Demand

You can work the way you want and publish work into different delivery standards without most of the typical creation and maintenance costs this entails. The odds are we already available have the Style solution tools for just about everything you can imagine designing in AutoCAD Civil 3D. Actually the odds are you’ll probably find there are multiple tools available to solve the challenges you face.

Here’s the Release 5 Production Solution basics

Here’s the Release 5 2013 and 2014 detailed particulars

Thanks to all our loyal customers who waited patiently a little bit longer than we expected for the AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014 products.
At that last minute we made some last minute Pressure Pipe improvements. I hope everyone saves another day or two because we did.

Oh – I almost forgot. If you’re working in an older release of our products, there is special upgrade pricing available now that won’t last forever.

Take Five and Jump Ahead

In my last post about Questions of Power in AUTOCAD Civil 3D, I tried to point out that our traditional CAD thought processes about AutoCAD Civil 3D don’t always line up with the way the software actually behaves. This is because our thinking processes most often line up with how we used to do things.
The statement above may sound a bit moronic or circular, but it ain’t.
We humans are tool users. How we employ our tools defines how we think about most things.

Civil 3D is All About the Data

I repeat this mantra all time in many ways and in many forms. 
The Civil 3D Data perspective helps us shake up our old school CAD thinking patterns.
The point of View (multiple puns are intended here) hopefully generates a new perspective that allows us to think about and approach our civil engineering and survey real world problems differently.
It’s true Civil 3D is all about the data, and then again it ain’t.
The software does have a real world job to do – spit out a plan set.

So ok, I lie - or at least I try to supply some quantum, model-based spin on such matters. You tell a good story and at times the plot tends to runs away from the characters or vice versa.

She’s a Diva

Her abstracted Style power makes the Civil 3D diva able to deliver a continuous stream of crafted Instagram photo ops(Style), Twitter tweets (Label Styles), and interconnected blog posts(Sets). To get a well-managed handle on all of that is a new required skill we must acquire.

Nothing in Civil 3D makes the Data|Picture dichotomy more apparent than the Alignment feature. The Alignment is where Autodesk puts the big investment bucks into the production that is AutoCAD Civil 3D. I’m sure you notice that the Alignment feature long ago and far way ran away with the Leading Actor (Feature) Award inside Civil 3D. OK - so Surfaces are important too, but mostly pretty boring without the leading man (or woman) and a purpose to drive the plot (multiple puns are intended here too).

Go ahead. In your head start listing the things you might want to do in Civil 3D. You’ll have to work impossibly hard to try and get anything accomplished and still avoid Alignments. Luckily, we actually have the opposite problem.  There’s almost too much an Alignment can do.

Creative License

The more competent list to work on is:
What are all the other things I can employ an Alignment for in my projects?
As I allude to in my last post, we often get emotionally stuck on CAD-based information management practice. Yeah Alignments and Alignment spawned Features is the stuff of critical design data. Alignments can be Parcels as I talked about in my Parcel posts earlier this year. Yada yada yada…

Blockbuster Productions

If it’s linear, we can Style it, Annotate it, and Manage it as an Alignment. Hence our InstantOn and Jump Kit products are chock full of Style, Label Style, and Label Set tools that employ Alignments as dual purpose data/annotative tools. We supply thousands and thousands of graphic symbol elements in our products.
By popular demand, the fastest growing collections tend to be alignment related graphics. Fancy that. Once the lights go on for an AutoCAD Civil 3D user the desire for useful choices explodes.

A Drift Over the Centerline

Frankly, you can almost argue that with a bit creative license and ingenuity you just might rid yourself and your drawings from AutoCAD linetype dependencies and similar CAD machinations completely.

I’m not saying we want to eliminate AutoCAD linetypes, but with what’s graphically possible within the Alignment feature context it is something to consider now and then. How much managed graphic detail can you cram into an Alignment’s Label Set etc.

Is that method the best way to deliver the desired published result?

Of course, we supply annotative Alignment Styles, the typical National CAD Standard and related Labels for the classic uses of alignments, and then some. We also supply typical NCS and typical US State Dot versions of infrastructure linetypes and more. Our latest Release 5 products actually include more in-depth and more consistent NCS 5.0 linetype resources as well. Find out some more details here.

Is That Thing an Alignment?

Take Five and Get the Freedom to Work in Civil 3D

If you train a bunch of AutoCAD using folk in AutoCAD Civil 3D you get some common questions. Errr. Actually these questions are usually formed as a statement. For example:

“We make a lot of stuff in our drawings that isn’t Civil 3D stuff. Civil 3D also seems to need lots and lots of Layers too. All these Layers are confusing. We probably don’t need them. Can we do anything about that to simplify things?”

Sure you can do that. You may actually end up working harder because you do.

Backwards Management

You might want to consider that you’re looking at the whole CAD management and publish thing backwards. Civil 3D in a very real sense turns these things upside down.

In AutoCAD, the ONLY things that make something mean something in your drawing is typically what Layer the thing is on and/or what the graphic specifics of the Block are.
You must worry about Layers because for the most part Layer Management the only way to get what you need to print out the door. In the AutoCAD world, you have to worry about all the silly little details ALL the time, because the sum total of all those many little details pile up on you in the end.

Aren’t you tired of that? Doesn’t that seem like a waste of time?

Civil 3D is NOT AutoCAD

Civil 3D employs a Style based management approach. Layers, blocks, and all that AutoCAD stuff is just something every Civil 3D Feature uses to “express” itself.  Get the Style, Label Style, or Set “right” and you get exactly what you want.

But there’s just regular AutoCAD stuff that isn’t Civil 3D stuff?

Really? Like what?