Civil 3D and ArcInfo Online Interoperability

The Autodesk and ESRI interoperability agreement was big industry news last year. Some might say this was like Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali deciding to be best buds and then become a WWF tag team. Talk about being up in someone’s grill. Sorry George Foreman. I just couldn’t resist.

Both the BIM/AEC/CAD gorilla and the GIS gorilla had good strategic and tactical reasons to do this in the modern Land of the Internet T-Rexes. Can you say shareholder pressure? Wait a minute? ESRI is not a public company. Can you say customer pressure? Whatever. Things got better.

Operations Engineering

Out here in Civil 3D Land, we all recognize what I like to call Operations Engineering is the mainstay and/or core business for a great deal of survey and civil engineering work. Many mid-sized commercial civil engineering firms are the public works departments for small towns and lots of pseudo/quasi departments and/or public agencies.

Autodesk and ESRI together are making a big push to all you Operations Engineering folks out there in Civil 3D Land. Maybe Autodesk marketing will call it BIM for Operations.

Infrastructure engineering, management, and maintenance feeds a lot of folk. Civil 3D and ESRI interoperability is what they must do before and after lunch every day.

I contend that the best GIS data is built and maintained commercially for viable economic reasons.
Just sayin’.

Many Framework for Civil 3D customers adopt the product simply because the robust, adaptive, and consistent Civil 3D Standards that are included. All those official standards are built in. These substantially reduce the in-house to agency interop issues. Everyone gets better data delivered the way they need it or even the way they want it.

iPOD – Intelligent Publish on Demand is the Real Deal

By design, the Framework for Civil 3D delivers Civil 3D to published dumb DWG and even to DGN well as a matter of course. Of course, you can do smarter versions too with mutual Framework for Civil 3D adoption and avoid most of the update and upgrade hassle too. Imagine that.
Register. Become a site member and explore our Export From Civil 3D section.

Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS Online

Autodesk and ESRI Round two…ding

The sustained mutual efforts to make that interoperability work in the real world and our civil engineering and survey projects begins to produce some useful tools in the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS Online that is included in the Civil 3D 2020.1 Update. Autodesk’s, John Sayre did some roll out videos you can view on the New in Civil 3D 2020 page.

Today, we might want to consider the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS Online a product unto itself. It was released in the latest Civil 3D 2020.1 Update. The Connector delivers practical interoperability tools for Civil 3D, Map 3D and Infraworks all at once. Oh, my.

The Autodesk effort also produced some very interesting new LandXML export and import functionality for Feature Lines that you don’t want to miss or overlook either. See the Civil 3D Update Features That Work post. You can check out the public Civil 3D Survey at Jump Speed page for some fundamentals.

Mark Schnesk of Seiler Design Solutions usually delivers some great videos on these and related topics. He’s in the midst of a series of short video on the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS Online at work.

 

Connector for ArcGIS in Civil 3D 2020.1

Civil 3D Parcels, Alignments, and Feature Lines get delivered from ArcGIS Online to Civil 3D and, given you have that important trusted relationship with the agency, many things you can edit and write back. In a real project environment, you probably wouldn’t want to dump stuff into a single Civil 3D drawing in this way.

Our Civil 3D Settings matter when you want better results with less hassle. That challenge speaks to the need to work on your Civil 3D Project Templates and the prototype placeholder resource drawings you have prebuilt into your projects to reduce the in-project flak and hassle for your Civil 3D end users.

Ok. Next we are all going to Civil 3D wish list for Style Mapping defaults stored in external JSON files too.

Mark’s next video will be on Gravity Pipes systems into Civil 3D with the Connector. A bunch more potential Mapping to do there too. Can’t wait.

 

Connector for ArcGIS in Map3D 2020

It’s true. It’s true. Sometimes Map 3D is exactly what we need to do. In this Map 3D version video for the Connector, Mark mentions some of the (as yet) unsupported Connector functionality you might want to know.

Those issues appear to be fixed by the installation of the AutoCAD Map 3D 2020.0.1 Update.

Time for me to get back to the latest Civil 3D 2020.1 Update build of the Framework for Civil 3D for both Release 7 and Release 8. There are hundreds and hundreds of Style updates to double check and updated Layer Standards resources to update for the NCS 5 and NCS 6 and the DOD, GSA, and AIA versions of the same. Oh bother.

As promised, there will be new Street Lighting and Traffic Signal systems support for Pressure Pipe and Conduit systems in the build. Adaptive Template Building Blocks and functional TREF (Reference Templates) make more things possible and practical in Civil 3D. Oooo.

What fun! If you employ the Framework for Civil 3D, that’s work you never have to do. Who knew?

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Civil Updates and Interoperability Posts