Civil3d 2013 Blogger Preview

There is nothing better than free advertising so every year Autodesk shots out invites to bloggers to attend a quick one hour casual presentation on the new release features.

This year the presentation was at a more convenient time of 9am in New Zealand rather than the 5am of last year. Unfortunately this year 10 minutes into the presentation i had a client arrive in the office unannounced so did not catch much of it.

I won’t bother to upload the screen captures I grabbed as if you Google Civil3d 2013 you will find them already all over the net.

Well what can I say about the new release from along time user’s perspective and the limited amount i have seen.

• In general the Autodesk Civil Development team have done a good job again in adding the annually required range of new features and enhancements to the product line.
• The amount and nature of new features they have added is obviously related directly to the internal priorities and funding they receive.
• Progression of the product continues at what seems like a snails pace in this world of instance gratification. But lucky for Autodesk the product is evolving faster than the competition.
• The two major new additions to the product that are big talkers and may pull in/convert new users to Civil3d from other products are Railway Assemblies and Pressure pipes objects.
• Seeing Railways are pretty much dead in New Zealand I will not be using that feature anytime soon.
• Pressure pipes are a welcome additional that I will make use of in the future. But does not justify updating at this stage with lack of export and design capabilities and inadequacies in profile band labelling for final plan presentation.

Well that is about all a can say, I still need to dig into the areas that I wanted to see improvements . But as they have not been mentioned in any PR hype they probably re main untouched.

So in conclusion Civil3d probably remains the leading civil development software package with even more 3d object modelling abilities. But is there room for more improvement heck yeah. Roll on Civil3d 2030,retirement and maybe the total 3d software package I can visualise.