Wicked Cool Stuff
Dominick Gallegos, Civil 3D Technical Marketing Manager for Autodesk, shares his unique perspective and ideas on the functionality and use of Civil 3D for a range of different project types.
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- posted 09/14/06 by Anthony Governanti Code names – The early years of Civil 3D
- Ok, you’re back again, which means you are either really interested, and I have a captive audience, or you stumbled onto this page while searching for a license key for that old version of DCA you found in the back of the desk drawer. Either way, this will be the third and final segment of the Civil 3D history lesson, as told by Da Govna.
We pick back up on our timeline in the early 2000’s when LDT was quickly growing into a strong contender in the Civil Engineering CAD market. About this time is when I became a member of the Autodesk family. Up to this point, i was working in the industry, but quickly grew tired of the “move-copy-rotate” routine of the typical CAD tech in my area, and after a couple job changes in a very short time, was lucky enough to land a job in Support at the ’Desk.
Man, this was cool; to walk the hallowed halls of the mother ship – where it all began. Unfortunately they kept us Support techs pretty confined to our desks, with a chain cleverly disguised as a phone head-set. Every now and then I’d fake indigestion or a bad cough and could slip away from the phones long enough to roam the halls of the development areas. It was here that I’d overhear weird conversations that didn’t make a lot of sense, mainly because they were speaking in a tongue few outside of the walls of Autodesk can speak. I later found out that this odd dialect of English was know as “code names” and was practiced by an indigenous species of programmers who seldom saw the light of day, but when they did, would use these code names to confuse and startle the enemy so as to not give away any secrets of what was waiting in the wings and was to soon be unleashed to the public!
The first code name I was aware of was Olympus; this was the first time you had an installable product that could create data, manipulate objects, create a design, and stuff like that. Then shortly after that it was renamed to better align with our Mapping brethren to Vine (a play on words, since the Map being developed was code named Hollywood, and the overall project of for the two applications was called Crossroad – so that when and if the products were built together, you’d have Hollywood and Vine. Pretty clever huh?! (insert sound of crickets chirping here)).
So Vine was slated to be the first release of this thing that had been nurtured along and growing in the shadow of LDT for a couple years. One problem though – its gotta have a name! Well, that part has been covered by James already, so refer to him for that story; bottom line; Civil 3D was the choice that was made, and Civil 3D it would be. That brings us to the fall of 2003, and the first release of Autodesk Civil 3D; it could have been a fairly momentous event, the only downside is that we choose to release it as a preview of the product. What does that mean? Well a preview is a chance to get an application into the he hands of our customers without charging any money for it (hmm, giving away software – what’s so hard about that – well its something that the government and the SEC has made very difficult to do if you are a publicly held company) and allow users to get their hand on it and start to put it to the test.
We had a lot of great feedback in those days, and I personally had a lot of fun showing 2004 to eager audiences (I became an Applications Engineer wit the Civil sales team at Autodesk at about the same time) to give a glimpse of what was coming down the pipe. Anyway, the preview lived for about a year, and if my memory serves me right, I even think we had a Service pack for it. Then in October of 2004, we released the first commercial version of Civil 3D, code named Dozer - I think a much more apt name considering it’s a program that deals with moving dirt, but the real reason for the name was the movie The Matrix. All the AutoCAD based product were given a code name after characters from the movie.
We had Neo (AutoCAD), Trinity (Map), Tank (LDT/CV/Surv) and some others that I can’t remember. Anyway, since I was a huge fan of the movie, I was quite pleased with those code-names.
So Dozer was much more of a momentous event; at least for us here at Autodesk, and for a bunch of subscription customers who received the first shipment just in time for the holiday season. This was also the beginning of some really fun times for me; I used to demo LDT to audiences, and right in the middle, would switch over to Civil 3D and show them some parcels being edited graphically, and let them watch all the annotation and table automatically update! That was cool – but the best reaction I received was when you would change the scale of the drawing, and all the labels would automatically resize – that always got the biggest oohs and ahhs – even from the project managers and owners in the room! Anyway, I digress again, but I can’t help getting a little nostalgic.
Soon, and I mean very soon, we then released Macallan (Civil 3D 2006) and for any Scotch drinkers out there, I think you can see where the motivation behind that code name came from. It was April of 2005, and in just a mere 6 months, the Manchester crew, along with an extended team in China, was able to turn around a full release of the software and still include some great new functionality. This is probably where most of you starting becoming aware of Civil 3D as more then just some experiment by Autodesk, but as a real-world engineering application. This is when I made the move over to my current position in marketing for the Civil team, and again really started to have a blast. I was one of a handful of folks who taught a Civil 3D based class at AU that year, and was enjoying touring the globe training our internal sales staff and partners on how this thing worked.
One more year in the books, and that brought us to where we are today – Fenway (Civil 3D 2007) so named after a great run to the World Series by the Red Sox (who play at Fenway park in Boston MA for those not up on America’s favorite past time). Well that’s it, your brief, or not so brief history lesson on Civil 3D and how we got to where we are today. I hope you enjoyed the tale, feel free to ask questions or post comments if you like, and thanks for tuning in!
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG
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Civil 3D; A History Part Deux
Posted 09/08/06 by Anthony Governanti
So to recap where I left off; we had set of tools that started from humble roots to grow into a great civil program, an acquisition, and a couple somewhat new programs given great names that fit the TLA standard at Autodesk. These were my glory days, as I gracefully exited college with two associates degrees in hand, and that innocent and somewhat naive outlook that I was about to take on the world and do great things as a CAD Technician. Then I started working..testing dirt; so much for all that CAD training, but that's another tale for another time.
Anyway, back to the history lesson; sometime in the early days of the Autodesk/Softdesk relationship, a grass-routes effort was undertaken to develop the 'next big thing' for Civil Engineering software. Some of this effort did see the light of day, and as I've been told (unfortunately, I was out testing dirt on a hot job site in the middle of nowhere NH at the time so this is a story being retold, so please excuse the second hand information) there was a program called AEC-X.
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This was a mysterious piece of code that was shown by none other then Dave Simeone with Carol Barts at his side at some big Autodesk event back in the day. It showed an alignment being edited on the fly, and the profile built from that alignment automatically updating! Wow, that's cool stuff, but surely it must be parlor tricks or smoke and mirrors; well, yes and no. It certainly wasn't an application you could design a real project with, but then again it wasn't meant to be.It was an experiment to see what could be with the right know-how, and more importantly, with the right investment.
Now I get to the part where ADT fits in. Part of Autodesk's reason for acquiring Softdesk was for the Civil engineering software, and part of it was for the Architectural software Auto Architect. So a decision was made early on after the acquisition that investment and resources would be pushed towards the architectural side of the house first, and that investment grew into ADT, which represented a significant rework, if not a complete rewrite of the Softdesk architectural code. What this meant for us civil folks is that we got LDD (now LDT) which was a more scaled back approach at 'integrating' the Softdesk code into an AutoCAD desktop application. Several releases of ADT went by, and finally the day came to set 'those civil folks' loose on some R&D money and time! A significant effort was undertaken, and the roots of Civil 3D began to sprout from the minds and hard work of some very talented and very determined folks in Henniker/Manchester (there was a move in 2000 to a new facility in ManchVegas). This will bring us to the beginning of Civil 3D, and probably the biggest chunk of the history lesson...in my next post.
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG
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Buon giorno fellow colleagues!
Posted 08/29/06 by Anthony Governanti
So if my Geek-cred wasn't fully established before now with a couple years participation in a Solar Car Club and Radio Station back in college; the time I spent living in a Technically Advanced Residential Dwelling with some great friends of mine; the two and half years as a support technician at Autodesk (I'm sure I've talked on the phone to most of you LDT users at least once in that span of time); the two years as an Applications Engineer; my fourth year participating as an instructor at Autodesk University; and the fact that most of the lights in my current house run on remote controls; if all that was't enough I've decided to jump into the world of Blogging with Wicked Cool Stuff. Its here that I'm going to talk about and share my ideas, tips, tricks, as well as rants and random thoughts about Autodesk Civil 3D; what I consider the best thing to hit the Civil Engineering industry since the Slide Rule.
So what's this Civil 3D thing?
Ok, you've heard some rumblings on the newsgroups; talked to some colleagues at a user group meeting, or may have even tried to use the software in your spare time (hmmm, that's a new concept huh? spare time I wonder what its like, I should try to explore it sometime) and you've heard the marketing speak; dynamic modeling, instant updates, 90% time saving, etc, etc, etc. Well I'm here to give you a little history, a little background, and maybe even some insight into what this thing is, and why it might be worth your time to take a look at it, at least before the rest of the world around you has already standardized on it.
Ok, history time; what three letter acronym (TLA) can be used to describe why Civil 3D exists today? - anyone, Bueller, Bueller - DCA. That's right; some of the old-schoolers in our midst will remember a program that ran as an add-on to AutoCAD called DCA. This program was born from the idea that it's got to be easier to plot survey points in CAD then to have to use a pen or pencil on a drafting board. Over time, the small set of lisp routines for surveyors grew into a fairly complete survey and civil engineering package. As it grew, so did the name, eventually becoming Softdesk.
This is where my hands-on experience with the software begins, as I learned Softdesk on AutoCAD 13 in school. Yes, I'm a late bloomer; this helps me avoid sayings like 'I remember when DCA came on 32, 5 1/4 inch floppy Disks' or one of my favorites; 'I had the fastest computer in the office; a 286 with 4 MB of ram, man those were the days'. Instead I have fond memories of perfectly timing my regens of a 12 MB drawing so that I could take my lunch break while my Gateway, with 32 MB of ram (the most in the office mind you) worked hard at regenerating my current view to make sure all my Wipeouts were at the correct display order.
I digress though, back to the lesson; so Softdesk became one of the more popular civil applications for AutoCAD till eventually Autodesk took notice, and acquired the company out of little Henniker, New Hampshire. Two major things came out of this move; Architectural Desktop and Land Development Desktop. Since LDD (yet another TLA (YATLA)) is probably near and dear to most of our hearts, we'll concentrate on LDD, but we'll see why ADT is worth mentioning in the next installment. Bottom line is that LDD consolidated what had become quite a group of modules from Softdesk into the configuration we still see today; Land, Civil Design, and Survey. LDD would grow over the next couple years into a pretty powerful program, especially when coupled with Civil Design. A lot of seats were sold, and a lot of companies around North America standardized on it for site development and subdivision design. We even ran across the occasional municipality or local government that used it for all aspects of civil design including road and highway. Through my time in the field as a user, I got great exposure to the inner workings of LDD and Civil Design, in particular the Pipes routines, and did a lot of work in sub-surface design and site design. What we'll get into next is what was going on at Autodesk during this time, and how it would change the future of civil engineering CAD.
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG