Lots and lots of enhancements have come forth in the latest version of Civil 3D, not to mention a shiny new name and the fact that the Civil products are now a part of the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry. I have spent quite a bit of time working with the Beta for AutoCADŽ Civil 3D 2008 and now the real deal is finally here. Please check your mailboxes to make sure that your subscription copy has safely arrived!

To kick it all off I am going to make a quick rundown of some of the features that you can expect to see upon the installation of the latest version, then then I will tell you which of these new features seem to be the most beneficial.

With this year's release you can expect to see enhancements in almost every area of the product, but of course some areas have been enhanced more than others. The main focus for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 was "stability, stability, stability" versus new functionality and from what I have seen thus far, the software gods have heard our prayers.

Since the birth of the product, many of you may know that the grading tools have suffered in the reliability department. AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 is supposed to turn over a new leaf. Do not expect to see many enhancements to the grading tools, but from what I have experienced thus far, I can actually grade a small commercial site with NO fatal errors (notice I did say SMALL; you have to start somewhere!).

These are just a few of my favorite things
To touch on a few of my favorite new features for 2008 I am going to start with the one that is most dear to my heart, the Lines/Curves menu. I am sure you all remember the lovely Lines/Curves menu that we all knew and loved from our Land Desktop days. Well, our prayers have been answered. What this means is that we no longer have to use the Transparent Commands in order to draw a Line by Direction.

We also have all of the Create curve commands, such as 'Curve From end of Object'. While the Lines/Curves pull-down menu is a much needed addition, I was really hoping for a toolbar to accompany these tools so I do not HAVE TO rely on the menu. One thing that I have notice with the new 2008 product is that they have flooded the pull-down menus with information that was not previously there. In my mind this is a step back, rather than a step forward because we all know that using the menus rather than icons or toolspace right-click methods is the least efficient way to operate in CAD.

On another note, one of my favorite additions from a project collaboration standpoint is the ability to generate corridor sections through AutoCAD xrefs. This is also a great tool and I truly believe that this is a start into being able to extract data from xrefs much as the Vault currently uses data references for Civil 3D objects. Some other small but mighty enhancements are the ability to use the ctrl pick function to select and modify labels. In previous releases you could NOT have additional text items displayed with your label without creating a new label style including that additional information. Now you can ctrl select your label and use a text editor to make necessary changes. Not only can you make changes to your text using ctrl pick, but you can also delete individual labels using the same selection method. In the previous release if you wanted to remove a single major station label for an alignment you would have to select the label, right-click, go to label properties and in your label properties dialog box you could set the visibility to false, with the new ctrl pick method you are able to cut those steps in half.

While on the topic of enhancements in 2008 I would like to point out the new boundary jig for corridors. In previous releases if you built a corridor model using more than one alignment (as any intersection would have) you lost the ability to add a surface boundary to that corridor "automatically" and were stuck adding it "interactively" which was extremely inefficient. At this point in the process I found it even easier to add a boundary to the surface using the surface tools on your prospector because the interactive function was too cumbersome. In 2008 they have added a boundary "jig" similar to the frontage jig when you are sizing parcel objects. Basically what you do is in your Corridor Properties dialog box on the boundary tab when you right click on the surface you can select add interactively and it will prompt you to select a feature line from your corridor that you wish to make the daylight line from (for example the daylight line). If you happen to have two feature lines on top of one another, like the daylight line and the daylight cut line, a dialog box with come up prompting you to select which feature line to start the jig from.

Last but not least I will discuss something else that is near and dear to my heart, Parcels. I regret to inform you that there have been very little enhancements to parcel objects and labeling in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008. The few things that I can mention that have been added is the ability to "Replace Multiple Segments" and "Replace Area" labels. What this means to you is if you have gone through and labeled your map and needed to change the labels on a particular lot, let's say the overall boundary, then you could select the "Replace Multiple Segments" and add your Span labels to the overall boundary of your map without having to delete your old labels and add new ones. There are MANY enhancements that need to be made in order to make parcel objects work well for survey and mapping, but for 2008 that's all she wrote.

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Submitted by Melanie Santer, an application engineer for L.A. CAD, a large western-region reseller and Autodesk Authorized Training Center (ATC). Melanie has more than five years experience in the civil engineering industry, more than two years of practical field survey experience, and more than two years of land development/design experience on large commercial and industrial sites. Since joining L.A. CAD in 2005, Melanie has taught hundreds of public and custom classes using AutoCAD, Land Development Desktop, and Civil 3D and has been recently hired as an instructor at a local University. She is currently assisting more than 40 firms in California implement Civil 3D into their production environment.