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 commercial civil engineering firms are the public works departments for small towns and lots of pseudo/quasi departments and/or public agencies.
Infrastructure engineering, management, and maintenance feeds a lot of folk. Civil 3D and ESRI interoperability is something they must do before and after lunch every day.
Operations Engineering is Essential
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 better - the way they want it.
Intelligent Publish on Demand (iPOD) 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 affordable mutual Framework for Civil 3D adoptions and avoid most of the update and upgrade hassle too.
You wouldn’t be alone. Imagine that.
Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS 2021
We could and should consider the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS a product unto itself. The Connector for ArcGIS delivers practical interoperability tools for Civil 3D, Map 3D and Infraworks all at once.
The latest 2021 Connector for ArcGIS release is the Autodesk and ESRI interoperability agreement results round three.
Civil 3D Parcels, Alignments, COGO Points, and Feature Lines already can be delivered from ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS to Civil 3D and, given you have that important trusted relationship with the agency, many things you can edit and write back.
These powerful Operations Engineering Interoperability Tools improved with a focus on Gravity Pipes in the new Autodesk product releases for 2021.
You could skip beyond the support in Infraworks 2021 to the Civil 3D 2021 Connector for ArcGIS support section that starts about 18 minutes into the following video. I would not.
The ArcGIS Connector for 2021
Autodesk’s Jerry Bartels delivers a detailed overview of the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS that includes both the current functionality details and the essential workflows in both Infraworks and Civil 3D 2021 for Gravity Pipes systems.
Jerry does this presentation with cloud-based ArcGIS Online data sources, but we aren’t limited to that. He covers the basic use of those important Mapping dialog boxes in Civil 3D.
Better Manage the Connector Details
ESRI also released a new Civil 3D 2021 installable ArcGIS Projection Engine to help prevent a coordinate offsets from occurring when you bring ArcGIS data into a drawing. See the Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Help files for the details.
I trust you caught it that we can now publish and access the Civil 3D data behind for Pipes Networks all many of the other previously named Civil 3D Feature goodies into new sharable and archivable FGDB (file geodatabase) database storage formats with the updated Connector. Hmmm?
The 2021 Connector for ArcGIS should help us all become better operators of essential infrastructure systems in the near future.
Standards to Build Civil 3D Standards From
Get the Framework for Civil 3D Release 8