Civil design module VS. Civil 3D

[Ajoe687]

I am about to help my office upgrade from Land 2004 and 2005. I know enough to be dangerous but I however was trained on 2005 and do not know much about the latest versions of software out there.

We are a municipality that does mostly roads, storm and sanitary in house. I might cautiously say I may be the most advance cad user there and on the other end of the spectrum there is an engineer who still draws his profiles by hand in model space, works good for him, but I prefer to use our current civil module to cut them from a surface.

My question is, as far as 2012 versions go, what would be the best option for us. I am aware that civil 3D exists, but that is about it. I wonder if it encompasses what the civil design modules did in earlier versions and how user friendly it would be to someone who would use it like basic AutoCad.

There is a local distributer I will be contacting soon, however, I didn’t want to comit the entire budget to a potential sales pitch without getting some outside perspective.

Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[rickh]

I don't know much about LDD but just for those that want the basic autocad, civil 3d can be used the same as regular autocad. Our Land Development groups went from Microstation v8 to Civil 3D in 2009.....took a lot of time to set it all up as far as styles, templates, etc go (and still standardizing...). BUT, those that are willing to learn the software can push out production drawings much faster, with a huge benefit being in the revisions process. Styles, I will say, are the hardest to get used to....especially when trying to identify layers in xrefs.....but you win some, you lose some. Set up the templates carefully and it shouldn't be too much headache.

 

Definately save some budget for powerful machines if you don't have them already. Bottom line for us is that it takes some front end time to get up and running (probably more so for us coming from microstation), but everyone that knows how to use it agrees that their projects are faster and easier to revise if needed. And for the old dogs in your company, they can still draw lines, circles, and text with regular Autocad.