Well, it’s that time of year again when Autodesk bestows us with the latest release of their flagship Civil Design application. Read on to see which features speak to this blogger. Please read all the way to the end because I saved the best for last!

File Format

This is probably the most-asked question, and I’m happy to say that there is yet again, no format change. We are still on the 2018 format. Good news for everyone!

Catchments

Many new catchment tools have been introduced.

Sections

Users can now multi-select when using the “Sample More Sources” tool.

Dynamo

Additional nodes are now available. Also, the Dynamo Core has been upgraded to version 3.4.1.

Project Explorer

No need to open the PE window to update Object Sets. There is a new command line option.

Surfaces

DREF a surface and specify an outer boundary during the reference command. The results in better performance and it still maintains the dynamic connection.

3D Viewer

I’m saving the best for last here. You are no doubt aware that the built-in Object viewer cannot handle a large dataset and even with a small dataset its performance is seriously lacking. Well, there is a new viewer in town called the Model Viewer. It is like the object viewer, but it wildly exceeds it in both performance and features.

I can’t stress this enough; it is so good, you’ll just have to try it, I orbited a 2 million point surface AND a very large corridor with no performance degradation at all!

• It is super fast
• Navigation is no longer difficult
• It is modeless, meaning the viewer can rest on your spare monitor and objects can be added and removed from the viewer at will.
• The orbit pivot point can be edited.

Don’t believe me, here is an example.

Corridor

Surface

GIF - This was recorded in real-time! No trickery.