Multiple Users Platform & Surface Simplifier

Hello Everyone

Our Company is evaluating to change the civil works platform to bentley (Currently we are using Autodesk Civil 3D) and one important thing we must know is if Bentley PowerCivil works with multiple user platform (one DB and several users working on it, getting just one model)

other question is if is there a surface simplifier command, procedure or something like that... we export our civil data base to PDMS but usually the surfaces have a lot of triangles and that makes the PDMS model get a little heavier (not little, really)... with Civil 3D we use the surface simplifier and works fine... does PowerCivil have something equivalent?

i really would appreciate your help with some of light

thanks in advance
  • The software tends to be discipline specific. The surface modeling is done in a site design module and the surface models are stored in a file.The sewer & water module and the drainage module reference the surface model file for their elevation source. They can be updated when the surface model file changes. Conversely the files created in the sewer, water and drainage modules can be referenced in the site tools to show those components in profiles and cross sections.

    While this allows for multiple designers to work on a project, there can only be one source file referenced at a time in each module. Therefore you can't have 2 or more designers building surface models or water/sewer/drainage systems at the same time unless you duplicate data which is not a very good workflow. So essentially it's one user per module.

    With the new technology introduced in SS3 I expect that to change. Microstation now has a Surface element which is stored in the DGN file rather than an external file. These surfaces can be referenced (XREF'd) into other files and used like data references in Civil 3D. Any time the surface changes it will be reflected in the XREF's and you will be able to control the display of the surface with styles like Civil 3D. The big difference here is these surfaces are native CAD elements in Microstation so they can be scaled, reprojected or moved to fit the coordinate system of any host drawing to be utilized as surface data. That cannot be done in C3D. They can also be used to check for interference, not with just pipes but ANY 3D cad element (3D solids, lines, etc.)

    I should also mention that with the release of SS3 there will be new 3D rules based parametric modeling. It is a bit complicated to explain here but essentially you will be able to establish  horizontal and vertical relationships between linear features that retain those relationships when the parent features change. Consider it like feature lines with built in profiles that you can edit in profile view and that retain distance, slope and elevation relationships to other feature lines. I understand we will be able to apply templates (assemblies in C3D) to these "featurelines" which will dynamically interact with the terrain and also provide subgrade layers to gradings. Again something that can't be done with C3D gradings. It should be very powerful if it works well. We should be getting our first hands on look in a couple of months or so.

    Neil Wilson (aka Neilw)

    Power Civil v8i 08.11.07.245

    AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018