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