It’s always fun to see the new items in all of Autodesk products. Could there be more? Absolutely! But continuing to see enhancements of key features and performance updates throughout the year, and with the annual release, this is always a date I look forward to!
Keep in mind that some things like Project Explorer and Grading Optimization is only available with subscription to the AEC Collection! However, there are some great new features and functionalities in Civil 3D 2023. Here are just a few:
Performance Enhancements
YES! Even us CAD guys and gals need Performance Enhancements every once in a while! While mine typically comes in a daily Monster (or two), Civil 3D has improved their performance in a few key areas, these include:
Section Views and Sample Line Editing
Addressed performance issues with corridor section views, including known issues with corridor feature lines, pipe networks and Quantity in section views. This eliminated the recreation of all view draw operations and instead cache the results so they are not recreated each time other content within the section view is updated. Sample line editing will be 20% faster on average based on the real-world drawings.
Event Viewer
The hated event viewer has been addressed, somewhat… Autodesk has increased the overall efficiency of the Event Viewer. The previous, poor performance of the event viewer database and its results dialog box had been impacting large numbers of functions in Civil 3D. The major issue was the more events in the viewer, the slower the process.
For example, one customer corridor that created a lot of targeting events took 90 seconds to rebuild immediately after opening the drawing. Making no changes and repeating the rebuild, the second rebuild took 150 seconds, followed by 210… Each rebuild added 60 seconds to the build time and this is due to the event viewer. With the fix all the corridor rebuilds in now take just under 1 minute. The progressive slowdown is resolved and the initial build is faster.
Corridor Modeling Updates
Property Set Data for Corridor Solids has been expanded and enhanced.
In order to further meet BIM mandates, these improvements include:
- Added property set definitions to identify the relationship of the corridor solid to and the subassemblies.
- Enhanced the corridor solid to that the handle of the solid won’t change if the number of corridor regions changes, even when the corridor solids are dynamically linked to the corridor.
- Fixed an issue where property set values on existing corridor solids now update when the name or limits of the corridor region are modified.
- API’s were added to allow users to track back to the applied subassemblies.
Corridor Targeting Efficiency
I must admit, I’m not a huge fan of the change that was made in an update to targeting in 2022, I liked how it was, but hopefully these corridor targeting enhancements in 2023 will help improve your efficiency design and modeling workflows.
Within the targeting dialog box, you can now filter alignments, feature lines, and polylines by name or by characters. The target map will only display the items that have been identified by the character search. You can also easily turn the filter off.
The subassembly list displays the offset parameters for each element. in Civil 3D 2023, when you hover over offset values indicated with “varies”, a tooltip popup will display the offset elements targeted by the subassembly.
When you add feature lines and polylines to a target layer, the corridor can be updated dynamically to include the new elements. You can view specific elements by selecting the Details icon. Items you select in the dialog box will highlight in plan view to help you identify target areas.
Surface target selection has also been optimized. You can now choose a surface for all surface targets at once (like it was previously!).
Pressure Pipe Networks
Civil 2023 adds some customer requested improvements for pressure pipes, including:
Added “Search by keyword” text to the pressure parts drop down list indicating that users can use it to search the list.
Added the ability to show the pressure/gravity network plan part’s property set data in a profile view label.
Profile Improvements! Where Pressure Pipes have really lacked since Day One just got a little bit better! The profile editing improvements include:
- Reduced the number of PVIs on pipe run profile to just cut lengths and elbows
- Removed Dynamic column from Pipe Run Profile dialog
- Added Reference Profile to Pipe Run Profile dialog Break cut lengths at PVIs
- Changed the text of the tooltip for “Cleanup PVIs”
- Use default cut length from feature settings if no cut length in parts list
Drawing Transformations
This updated was introduced recently in an update to Civil 3D 2022. One of the most painful things to do is transform a Civil 3D project, and this update may help a little on some tasks, but this still has a long ways to go!
The Drawing Transformation tool allows for horizontal transform, vertical datum transform, and vertical units transform from U.S. Survey Foot to International Foot and from International Foot to U.S. Survey Foot and will only functions in a drawing with an assigned coordinate system.
The Coordinate System Transformation dialog box allow us to assign a target category and specific coordinate system.
The Drawing Transformation Tool produces a comprehensive report of what was transformed (and what was not) along with the before and after coordinates to validate the accuracy of the transformation results.
Once installed, it can be found under Miscellaneous Utilities on the Toolbox tab of your Toolspace.
To read Part 2 of “What’ New and Exciting” for Civil 2023, click HERE.
