[nmoxey]

I know this is a touchy subject, but the company I work for is currently using a mix of Land Desktop Development 2004 and Carlson Civil Suite 2009. We are looking to upgrade our Land Desktop Development to either Civil 3d 2009 or Carlson Civil Suite 2009 and I was wondering if I could get some input from the members to the pros and cons of each program.

Our company is a civil engineering company that does alot of commercial and residential subdivision development. Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks

[rustysilo]

I've never used any program outside of Autodesk products so I have no idea about Carlson. I recently saw a post about MicroSurvey at theswamp. It looks like it might be another option to consider as well. Uses Intellicad so it should be similar to AutoCAD which cuts down on the learning curve.

We have Civil 3D and I love it although it has some quirks here and there. It is similar enough to Land Desktop/Civil Design, but is dynamic in nature so no more rebuilding surfaces, then rebuilding profiles, etc. You make a change to your surface data, the surface updates, the profiles update, etc.

[BIGAL]

As an ex dealer for another brand of surveying engineering software I would have to say that there is some better software out there to do surveying and engineering functions vastly simpler than Civ3D and often with more detail.

The trade off though is the CAD drawing side even though they have spent a lot of time improving there cad ability.

I would expect the majority of engineers etc here in Australia have two packages Autocad and something else.

Yes we run Civ3D but we run the Australian ARD on top of it to make it equal to what we were used to. ie two packages. What I am trying to say is that add ons to Autocad can only make it better and fill in holes in the original product.

[rkmcswain]

P&P Sheet production is in it's infancy in Carlson, but Carlson's modeling of roads and intersections, etc. is far beyond C3D.

The best thing to do is get together a sampling of your daily tasks and ask Carlson to demonstrate how to do them in Carlson. They will either come to your office or do a Webinar for you.

[rustysilo]

And I bet you wouldn't have to deal with a subscription using Carlson...

What makes their roadway modeling so much better than C3D if you don't mind me asking?

[rkmcswain]

Originally Posted by rustysilo

And I bet you wouldn't have to deal with a subscription using Carlson...

Carlson does have a similar model, but the costs are very reasonable.

Originally Posted by rustysilo

What makes their roadway modeling so much better than C3D if you don't mind me asking?

Specifically, intersection design. You don't need all those alignments like you do in C3D. I'm pretty sure they have some demo videos you can watch on their website if you are interested.

[rustysilo]

Downloading one now. Thanks for the info. I see the cost is a bit less expensive that Civil 3D. I've seen that there are a few intersection add-ons for C3D that are supposed to make it a bit easier, well not that it's hard to model an intersection in C3D. Just a little time consuming due to all the alignments and profiles.

[rustysilo]

Wow! It does the intersections for you! That's pretty cool.

[rustysilo]

I went back to find some of the other intersection add-ons and see that now caddapps has a "lite" version for free.

http://www.civil3dtools.com/index.html

[sinc]

I was talking with some surveyors at a seminar today, and they said they finally dropped C3D and switched to Carlson. They said they've been far, far happier and more-productive since doing that.

They said it's much easier for them to "work with others" now. They said they can even extract data from Civil-3D files. Meanwhile, they had a lot of issues in this regard with C3D. The other big problem they had with C3D was the constant crashing. Not sure what they're talking about.