Wicked Cool Stuff

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posted 08/29/06 by Anthony Governanti Buon giorno fellow colleagues!

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

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