AUGIWorld Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 11) civil engineers were the only people who even cared about the 3D models of sites. Today everyone wants a copy of this model, which, unless structured properly, will be all but impossible to share. On a more personal note, a poorly structured Civil 3D project will almost certainly result in a project plagued by problems. In a perfect world, we would have all the data necessary to design our site from start to finish on day one. Reality often paints a much different picture where we receive fragmented pieces of data weeks into the design process. This most commonly seems to be the case when aerial (photography) survey is ordered. Field crews must be dispatched after receiving the aerial survey to fill in things such as vegetative areas. Failing to consider the additional field data you’ll be receiving shortly has the potential to wreck your entire project. Starting on day one, you must form a plan for how you will structure your project in a way that not only will sustain your internal design needs, but also any interoperability requirements associated with your project. Ask yourself: “How is this job going to perform after I have an array of alignments, profiles, assemblies, and cross sections?” All too often such considerations become a reactive action on the part of the design team rather than a proactive one. What are you going to do when that +100MB of existing ground surface exceeds the capabilities of your hardware, effectively locking you out of your entire project? At that point you have an entire design team sitting idle while you scramble to find a solution. A cognitive data management plan would have saved you this frustration, not to mention your staff’s lost production time. enough storage space to retain 2-3 copies of every DWG file on your server. Individually these factors probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but together the software and hardware requirements can become costprohibitive to many firms. So what are firms that simply can’t afford an Autodesk Vault Server deployment to do? The answer to that question lies within the boundaries of Data Shortcuts. AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 brought with it vast improvements to the way Civil 3D is able to utilize Data Shortcuts. Unlike Vault, Data Shortcuts do not offer any type of versioning and lack the data management capabilities of Vault. Despite these limitations, Data Shotcuts still allow you to share things such as surfaces, alignments, and the like between your Revit have the AutoCAD variable PROXYGRAPHICS set to 1. Admittedly this process isn’t necessarily glamorous, but it works. For this reason I can only expect Autodesk will introduce new features to AutoCAD Civil 3D and/ or Revit to streamline the exchange of data between the two platforms. Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: the need to exchange robust 3D models of designs is here to stay. Although BIM is still in its infancy, it has rooted itself deep enough in the AEC and civil industries to be here to stay. Even if it’s BIM and not CIM (Civil Information Modeling), the concept, process, and workflow are as important to the civil industry as they are to any other AEC discipline. AutoCAD Civil 3D will be the design package where In a perfect world, we would have all the data necessary to design our site from start to finish on day one. Reality often paints a much different picture… Civil 3D DWG files. While Data Shortcuts are not as robust as a Vault implementation, they do provide the same core functionality at no additional cost to you. Migrating from a Data Shortcut environment to a Vault environment is possible. Unless a feature such as data versioning is an absolute necessity to you, my suggestion is to start with Data Shortcuts. While I am sure that Autodesk will continue evolving the capabilities of Data Shortcuts in future releases, even their current form is most capable of structuring a 3D dataset in a cognitive way. A mainstay of this so-called BIM environment is the idea of digital collaboration. The rapid exchange of 3D design data is quickly becoming commonplace, reinforcing the importance of solid data management practices. In much the same way the civil community is adopting Civil 3D, the architectural, structural, and MEP trades are each adopting a design platform known as Autodesk® Revit®. Unlike Civil 3D, Revit is not a derivative, or so-called “vertical” application to AutoCAD. While there are articles out there which may lead you to think differently, the interoperability between AutoCAD and Revit extends no further than the age-old AutoCAD DWG format. To make a long story short, Revit can read an AutoCAD DWG file, and Revit can also export an AutoCAD DWG file. Revit and AutoCAD Civil 3D can coexist provided any DWGs you wish to extract design data from using we begin realizing the full potential of the 3D models we generate. Of course in finding that potential, there will be challenges to overcome along the way. Chief among these will be the importance of structuring your model in a way in which we can both design and collaborate with it. As we begin to look at a project team as one entity, and not multiple sub-entities (trades), our designs can only get better. AutoCAD Civil and AutoCAD Civil 3D will each see new civil design centric features introduced to them. Just as important as the upcoming design-centric features of Civil 3D, will be the features aimed at “Information Modeling” and interoperability with other design platforms. The culmination of increasingly robust models and more transparent interoperability between design platforms will undoubtedly guide us to the full adoption of BIM even within the civil engineering trade. Donnie Gladfelter is the Design Systems Specialist for Timmons Group; an ENR 500 design and consulting firm headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, with offices throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Backed by more than a decade of CAD experience, he is jointly responsible for the development and delivery of training, support, and CAD standards for their more than 200 CAD users. He can be reached at donnie.gladfelter@timmons.com, or through his CAD Blog online at www.TheCADGeek.com. 11 Vault versus data shortcuts Interoperability Although it is certainly possible to contain an entire Civil 3D design in a single DWG file, it certainly isn’t desirable. To make it possible for us to split our designs into multiple DWG files, AutoCAD Civil and AutoCAD Civil 3D provide two fundamental ways to exchange real-time design data between drawings. The method long encouraged by Autodesk has been to build and deploy an Autodesk Vault Server. A Vault Server has always offered the most data sharing options within Civil 3D, but also carries a number of software costs in deployment. Launching an Autodesk Vault server requires the Autodesk Vault software (free to subscription customers), Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, plus applicable licensing from Microsoft. Among the core advantages of an Autodesk Vault Server is its versioning feature. Consequently, you must allocate Nov/Dec 2008 http://www.TheCADGeek.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.