This document compares Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 software for civil engineering projects. It summarizes a project that has experienced significant time delays and budget overruns due to frequent design changes required in Land Desktop. The author reengineered a section of the project in Civil 3D and found that features like dynamic surfaces and objects saved numerous hours by automatically updating linked designs when changes were made. Overall, Civil 3D allowed for faster, easier redesigns that reduced time and costs compared to the repetitive, disconnected processes in Land Desktop.

1. www.autodesk.com/civil3d 1
Autodesk Civil 3D
Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk
Land Desktop 2005
Autodesk commissioned this review by Michael Carris. Carris is Business Development Manager for K-TEK
Solutions, a K-TEK certified professional, an Autodesk authorized consultant, and an Autodesk certified instructor.
He has more than 15 years’ experience in civil engineering and surveying software, engineering design, and land
surveying. Carris provides consulting, training, and technical support for Timmons Group in Richmond, Virginia,
and to many other public and private engineering and surveying firms across the country. He is known for his
expertise in design visualization, GIS, mapping, civil engineering, and land surveying software applications.
The following report has been minimally edited by Autodesk for editorial and formatting consistency.
Introduction
The last 15 years have brought many changes in the hardware and software used in the
engineering, survey, and mapping industries. These changes have led many to ask the
following questions:
• Will drafting exist as a profession in coming years?
• Is creating 3D models worthwhile when most firms produce 2D review plans?
In addition, civil engineers want to get more out of the software they already own. They
frequently ask, “Why should I upgrade when I don’t use what I already have?”
The future of drafting as a profession is beyond the scope of this paper, but readers who
have a stake in this issue may find the information presented here interesting. As for the
other two questions, I believe this paper presents compelling reasons both to upgrade your
software and to create 3D models.
I’ve spent the last two years testing and using Autodesk®
Civil 3D™ software, which has
resurrected these issues and led to new conversations about change—change not only in the
software used, but in the engineering, surveying, and mapping processes themselves. From
my exposure to Civil 3D I see this software bringing about many changes in the way the
industry currently operates.
With existing software, the smallest revision on a project, such as moving the PVI (point of
vertical intersection) of a road, currently requires hours to adjust the plan and the related
annotation. With Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 it takes only seconds to accomplish the same
change. In this paper I demonstrate the difference in Civil 3D’s process that can produce
such dramatic results and I show Civil 3D’s potential effects on the bottom line, by
comparing the differences between Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk®
Land Desktop
2005 in a project environment. Working with a project that is still under development using
Land Desktop, and having an understanding of the design concept for the project, I
reengineered the project and documented the significant time savings and process
differences using Autodesk Civil 3D 2005. I focus here on the advantage of using an
improved process rather than on a feature-for-feature comparison.
White Paper

2. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
The project concerns a section of land in a mountainous region of the eastern United States.
The project engineers have designed and positioned the house locations on the property to
afford desirable views of the surrounding area. Once they established the house locations,
the engineers designed the roads to provide access to the houses. They designed the roads
to have multiple horizontal curves through the property with a limited number of straight
segments. Once the engineers had established the roads, they created the lot parcels. The
design criteria for the parcels required that they hold to a minimum of 0.5 acre with a
minimum frontage of 100 feet.
The overall project consists of four main sections and a fairly significant design budget. This
comparison focuses on one section currently being designed. I have begun reengineering
the project with Autodesk Civil 3D 2005. The project to date has consumed 35-40 percent of
the design budget and has used about 3,000 work hours. Project members have spent most
of this time on design changes to the horizontal and vertical alignments, which have also
affected the lot line locations. Project records directly attribute about 2,000 hours to design
and drafting of the project using Autodesk Land Desktop 2005. A significant amount of work
remains to complete this project, which still requires grading, utility work, and significant
drafting work. To add even more time to the project, the lot lines have been changed once
again. This project is about two hundred acres with about thirty-five home lots. This is one
of seven phases and has a design budget of about $700,000.
Defining Surfaces
The project began with a concept plan, and then moved into the survey phase where
surveyors collected data and established existing property boundaries. Because of the large
size of the site, surveyors collected and mapped a combination of aerial and field-located
data. They provided this map to the project engineer, depicting the planametrics of the site
with existing ground contours. They provided a surface or digital terrain model using
LandXML.
The surface in Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 consists of a database that is stored in the Land
Desktop project. This database is accessible to any drawing in the project. Engineers can
use the database to create contour lines and 3D surface models, and they can use it during
the design process to create profiles, cross sections, grading scenarios, and volumetric
calculations. It is a static database, meaning that anytime you add or modify data, you
must rebuild the surface. In addition, if you have information that was created from the
surface, such as the contours, you must re-create this information and erase the old
contours. The displayed data is also static. For example, if the user wants to display the
contours using one-foot minor intervals and five-foot major intervals, this in itself requires a
two- to three-step process that could take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes,
depending on the size of the surface. If the same user requires a two-foot interval with ten-
foot major contours, this also requires a multistep process as well as managing layers,
multiple drawings, or both. If the user has created profiles or ground sections using this
surface and the surface is subsequently modified, the user must then re-create the profile
and sections. All this adds more steps and time to the process, in some cases hours of
additional work.
Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 takes a different approach that results in significant time savings.
Civil 3D stores engineering information as intelligent models, and it controls how that
information is presented graphically through user-definable style settings. Furthermore, Civil
3D maintains relationships between objects so that changes to one object automatically
update other dependent objects.
In Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 you maintain the surface in the drawing, but you can share it
through Civil 3D project management tools. The most beneficial feature of Civil 3D is that
its surfaces are dynamic. When you modify the surface data, you can set it to auto-rebuild.

3. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
This feature in itself saves a few steps, but the real advantage comes from the dynamic
relationships to other Civil 3D objects. Profiles, sections, and other objects that derive
information from the surface data also update automatically, saving significant time.
Surface styles control how the contours and other information display. Changing from a
one-foot interval to a two-foot interval is just a matter of changing the style. You make no
changes to the surface model itself, and redrawing is automatic. Additional benefits of Civil
3D include its ability to show depression contours and to add materials to the surface to
create a realistic surface rendering.
These are just a few of the differences between the surfaces in Autodesk Land Desktop
2005 and Autodesk Civil 3D 2005. They may seem minor, but at this stage of the project
they have significant effects, because engineers spend a lot of time changing the display
representation of a surface to show the client or the project manager what the existing
ground surface looks like. I was able to import the surface into Autodesk Civil 3D 2005
directly from the Autodesk Land Desktop project and display it with two-foot contours
through a surface style. This is where I began the reengineering process in Autodesk Civil
3D.
Creating Alignments
On this particular project the house
locations are based on the view of the
surrounding areas. A crew using GPS (global
positioning system) equipment went to the
site and located the best views. Engineers
then brought these points into Autodesk
Land Desktop 2005 and aligned and
positioned the blocks representing houses.
Next, the engineers designed a road
network to provide access to the homes.
This took up another large chunk of the
design budget. The intent of the road design
is to have many smooth curves. As such
engineers had to modify it many times,
which required hours of rework.
In Autodesk Land Desktop 2005, creating
the road network or horizontal alignments
begins by defining the geometry using lines
and arcs, and then turning those lines and
arcs into a database. This database also
resides outside the drawing and can be
accessed by any user in the project. To edit
the alignment the designer has to use an
editor and then view the changes
graphically (see Figure 1). If the alignment
changes, the user must edit the lines and arcs and then re-create the horizontal alignment
database. The lines and curves are simple AutoCAD®
software entities and contain no design
criteria. For example, if you modify a tangent segment, you must also modify the other
tangents or arcs adjoining the tangent in a separate operation. Land Desktop does not
maintain design criteria information, so modifications to the alignment not only consume
lots of time, but can also produce geometric errors such as nontangential curves.
Figure 1: An alignment being modified in
Autodesk Land Desktop. Notice that the curves
do not remain true reverse curves and that
labels are not automatically updated.

4. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
In Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 you create horizontal alignments using a layout toolbar. Instead
of drawing a series of lines and arcs, you design the alignment to meet the design
requirements. The layout tools in Civil 3D create curves and tangent segments to maintain
certain design characteristics. The curve tools enable users to maintain a specific radius or a
required pass-through, both common operations in the design process. If the user modifies
the adjoining segment to the curve, the curve maintains the user-defined design criteria.
You can modify the horizontal alignment using an editor, or you can modify it graphically
using interactive grips on the alignment object. Each component of the alignment has
specially designed grips that either enable or limit the modification of the segment based on
the design criteria or the tools used to create the segment. Object styles and labels styles
also control the display properties of the alignments in Autodesk Civil 3D 2005. Station
labels automatically adjust when the alignment changes. The software thus does the
drafting automatically during the redesign, saving many hours.
The design intent of the project was to have smooth-flowing roads with many curves, which
required continuous design changes. Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 made this a time-
consuming and cumbersome process.
Designers used fillets, arcs, and circles
to lay out the geometry but found it
difficult to keep the arcs tangent and to
create true reverse curves with sufficient
separation. Designers spent many hours
modifying the geometry and features
affected by the changes in the
alignment.
In Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 I re-created
the road alignment using the alignment
layout tools (see Figure 2). After laying
out the tangents, I went back and added
the curves or additional PIs (points of
intersection) to re-create the design
intent. This took only a few minutes per
alignment, resulting in alignments that
were not only designed correctly
(tangential) but also labeled correctly.
The equivalent process in Autodesk Land
Desktop 2005 required hours instead of
minutes.
Creating Parcels
Once the engineers had laid out the alignments with Autodesk Land Desktop 2005, they
created the parcels. The only constraints on parcel design were to maintain a minimum lot
size and frontage. The engineers were laying out lots even before the roads were finalized.
As I write this, some roads are still being adjusted, so the engineers will have to spend
many more hours on lot line adjustments when they modify the road alignments.
Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 provides a parcel manager and creation tools to aid in defining
parcels. The parcel creation process starts with the storing of lines and curves using
standard AutoCAD tools. Once the parcels have been defined, they are static with respect to
Figure 2: An alignment being modified in Autodesk
Civil 3D 2005. Notice that the curves remain
tangent and true. Once the grip edit command is
completed, the labels automatically update.

5. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
the rest of the project. If users modify the alignment or adjoining parcels, they must also
modify all the parcels affected by this change by adjusting the lines and curves that
represent the lot lines and redefining the parcel in the parcel manager. This is also a time-
consuming process; project members have been spending many hours cleaning up parcels
every time the road or lot line changes. The time spent includes recalculating the lot areas
for the parcels and then editing the labels.
In Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 parcels are also objects that you create using design layout tools.
The parcel segments react dynamically to alignment segments and other parcel segments.
Adjoining parcels share their common line as a single line. If you create a parcel line and
attach it to the alignment, the parcel line adjusts when the alignment is modified. Resizing
the parcels in Civil 3D to have a minimum size is simple using the parcel sizing tool. You can
create multiple parcels using the automatic parcel layout tool based on frontage and
minimum area. Parcels also have styles that control their display properties and the styles
of their associated labels. You can change a parcel that was once designated as single
family to a common area by changing the style applied to the parcel. When you make this
change, the line color, linetype, and fill characteristics update automatically based on the
style. When you define a closed parcel, Civil 3D automatically calculates the area. You can
use this area to label the parcel or to create an area table that automatically adjusts when
the parcel is modified.
After I spent a few hours laying out the horizontal alignments, I spent some time on the
parcels. The parcel lines on this project derive from the centerline, not from the right-of-
way. This enables the parcels to react to any changes in the road alignments. If you modify
any of the road alignments, the parcels adjust accordingly. In this process, you create the
right-of-way parcel later once you have finalized the alignments. As you modify the parcels,
the software automatically creates and adjusts the parcel labels, saving many hours of
drafting time. Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 also sets the labels to maintain their view orientation,
so you need not worry about the view orientation or scale.
A current solution to different drawing scales and view orientations is to create duplicate
labels and control their display using layers. If the parcel changes, the designer or drafter
must make the required changes to multiple labels. As I write this, the drafters are
spending time rotating the parcel labels in Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 to the orientation
of the viewport, so that when they create the construction documents, the labels do not
appear upside down or sideways. The problem is that engineers are still making
adjustments to the alignments and parcels. I do not need to worry about this in Autodesk
Civil 3D 2005, since the software automatically adjusts the labels when the parcels or
alignments change. Autodesk Civil 3D also automatically sets the scale and view orientation
based on the viewport of the Layout tab, which saves hours of drafting time.
Road Corridor Design
Since the road design in Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 and Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 both
required vertical alignments (profiles), sections, and design templates, I cover them
together in this section. Vertical alignments are another component of this project that
affected the design or placement of the roads. Because of the location of this project, the
design intent calls to minimize the amount of cut and fill.
In Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 you start the road design process by defining the horizontal
alignment. You then use this alignment with the existing ground surface to create a profile.
You create the vertical alignment using this profile. You lay out tangents and vertical curves
similarly to the way you created the horizontal alignment.

6. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
The next step is to define the vertical alignment and add it to the database. You then
sample cross sections at specific intervals. You create a cross section template to represent
the finished ground road. You create this template from geometry elements, and then
define it as a template similar to the horizontal and vertical alignments. Creating the cross
section template is a time-consuming task that can take a few minutes for a simple section,
but many hours for a more complex one. Once you have created the geometry you must
define the template. You define the transitions, super elevations, and the template surfaces
after the cross section is built. If you change the section you also must redefine the
surfaces, transitions, and other properties. Once you have defined the horizontal and
vertical alignments and the cross section templates, you bring them together using the
design control parameters. A complete road design requires a combination of design control
parameters and possibly many different cross section templates.
Creating contours or designing the utilities involves an additional process that requires
taking the data for the road and building a surface. Depending on the size of the road,
building this surface could take an hour or more. If you change any one of the design,
horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, existing ground surface, or cross section template
components, you must also rebuild the other components. What may seem like a simple
adjustment to the radius of the horizontal curve results in many hours of work, not only for
the road design but also for the parcels and any labels or other objects that are affected.
In Autodesk Civil 3D 2005, the road design—known as
corridor design—also starts with the horizontal
alignment and contains a profile, an existing ground, a
vertical alignment, and an assembly (which takes the
place of the cross section template). You create the
ground profile using the horizontal alignment and
existing surface. With the dynamic objects in Civil 3D,
the vertical profile automatically updates when you
modify the horizontal alignment. You create the
vertical alignment similarly to the way you create the
horizontal alignment by using a layout toolbar.
You can sample sections at any location or range of
stations, and these sections can even include
nonperpendicular sections. You create the cross
section template—known as an assembly—from a
catalog of subassemblies (see Figure 3). You can drag
these subassemblies to create an assembly in about
five minutes, which is much quicker than in Autodesk
Land Desktop 2005. The subassemblies contain design
characteristics for transitions and surfaces, which you
can size and change at any time during the design
process. You bring all the horizontal and vertical
alignments and assemblies together using the Create
Simple Corridor command.
Once you have defined a corridor object, you can create a surface and display its contours.
This surface is a component of the corridor. Creating the corridor and the surface takes only
a few minutes. If any part of the design changes, such as the horizontal alignment, vertical
alignment, or the assembly, Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 can rebuild the entire corridor,
including the surface. You create regions along the road corridor to handle different
assemblies. This feature of Autodesk Civil 3D is one of the big time savers in the design
process. If this project had been started in Autodesk Civil 3D 2005, engineers would have
designed the road corridors in the early stages of the project instead of waiting for the
Figure 3: Tool palettes are used
to drag subassembly
components to build a complete
assembly. Each subassembly
has design characteristics that
are modified through the Object
Property Manager.

7. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
horizontal alignments to be finalized. This would have enabled the engineers to determine
the correct design early on and reduce the amount of work by weeks.
On this particular project, engineers are still adjusting the roads; this is where I’ve been
able to catch up to the design of the project and move forward with it. By creating the road
corridors I can now move onto another section of the design. From simple edits to major
modifications, Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 takes only a few minutes compared to the many
hours to make the same changes in Autodesk Land Desktop 2005.
Conversion Workflow
The following workflow diagrams show a typical process workflow for a subdivision project
and for a highway design project. They show how you can take existing data in Land
Desktop and complete a design using Civil 3D and get data back into Land Desktop for
additional design. Every project has its own characteristics and certain disciplines will utilize
the software in many different ways. The key to making Autodesk Civil 3D work is to
identify the proper tool and work it into your design process even if that means changing
your current process.
Subdivision/Site Design
This workflow identifies a typical
process for a subdivision or site
plan that may have a simple
access road.
The process will also depend on
what your construction document
requirements are. If you are
required to create cross section
sheets or you have a lot of
corridor designs that span many
sheets it would be beneficial to
utilize the Civil Design Sheet
Manager tools. (See the Corridor
Design diagram)
Gravity Pipe Design will require
utilizing Autodesk Civil Design for
sizing and automated drafting.
However Autodesk Civil 3D can
be used to create the
construction documents by
coordinating the drawings via
xrefs. This will depend on the
project size.

8. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
Conclusion
In about 40 hours I was able to reengineer this project and have construction documents
ready to be published. If I compare this time to the 2,000 or more hours that have already
been spent designing and drafting the project, it represents about a 98 percent time
Corridor Design
This workflow identifies a typical
process for a corridor design
(road, rail, channel…) that will
require more extensive design
with regards to superelevations,
and use of generating multiple
plan, profile and cross sections
construction documents.
When designing a roadway
making use of the dynamic
relationships of objects in
Autodesk Civil 3D to determine
the best design alternatives will
save many hours of time on a
project. Once a design alternative
has been determined it would be
best to bring the horizontal and
vertical alignments into Autodesk
Land Desktop to fine tune the
design.
Civil 3D’s parcel object
capabilities also save hours of
time when creating right of way
acquisition and easement maps.
And using LandXML to create the
Legal Descriptions will make a
tedious task simple.

9. Comparing Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 and Autodesk Land Desktop 2005
www.autodesk.com/civil3d
savings. That number equates to a huge profit margin for this project. Because I had some
advantages in knowing the placement of the roads and homes before I started my
reengineering process, I based my numbers on the time it takes to design each component
in both Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 and Autodesk Civil 3D 2005. Then I calculated the
time it would take to modify the design in each product. I cross-checked my analysis by
interviewing the engineers, designers, and drafters working on this job to determine their
time involved. (There are currently about five individuals involved in this design, compared
to one person reengineering the project in Autodesk Civil 3D.)
To think of Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 as just an upgrade to Autodesk Land Desktop 2005 is
like thinking the automobile is an upgrade to the horse and buggy. Autodesk Civil 3D 2005
represents a complete shift in the engineering process that requires us to rethink the role of
each individual in the design process.
The best way to sum up this comparison is as follows: we can do the tasks we have done
for many years more efficiently and much faster with Autodesk Civil 3D 2005 than with
Autodesk Land Desktop 2005.
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USA
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