Kickstart Civil 3D Custom Improvements

The Autodesk marketing people say that everyone wants an Autodesk Civil 3D built their way. This is wishful thinking.

Professional civil engineers and surveyors really want their expensive Autodesk code to work and produce work that is acceptable to them and those that they deliver their work too. If that’s the goal of your Autodesk Civil 3D customizations or improvements, we can work with that.

At this point in time the odds are your organization already has a functional Civil 3D production environment. That working environment could probably stand for some improvements. Is the current Civil 3D implementation getting a little long in the tooth like an old boar? This can be intimidating.

We build and maintain the most downloaded, most used, and largest Autodesk Civil 3D Template collections, Civil 3D Style libraries, and Civil 3D resource tools collections on the planet. We’ve been at this work for longer than anyone else. People do declare that our effort shows.

The Jump Kit product is an Autodesk Civil 3D US Country Kit in Imperial units.
Try a Templates Only.
For small customers Templates Only is a viable production solution that works right out of the box.
Our Framework products deliver results in real world civil engineering and survey projects every day.

The Framework is…

Robust and Feature Rich

This thing we do is a productive, useful, and national standards compliant customization for multiple releases of Civil 3D from the recent Autodesk Civil 3D 2026 release back into the dark ages. More is built-in ByDesign.

We continuously work at the Framework platform so you don’t have to. The products produced from our Framework engine do get better. Civil 3D Upgrades and project deliverables become easier. Life is good.

The Framework for Civil 3D is a practical customization engine to help us all build and systematically maintain Autodesk Civil 3D our way.
People ask,

“How do we get started?”

Caveat

The construction of the Framework product has consequences. Personally, I do a lot of Standards Development and Civil 3D Implementation work. Some of these projects go on for years in large organizations with lots of departments with internal and external customers who have interesting interoperability challenges and conflicted Standards.

People do appear to love to build standards for everything. Funny. They rarely seem to listen to others about them. This is a somewhat understandable consequence of our very human and personal self-interest.

The following counter intuitive advice generally surprises everyone regardless of customer size.
The folks who follow it tend to succeed with less effort and expense.
The people who don’t, tend to wallow in the muck of their own making.

People First

We need an intelligent Microsoft Office capable and hopefully website-aware intern or assistant.
STEM program, self-disciplined, and self-motivated high school or college kids work great.
Part-time accounting staff who want more hours can also work out well.

No. Do not employ CAD staff at this stage. They have personal (ownership) issues, over-educated opinions, and everyday Civil 3D and AutoCAD user preconceptions that will get in the way of the initial list creation work that is initially at hand.
God forbid, we assign this work to our best people or a CAD Manager.
Best to keep our CAD staff working.

It helps if these people have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
Kidding aside, we can work with the detail orientated.
If they are good at Excel (it helps to understand or be willing to learn Excel text string expressions) and/or can code a modern website for fun or marginal profit all the better.

You’re an engineer or surveyor. You can watch them use Excel and tell in probably a minute or less if they have a reasonable level of spreadsheet skill or better yet the willingness to learn that.

“Create for me a cell formula that concatenates lookups from another sheet.”
The significant issue here is - Can they learn to do it quickly?
“Bring me a spreadsheet example that does this a week from Tuesday.”

In the job interview ask them to describe their personal use of standard web frameworks and/or CSS customization skills. Ask them show you a working website on their phone and discuss the internal details.
Odds are you will understand little or nothing about what they are talking about.
Great. You may learn new interesting things.

We are looking for visual graphic skills. Are they data display aware? Do they have an eye for the specifics of detail?
Remember we are profiling for specific forms of human intelligence not experience.

List Building

Their initial work will be to produce detailed lists of things to be matched to other detailed lists of things. This process isn’t rocket science except for the sad fact is many people won’t do the detailed and at times tedious work that’s needed.

Most people will tend do a few - then they want move on to the more exciting stuff.

The little foxes in the field spoil the crop.

“What about their AutoCAD and Civil 3D Skills?

Isn’t that part of the opportunity that we intend to provide to an intern?

Our website can help with a lot of that learning stuff…for free.
Register. Become a website Member.

Honestly, only basic AutoCAD and Civil 3D skills are required.
Can they open a drawing?
Can they learn to get a listing from the core AutoCAD tables: Layer names. Block names, etc?
Can they Copy Paste from the history of the ACAD command line and a few key AutoCAD and Civil 3D dialog boxes in a text editor and/or Excel?
Can they learn to employ an ASCII text editor like Notepad+ to make repetitive edits to text data?
Can they learn to test and run an AutoCAD script file at the command line?

A couple of hours of specialized and directed coaching from an experienced and skilled cadpilot that you already employ can get that done.

AutoCAD Layer Essentials

If we want to modify the Layer System that underlies our AutoCAD and Civil 3D Templates we need a big list of all the Keys that make up our potential Layer names.

If we have multiple clients with different Layer System requirements, our interns will have additional lists to build and maintain.

The Framework Layer Standard Spreadsheet tools provide us all with an easy-to-use translator Sheet. This swaps parts of names and other Layer properties by rules.
We do need a Keys list and the pattern of the naming convention structure to match.

Obviously, it does help to own a Jump Kit. We don’t need to build the Excel Spreadsheet Tools from scratch.

AutoCAD Block Essentials

We need a list (INSERT ? command) of the current AutoCAD blocks we employ in our deliverables.
Pull this list multiple times from more than one project’s plan set. Our project work does vary.
Once again employ our Excel Spreadsheet tools and extract the blocks (a WBLOCK script) into a resource folder or to a collection of resource folders.
Build and compare a match list of our internal symbol (block) names with the supplied Symbol Set block names from the Framework.
Edit and/or replace the symbol names and/or block graphics as appropriate.

The Framework Spreadsheet Tools Are Content Not Software

The Framework for Civil 3D Jump Kit product includes a bunch of loaded and fully functional Spreadsheet Tools. We supply both a bounty of useful content and the tools to manage, edit, and update that.
Here’s a summary the current Framework Spreadsheet Tools list:

It can be easily argued that the Framework for Civil 3D Spreadsheet Tools are more than worth the price of the Jump Kit product all by themselves. We have customers who do just that.

Many customers can and do apply and employ these tools to their existing personalized customization of Civil 3D.

All of that is a small price to pay for the…

The Liberty to Work in Civil 3D

Did we forget mention this?
With Jump Kit, we are also ready to go right to work in Autodesk Civil 3D.
Our famous InstantOn Civil 3D Templates and Civil 3D Style collections are ready to run.
Those in-depth resources include content for everything under the Civil 3D sun.

Civil 3D Project conversions are not such a big deal.

We are customizing our publication Civil 3D Template(s). Right?

Make Civil 3D Work Better
Get The Framework for Civil 3D