Profile elevations in centerline points

[fredweaver]

I'm still evaluating civil 2010 and I'm a long-time land desktop user. Two things I'm trying to duplicate in Carlson:

1: insert points along a centerline at a specified interval. the interval options available does not work as I expect. after following the prompts I get several points at the first interval, not at the specified interval along the entire centerline or from station to station.

2. how to insert points along the centerline with the profile elevations as their attribute elevation.

It appears that the profile data is not directly linked to the horizontal alignment (centerline).

99.9% of my work is pointing up construction plans for the crews to stake. the more info I can give them the better.

Should I be looking at the survey software instead?

[Nava Ran]

Yes you can:
Profile>Profile to Points

[emorse4487]

If you do any kind of raw data processing you will want to get the survey module; the civil module will be needed to convert centerlines to points.

We use the Civil Suite and it does everything we need, although we are not exclusively pointing up drawings for construction stakeout crews. If you are working in a construction environment you might want to look into Carlson Takeoff. It has all of the points/centerlines/profile tools in addition to construction quantity tools for cost estimation. If you can streamline your cost estimation process in addition to the construction stakeout routine it would be much easier to justify the cost of the software.

We use IntelliCAD, it is getting better but definitely no where near as good as the AutoCAD version. If you only need 1 license the extra 2k dollars for the Autodesk license is WELL worth it. Licensing 6 or 7 workstation is another story however.

On a side note, Carlson Civil Suite 2010 is still cheaper than Carlson Takeoff (last time I checked).

[fredweaver]

Thanks. Purchasing Civil AND AutoCAD is something I'd like to avoid. I'm preparing a proposal to my employer to allow me to work at home several days a week. They use Land Desktop. I may have to purchase the software myself, so the Intellicad version is more attractive.

[emorse4487]

Using Carlson Civil Suite with IntelliCAD in conjunction with LDD is something I would highly discourage doing.

We switched over from LDD to Carlson 2009 and the transition was not as clean as it should have been. This was partly based on the crying from our technicians who didn't want to learn new software, but also because of incompatible objects between programs.

Opening LDD projects in Carlson 2009 (has not changed with 2010) caused ALL of our viewports to get screwed up as IntelliCAD does not allow for "irregular" viewports. These viewport objects do not revert back to their original format when opened in AutoCAD; that was a huge issue with one of our road projects with a large series of sheets.

We switched from LDD3 which utilized 2002 dwg format. People would save over these original drawings in the 2007 format that IntelliCAD uses and subsequently could not be opened in the older version of AutoCAD. Saving back was possible but it was a real nightmare, primarily because AutoCAD refuses to recognize design files from other programs. For instance, if you design a roadway centerline in Carlson, LDD will not recognize it as such so you have to redefine all of your work. If your office is up to date with their Autodesk subscription then you will have to worry about the conversion between 2009 dwg format with IntelliCAD's 2007 format.

There are a TON of issues that I had with the transition, and I would really hate to deal with these problems on a regular basis by working between programs. Now that all of our projects are created exclusively with Carlson my life has become much more enjoyable.

Carlson allows you to commute network licenses so there is no additional cost to your employer for letting you work at home. See if you can get them to buy you a Carlson license for your office, then you can just commute the license when you work at home. Problem solved. If you have any specific questions let me know via PM and I will try to answer them in a timely fashion.


ON SECOND THOUGHT:

Seeing as how you are simply creating points and exporting .txt/ascii files to data collectors for stakeout you probably won't have the same issues that we had. As long as the drawings you are creating are to be used exclusively by you for pointing up drawings you won't have too many problems. You will have to re-import points from carlson into LDD but other than that you might be good to go.

[fredweaver]

I am beginning to see some of those issues, but I may try to live with them. Still there are a few things that may give me second thoughts:

The Properties Dialog does not show a line, arc or polyline length. I frequently use this to get a quick distance.

Inserting points by station and offset. I'm forced to use an offset point. For example: I'm pointing up 8000 LF of sewer. I place points on centerline at lateral and the offset at the end of lateral at R/W and manhole locations, which will not have an offset. I don't want to stop and start as I'm working and I want the point numbers to be consecutive to make it easier for the field crews.

I really like how Land Desktop does this.

Point description: I haven't found how to set a default description that gets used automatically. When I add points to a water main I may just want to use CL WTR as my description for all the points.

Mean while I still have 17 days left on my evaluation copy and I'm still testing.

[emorse4487]

I really can't help with the offset staking as I don't use that very much. For the most part all I have to do is go to POINTS>DRAW-LOCATE POINTS>SCREEN PICK because I don't have to create huge amounts of points. You can manually set your starting point number and default description in that dialog box, offset staking might pull those default starting number through it's routine, I don't know.

You have a bunch of different options for determining line lengths. The drawing inspector tool is very helpful but sometimes is a pain in the... as it doesn't pull information through blocks or xrefs.

Commands:

INSPECTOR
LIST
DIST

There are others but those are the ones I primarily use.

Look through the Carlson Help file and see if "Profile To Points" is any use to you. You can offset stake trenches with that routine, it's pretty slick but your drawings need to be setup correctly which probably isn't the case if you're getting them from an outside source.