Wanted: Civil 3D User Experiences with OpenRoads

My conclusion, based on the replies is Open Roads is not going to solve our Civil 3D woes. As I expected, Bentley's products are being developed on a slower timeline, likely due to it's financial disadvantages and it's obligations to support it's primary investors, the DOT's. In my years of using their products since 2007, Bentley has never shown any interest whatsoever in supporting small scale engineering firms. Technical support has been dismal. I can't even get a response to a request for a demo for their software through their web portal. That would never happen with Autodesk. I'm not happy with Autodesk but Bentley has not stepped up to the plate as an alternative. Unfortunately I suspect it's all about financial domination ultimately, and Bentley loses on that front. 

I think it's hard to tell what you do not like about civil 3D to compare it to Openroads if you do not state it.  I use both and we could argue about differences for small things, but in the end I would say with confidence that Openroads is better, faster and easier to model complicated stuff than civil 3D.  But civil Civil 3D is better, faster and easier to do all the drawing stuff.  It depends where you want to spend your money, in the design (civil 3D) or in the drawing (OpenRoads)

I think it's hard to tell what you do not like about civil 3D to compare it to Openroads if you do not state it.  I use both and we could argue about differences for small things, but in the end I would say with confidence that Openroads is better, faster and easier to model complicated stuff than civil 3D.  But civil Civil 3D is better, faster and easier to do all the drawing stuff.  It depends where you want to spend your money, in the design (civil 3D) or in the drawing (OpenRoads)

We need to be able to annotate our models. Civil 3D is very good for that. Annotation and plans production typically take far more time than building models.However grading tools and corridor modeling are problems. Gradings corrupt and crash. Corridors are very tedious. My biggest problem is performance. Any project larger than a residential site seems to overwhelm the computer with constant processing for every little task. It gets really bad when you use data shortcuts for plan production. The sync processes occurs for every change. It is maddening. My concerns about Openroads are performance, stability and annotation/plans production. We need dynamic annotation for site work. Slope labels, spot elevations, coordinate tables, contour labels are some of the essentials. Dynamic profile and cross section sheets too. Then there are pipe models. C3D gravity pipes are pretty good but pressure pipes are terrible.

Regarding stability the one thing I want to say is that although stability is worse in ORD than Civil 3D (from my experience) data loss is minimal in ORD due to the DGN incremental save process on every change (vs the scheduled save process of the AutoCAD environment). This is probably the reason Bentley have not refined stability yet as it is a frustrating experience instead of a catastrophic one if that makes sense. Corruptions of DGNs do happen on rarer occasions (like any format).

I tried to use the Civil Geometry tools when it was first released in SS1. It was very unstable. It would frequently hang and crash when snapping to geometry and fixing them when pieces disappeared (gaps) was a pain. Also if the files get exported to DWG, all the underlying control elements got turned into lines so it was a mess. I assume those issues have been resolved by now, but I wonder. 

If it was still like it was in the v8i environment we wouldn't have bothered. Everyones perspective is relative so the best thing to do is trial it in my opinion, you may be pleasantly surprised (or disappointed).

I was hoping you had a reply. Does OpenRoads provide the annotation/plan production capabilities I listed?