Civil 3D and the BIM 360 Interoperability

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Autodesk is making a serious push to get the folks in Civil 3D Land to employ Autodesk’s cloud-based BIM 360 solutions. You might tend to want to pursue an ostrich strategy for BIM 360. That might not be a good idea. In some project-based contexts BIM 360 makes sense where you have aware partners who want to play the collaboration game more deeply. BIM 360 can make the management of the published data more manageable. Eheh.

We can now encourage some newfound BIM 360 user awareness with less effort. Work smarter not harder.

The BIM 360 Cloud and Autodesk Civil Apps

There were some improved BIM 360 for Civil 3D interoperability integrations rolled out in the recent Civil 3D 2020.1 Update. See the What’s New in Civil 3D 2020.1 page. More improvements are sure to be included in the next Civil 3D 2020.2 Update due out later this year.

There were some improved permission levels for Infraworks BIM 360 intergrations rolled out in the latest Infraworks 2020.1 Update. See the What’s New in Infraworks 2020.1 page.
Remember, you don’t need a BIM 360 account and a BIM 360 Project to Share Views of your Infraworks models. Now you can do that in BIM 360 more easily with better control of the results.

BIM 360 integrations and interoperability will be a big deal and continuous theme at the upcoming Autodesk University.

BIM 360 and Projects

I think the BIM 360 focus is a good thing for all the software. The focus forces the applications to interop together at a better level and deal at least somewhat with what happens in the real project world.

There are caveats. In the How to See More in Civil 3D Tools post, I previously discussed some of the inherent problems with attempting to program tradecraft and those heuristics successfully.

“All Heuristics Cannot Defined by Code”

Our heuristic rules of thumb and our industry processes do not and cannot always translate well into procedural programmer speak and their focus on sequential logic. The programmers do try incessantly to include common heuristic choices when possible. They rightfully dodge the more dicey ones. Sustained Inattentional Blindness (see the post above) is true for programmers too. They’d prefer that you totally ignore those non-sequential and problematic heuristics that are impossible to code, but vital to real world project success.

Sadly, there is often a direct correlation between modern project size, managed oversight, and staggering project cost overruns. It is probably important to note that these days this is trending for the worse not the better. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it isn’t.
More transactional checklists to complete does not automatically translate into better and more cost-effective design never mind completed projects on budget.

BIM 360 Learn and Burn

Understanding the software tools and what they are designed to accomplish is obviously important. The real-world use of all tools requires that we understand both the capabilities and the limitations.

The human art of tool use is knowing how to employ the tools creatively.

Take Advantage of Free While You Can

We collected a bunch of BIM 360 training videos on the BIM 360 Tools pages.
There’s a good chance you might need something a bit more formal and detailed for BIM 360.

How to Become BIM 360 Aware

Autodesk rolled out a new BIM 360 learning site this week.
Here’s the link
Learn BIM 360

The learn BIM 360 site only requires that you have a free Autodesk account to use it.
The BIM 360 courseware content is currently free to use and appears to cover the full range of topics.
Autodesk does require that you allow them to track your progress in the courses that you register to take.
Someone somewhere could even make the unaware BIM 360 somebodies pass the tests.

Training we don’t have to do is a good thing.

The courseware is certainly not only for cadpilots.
These folks are probably the least problematic of the new users you might have to deal with in BIM 360.

That is probably the most important point - the point of BIM 360 interoperability in the first place.

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Civil Updates and Interoperability Posts

Most posts include videos.

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Bent Reference Templates in Civil 3D

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Civil 3D Update Features That Work

  • Civil 3D 2020.1+ and Civil 3D 2029.3+ improvements you can employ today

Civil 3D and ArcInfo Online Interoperability

  • The new Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS Online and the interoperability benefits it practically means for projects

Civil 3D and Infraworks Interoperability

  • The potential of the shared data integrity that the Connector for ArcGIS Online provides in both Infraworks and Civil 3D

Civil 3D and Adaptive Standards Interoperability

  • The What, How and Why of Adaptive Standards Interoperability in Civil 3D

Civil 3D and the BIM 360 Interoperability

  • BIM 360 tools improvements and how to learn to use them for both Infraworks and Civil 3D

Civil 3D 2020.2 Shaken not Stirred

  • The new SHP Import/Export Tools and Property Set XML support for even more interoperability

Migrate A Civil 3D Test Project to BIM 360

  • The necessary details to migrate a Civil 3D test project to BIM 360 with the Autodesk Connector