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Introduction to Civil 3D

Autodesk's Civil 3D has been the leading design authoring tool of choice supporting civil engineering design applications since the early 2000s. Designers working with Civil 3D are able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to civil engineering design. This textbook is intended for civil designers with a basic understanding of Civil 3D and its workflows.

With this book, you will learn how best to configure and manage your civil engineering designs by successfully leveraging all that Autodesk Civil 3D has to offer.

We will begin by exploring best practices and real-world applications that will elevate your designs with Civil 3D. Autodesk Civil 3D connects to an entire network of other platforms and technologies to take your project further than you would imagine for civil engineering designs. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Autodesk's Civil 3D and will be able to strategize how best to utilize it in your next project.

In this chapter, we will provide some background and history to help you realize the benefits of leveraging Autodesk's Civil 3D and understand its place within the Architeture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. We will then familiarize ourselves with the overall user interface to understand all the tools and functionality available within Autodesk's Civil 3D, allowing you to maintain a high level of efficiency as you work through your design(s). Finally, to gain all of the benefits that Civil 3D has to offer and maintain a high level of efficiency and consistency, you're going to learn how to leverage as much of Civil 3D's dynamic capabilities as possible to support your Building Information Modeling (BIM) design(s).

So, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is Civil 3D?
• The user interface
• Understanding Civil 3D elements

Technical requirements

It's important to note that Autodesk's Civil 3D can often be very taxing to your computer. There is a lot of processing that goes on with modeled design elements, even in the background, that enables the dynamic (connected) capabilities to occur throughout the BIM design life cycle. In turn, there are many technical requirements that need to be considered to allow Autodesk's Civil 3D to operate at its full potential. Here, we'll review the minimum requirements that Autodesk recommends, with a few of my suggestions added to increase efficiency and speed throughout the BIM design process:

• Operating system - 64-Bit Microsoft Windows 10
• Processor - 3+ GHz
• Memory - 16 GB RAM (I suggest going with either 64 GB or 128 GB)
• Graphics card - 4 GB (I suggest going with 8+ GB)
• Display resolution - 1980 x 1080 with True Color
• Disk space - 16 GB
• Pointing device - MS-Mouse compliant

What is Civil 3D?

We've all heard the term BIM being thrown around for quite some time now. In general, BIM is the process typically applied to and associated with intelligently and dynamically designing an actual building or structure, where architects/engineers and designers can visualize and anticipate the true constructability of a project.

On the survey and civil engineering side, we've been generating, designing, and modeling everything outside buildings/structures in a 3D environment for just as long, if not longer, than the term BIM has been around. However, for one reason or another, these designs have not typically been viewed as BIM by the vast majority.

This is where Autodesk's Civil 3D comes into the picture. Civil 3D is essentially a BIM design authoring tool that fully supports both surveying and civil engineering designs. When utilized the right way, we have the power to create and manage intelligently designed models, perform cost estimations, interfence checks/clash detections, prepare our models for construction sequencing, and even perform asset management integrations well beyond design.

It's important to note that Autodesk's Civil 3D is considered a vertical application of Autodesk's AutoCAD. A vertical application in this context essentially means that Civil 3D is built on top of AutoCAD, thereby still providing a lot of 2D-focused tools and functionality. To make the transition from 2D to 3D, we'll need to realize the separation of where the content resides and how the application of tools differs in each world. Throughout the course of this book, I will cover both 2D and 3D applications of design intent to provide a bit more insight as to how and when to apply each of them.

Historically, it is always recommended that anyone looking to fully utilize Civil 3D should have a basic understanding of AutoCAD to establish that foundation. Depending on the individual learning, that concept is more frequently dismissed as it has the potential to root bad design habits in those not willing to fully embrace the 3D world. As Civil 3D continues to evolve and become more of a model-centric focused design authoring tool, the industry has a much better opportunity to fully embrace the concept of BIM and design with intelligence from the beginning.

What types of BIM projects can Civil 3D manage?

When trying to determine how Civil 3D can best be utilized from a design standpoint, we're going to break down the tools and functionality into the following three main design categories or markets: land development, utilities, and transportation. In addition to the three main design categories, it's important to realize all projects, whether building or infrastructure, rely upon existing conditions, and Civil 3D is a great partner for hosting these parameters as well as modeling new ones for a complementary design to the interior of the structure. This added benefit is heavily relied on and supported in the surveying industry as well.

In this course, we'll cover all four of these categories in great length as follows:

• From a surveying perspective, we'll cover tools that allow for full integration of survey databases, field books, existing conditions modeling, and even point cloud integration from drone and laser scan technology. Any BIM design being generated can only be as accurate as the survey and existing conditions model, making these early steps critical to successful design downstream.
• From a land development perspective, we'll cover methods that allow a wide array of civil site designs including subdivisions, residential/commercial sites, parks, and even environmental designs.
• From a utility perspective, we'll cover tools and functionality that support storm drainage, sanitary sewer, waterline, and natural gas designs.
• From a transportation perspective, we'll cover tools and functionality that support roadway designs, rehabilitations, and access roads. Additionally, we'll cover tips and tricks on how some of these tools can be applied in civil site designs and even stream and restoration projects.

Understanding real-world applications of any new technology solution is critical from an overall adoption and implementation standpoint. Throughout this book, especially as we dive deeper into the specific tools and functionality of Autodesk's Civil 3D, we'll begin to understand how and why it is viewed as a leading design authoring tool supporting the AEC industry.

Let's go ahead and jump into the program to begin to familiarize ourselves with the user interface to get an idea of where to locate all of the tools and functionality available to us.

Exploring the Civil 3D user interface

With all the introductions and background out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into Autodesk Civil 3D and get acquainted with this BIM platform. When Autodesk Civil 3D is opened up or launched, you will be presented with the Start tab/screen, similar to that shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 - User interface when Autodesk's Civil 3D is launched

If we then select the + sign next to the Start tab, we will see we have essentially created our first drawing and will be presented with a screen similar to that shown in Figure 1.2:

Figure 1.2 - User interface after our first drawing has been created

Along the very top of the program, you are presented with three levels of tools and functionality, as shown in Figure 1.3:

Figure 1.3 - Top three levels of tools and functionality within the user interface

Each of these levels provides varying access to the tools and functionality available within Autodesk's Civil 3D platform. Much of this should be a bit clearer by the end of...