Matt’s last post regarding Hydraflow applications and a few other articles I’ve read lately have added to the ideas that have been dancing around in my head regarding Civil 3D interoperability (or lack thereof!) with other application. There are hundreds of add-on applications for Civil 3D and you can find a long list of them here at Autodesk’s Partner Product webpage. But third-party applications is not exactly what I’ve been pondering. What is really interesting is how users are making Civil 3D work with all the other applications needed to get the the _entire_ project designed and constructed.
There’s a lot of talk about BIM, CIM (Civil Information Modeling), Virtualization, Virtual Design and Construction, 5D Project tracking, and on and on. What we don’t hear so much about is HOW user are exchanging data among all the widely varying products needed to bring all this together. Even applications from the same vendor rarely share information in a meaningful way (think Revit and Civil 3D), so how do we expect applications from different manufactures to play nice?
To quote the Information Delivery Manual website:
[To] use BIM effectively and for benefit to be unlocked, the quality of communication between different participants in the construction process needs significant improvement. If the information required is available when it is needed and the quality of information is satisfactory, the construction process will itself be significantly improved. For this to happen, there must be a common understanding of the building processes and of the information that is needed for and results from their execution.
The question on the floor then, is how do YOU share/collaborate/interoperate Civil 3D information with other team members/applications/contractors/architects/owners? do you consistently share the same type of information in a similar format? Do you have to “dumb”-down” your smart models in order to share them (how “smart” is that?)? Are you required to provide model information or data in a specific format? Do you use third-party apps to make sharing model info easier?
While you ponder your answer, there are a few resources you might find interesting:
McGraw-Hill SmartMarket Report on Building Information Modeling (BIM)
International Alliance for Interoperability
BuildingSMART Alliance (North America)
Join the discussion by leaving a comment below. Let’s hear what you have to say!
We typically dumb down our base models (only linework) to send out to contractors for the layout portion of the project. For surface information we typically send the TIN as 3D lines or Plines along with the Featurelines exported (3D Polylines). Finally, we use XML to send surface data back-and-forth between Microstation and AutoCAD, when applicable; very rare.
The most back-and-forth we do is with Hydraflow Storm Sewers and Civil 3D. There again we use XML with a handy Excel worksheet so we can round-trip the data as may times as needed without losing any design setup in Hydraflow. Civil 3D is much more flexible than LDT in this area.
Does _anyone_ find the tools for sharing revit info useful?
We find ourselves typically on the receiving end of the sharing as our field crews perform a lot of construction layout requests. It has ranged from simple linework drawings, to Microstation, to AutoCAD drawings, to worst drawings – architectural drawings plotted, and sent as a scanned TIF in a PDF . Only a seldom few have ever wanted to share a LandXML surface or two.
I have had architects worried that we would scale off the drawings…
When we collaborate with Architects, we share the typically the linework necessary. Seldom are we asked to provide drawing files to other firms to prepare layout. Occasionally, we are asked to provide dumbed down drawings to clients.
Revit ? I haven’t gotten a architect who uses it who knows what to share…
Not sure if you’ve all heard of it but there’s a powerful tool that’s widely used throughout the industry to provide interoperability between the different products Mark has alluded to. It’s called Export to AutoCAD
All joking aside, this is no joke. In my experience the lack of interoperability between products basically forces users to go this route meaning all that really smart, amazing data is reduced to lines, arcs, and circles. Pretty sad…
I just read a short Press Release from Safe Software about a new tool that lets you bring Civil 3D information into their GIS product, FME.
Info about FME: http://www.safe.com/products/desktop/keyfeatures.php
Info about Civil3D import capabilities: http://www.safe.com/civil3d
I’m hoping someone from Safe.com will join this discussion as I think they have a tool that might be of value to many Civil 3D users.
For Safe Software’s FME 2010 release, we have added a Civil-3D reader, which gives users the ability to transform their Civil-3D data into any of the other 200 or so formats that FME supports.
The Civil-3D reader presently supports the following features:
Alignments
Parcels
Sites
Pipes
Pipe Networks
Point Groups
COGOPoints
A web demo showing FME being used to import Pipe data into an ESRI Geodatabase can be found at “http://www.safe.com/support/movies/Civil3D/civil3d_movie.html”. An important advantage FME has is ability to use Transformers to manipulate the data during the translation process. Civil-3D stores only the pipe centerline and diameter, but using FME’s Transformers, it is easy to calculate the invert and crown elevation of the pipe to be written to Geodatabase.
The development of FME has largely been driven by the needs of our users. Since Civil-3D is a newly added format, we would welcome feedback from Civil-3D users on how the reader can be improved to best meet your data translation needs. A fully functional trial version of FME 2010 can be downloaded from “www.safe.com/download”, and our support team (support@safe.com) is happy to help you creating workspaces to translate and transform your Civil-3D data.
Dave Campanas
Product Specialist
Safe Software Inc.
Typically when we work with the architects we have to save our drawings as autocad 2007. Then we have to spend time cleaning up the drawing so its basically line work with not survey points. Just a few weeks again I had to work along with another agency on a project and all their drawings were dgn. So I basically had to save my drawings as dgn files and email the files to them. It did get a little fustrating at times trying to get their information to line up with ours. In addition, their survey data was on a different datam than ours. On the other hand I do love challenges.
. I wish the city, clients and architects would use Autodesk TrueView and Design Review to review over plans.
I’m involved with the BIM Focus Group established by the Texas AEC CEO Roundtable. Our goal is to research and report on BIM to the CEO’s at their bi-annual meeting. Our current study is focused on this topic. I have been leading the task on Civil/Architect coordintation. I’m a Civil Engineer and work with an Architect in the committee and we trying to establish some good workflows. Two resources that have been very helpful are from Autodesk and AU 2009. Link are below:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=13734321&linkID=9240695
http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=class&session_id=5342
Thanks for the reply. The skill builder does a good job of explaining the functionality of Civil 3D and Revit data sharing tools. Unfortunately that functionality to really collaborate or share model data is woefully inadequate. As the procedure demonstrates, there is no live link between the Revit model and the Civil 3D model and edits to one or the other means a complete redo of the procedure.
Have you and your team had a chance to put the workflow into practice? Have you found tweaks or other work-arounds to keep both models intact, linked and dynamically updated? Seems like interoperability, even for products from the same mfr, has a long way to go.
Anyone else see things the same way? Differently?
Not in practice yet. We are still wrapping up some of the details. I will say that there is no dynamic link yet and the group all agrees that we don’t see the technology capable of doing that at this point. What we’re talking about at this point is simply how to get the data to transfer with the least amount of effort possible.
We are focusing on coordinates, units, site plan, surfaces and utilities. Essentially, the coordinates work out as long as REVIT uses shared coordinates with the site survey. Units take care of themselves so no more scaling by 12 when I bring in a building model. Building comes in right into place using the import site model in C3D.
The site plan is an issue. REVIT does not have the capabilities or tools to design a site plan. Architects that insist on designing the site plan still use AutoCAD and then send that to the Civil Engineer. We then build our site model and then export to AutoCAD for them then to bring into REVIT to verify grade. This works well for what it’s worth.
Utilities are kinda nice. We bring in a REVIT MEP model using the site model import and then we can tie our pipe network directly to it using snaps. The MEP pipe has a centerline through the pipe that is snappable. We then export to AutoCAD and then REVIT can see our pipe network.
After talking with my Autodesk rep for our region (David Kubala), there is no better workflow than that right now. If you have any suggestions that we can try, I’m open to trying it and discussing with the group.