AUGIWorld Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 24) AutoCAD Civil 3D Civil 3D Turns 5: A First Look at AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 Five years ago Autodesk Land Desktop 2004 was shipped with an added bonus for civil engineering professionals worldwide. That added bonus was the first release of AutoCAD® Civil 3D®. Although Civil 3D 2004 was only a preview release, it certainly had the makings to revolutionize the way civil engineering design was done. Land Desktop users marveled at the idea of a dynamically linked design environment. Throughout its five short years in existence, Civil 3D has evolved into a fullfeatured civil design suite, able to tackle some of the most complex design scenarios. Recent Civil 3D releases have introduced a number of monumental features such as Plan Production in 2008. But a larger question remains: what’s the big new feature to be packed inside AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009? While it may disappoint some, Civil 3D 2009 does not bring with it a flagship feature such as Plan Production. Instead the excitement in Civil 3D 2009 comes from a strong collection of smaller features, sure to add up to vast amounts of time savings. This fifth release introduces ways to better manage large datasets, more easily share data without Vault, and even speed based design, to name a few. able advantage Data Shortcuts have over Autodesk Vault is economics. Data Shortcuts are built into the software for free, whereas hardware, software, and implementation costs for Vault can add up. Additionally the Civil 3D Vault interface has always been superior to the Data Shortcut interface. Civil 3D 2009 aims to close some of that gap. Data Shortcuts are now included within Prospectors Master View. Users can share surfaces, alignments, pipe networks, or view frame groups just like before, except now with the added bonus of a Prospector interface. In addition, an all-new external Data Shortcuts Editor provides an interface similar to the standard AutoCAD Reference Manager. Surfaces Figure 1: Data Shortcuts in Prospector. Ironically, as I write this article my firm is getting started on a relatively large in- Autodesk Vault’s versioning capabilities and the like are definite advantages over Data Shortcuts. Of course one indisput24 Data sharing and management Figure 2: External Data Shortcuts Editor program. w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.augi.com
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