hi
I wonder if anyone here was/is quite proficient with Civil3D and now with OpenRoads Designer.
I switched to Microstation from Autocad in 2005 and have never regretted it. Then I learned InRoads v8i to later made a transition to OpenRoads. I feel quite fully conversant with it, I am using in on highways, small streets, runabouts, site projects, runways, aprons, taxiways, and harbors, etc. I am providing training in ORD for Bentley Institute. And would rally stay with ORD.
However now more and more clients both external and internal at my company ask me to work in Civil3D, with no other reason than "we work in Civil 3D, we don't know ORD and we want you to work in the same software". Frankly, I can not say what is better to what tasks, I see sometimes colleagues struggling with assemblies that I can do in seconds with ORD templates, and I appreciate the flexibility and working in 3D environment rather than creating solid as exports of corridors. I know they are suffering from lack of surface templates, etc. On the other hand, they produce solids, not meshes that have sometimes issues with volumes.
Briefly, what I would like to ask, if you can use both ORD and C3D, what would be the software of your choice.
Adam
You can use both if you want, on my last project the plan productions was done with civil 3D and datashortcut, driven and update with lanXML from Openroads, updating the "main files" from the xml from ORD will updates the different plan and profiles trough the datashortcut. All the corridors and modeling were done in openroads. The deliverable were dwg, surfaces, and IFC for 3D models.
So far everythings is smooth.
The big problem with civil 3D is subassembly composer and the whole assembly process. In this world, a point on the right side of the alignement can't be driven by a point from the left side of the alignement because everything is calculated from the center to the outside of the assembly.
Answer Verified By: Adam Wieczorek
This is an interesting thread! I face similar challenges in my organisation where it is institutionally ingrained that C3D is used but I am much more proficient in ORD, coming from an MX background. In terms of modelling, I feel ORD is far superior but I have to admit, C3D wins hands-down on the drawing production side.
I'd very much like to find out more about what you specifically exported from ORD in XML and what you exported as IFC as I think this could be a game-changing workflow for me. The mindset of C3D being superior is difficult to overturn as C3D is ubiquitous, but with this workflow it could be demonstrated that modelling in ORD and drawing production in C3D (until ORD catches up!) is a possible win-win situtation.
Thanks,
Chris
Hi Chris,
Although Civil 3D Drawing production is more refined than ORD, something to clarify is that it is not superior (IMO). The live 3d cutting of any Mesh\Solid and ability to automatically annotate any crossing feature is very advanced in comparison to the styles and other hoops you need to do for crossing features in C3d. If it is simply annotating a section in a familar way than legacy software, that is much simplier in C3d.
Regards,
Mark
OpenRoads Designer 2022 R3 (10.12) | Microstation 2023 | ProjectWise CE 3.4