Bentley Civil Platforms

Hi Dana,

tough question to answer without more details.

1) What type of projects will you be using the software for? If your project work includes Highway designs, that eliminates PowerCivil (which is Bentley's Land Development product).

2) Assuming you do expect to do Highway design - knowing which State DOT's you will be working for may dictate which product you look at (InRoads or GEOPAK).

3) Only InRoads will operate with Autocad as the Cad platform. All 3 products will operate with DWG files.

4) All Bentley Civil products include a convertor to take LDD Project data to the Bentley products. C3D data can be exported via Land XML and imported into any of the Bentley products.

5) I doubt that C3D Objects can keep their properties within a DGN file format. The C3D data is Autodesk proprietry data that we do not have access to. I'm not 100% sure on this one... may need further investigation.

6) The differences between InRoads and GEOPAK are significant, but both products achieve virtually the same end result. Both of these products were acquired by Bentley and, prior to that acquisition were in direct competition to each other. Therefore, they both achieve similar goals but have different methodologies getting to those goals. In saying that, we have begun to share modules between our different product lines to ensure our users get the strengths of our Civil products no matter which product they choose.

I hope this helps,

If you have further questions, contact me via email and I will attempt to assist further.

Michael.

Hi Dana,

tough question to answer without more details.

1) What type of projects will you be using the software for? If your project work includes Highway designs, that eliminates PowerCivil (which is Bentley's Land Development product).

2) Assuming you do expect to do Highway design - knowing which State DOT's you will be working for may dictate which product you look at (InRoads or GEOPAK).

3) Only InRoads will operate with Autocad as the Cad platform. All 3 products will operate with DWG files.

4) All Bentley Civil products include a convertor to take LDD Project data to the Bentley products. C3D data can be exported via Land XML and imported into any of the Bentley products.

5) I doubt that C3D Objects can keep their properties within a DGN file format. The C3D data is Autodesk proprietry data that we do not have access to. I'm not 100% sure on this one... may need further investigation.

6) The differences between InRoads and GEOPAK are significant, but both products achieve virtually the same end result. Both of these products were acquired by Bentley and, prior to that acquisition were in direct competition to each other. Therefore, they both achieve similar goals but have different methodologies getting to those goals. In saying that, we have begun to share modules between our different product lines to ensure our users get the strengths of our Civil products no matter which product they choose.

I hope this helps,

If you have further questions, contact me via email and I will attempt to assist further.

Michael.

I might be able to help some with regards to Civil 3D as I have worked with Power Civil and Civil 3D.

1st off, the utility convert Land Desktop data to a LandXML file which was introduced with the v8i version is not fully functional for Power Civil. The xml file that is generated by the utility combines alignments, profiles, points and surface models all into one file. Power Civil is not currently capable of extracting multiple types of data from a single XML file so it doesn't know what to do with the XML file generated by the utility. Actually it can only handle one surface per XML file. If an XML file includes more than one surface, Power Civil will combine them all into one surface at import which results in a mess.

Also Land Desktop does not allow for mutiple design profiles for an aligment and all design profiles are named (FG). Since it associates the design profile to it's alignment this does not create a naming conflct. However Power Civil does not associate profiles to alignments so every profile must have a unique name. Thus when importing Land Desktop alignments and profiles, each must be in a seperate XML file to avoid naming conflicts in Power Civil, otherwise you will get all the alignments in but only one profile named FG.

Civil 3D uses custom objects for surfaces, alignments, profiles, points and sections. There is no way to preserve those objects in Power Civil (or any Bentley App as far as I know). At best you might be able to display them via object enablers (which are not yet available) but you would not be able to manipulate them in any way. Your only option for exchanging data is via LandXML or by exploding the Civil 3D objects (which must be done in Civil 3D) and using the graphics in Power Civil. This will limit you when round tripping data between the 2 apps. If you import an alignment from C3D to Power Civil via Land XML, edit the alignment in Power Civil, and export it back to C3D via Land XML, the alignment will become a new alignment in Civil 3D. Thus you would have to a lot of rework to get this new alignment mapped into the C3D models. One exception is in regard to surface models. If you import a surface into Civil3D via LandXML it retains a link to the XML file. Thus if you over write the XML file with an updated version, Civil 3D can update the surface from the XML file and everything referencing that surface would update as well.

HTH