Civil 3D Projects in Autodesk Construction Cloud: What's in It for Me?

JAIME CASTILLO: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Civil 3D Projects in Autodesk Construction Cloud, What's in it for Me? This is AU class CES4441. And I am Jaime Castillo, just a quick introduction about myself. I work as a designer and CAD guy on a team in Austin North, the north area of Austin in Central Texas, and I am also a project manager on that team. I work for Kimley Horn.

And this team focuses primarily on site plans than being commercial and industrial projects. We really don't do major commercial subdivisions or anything big. We just stick to the middle, middle projects that just have buildings, utilities, storm, and stuff like that. I'm lucky enough to say that I can work on all aspects of a project. And there's random times where I'll be in helping out with planning production, setting up sheets, doing concept plans, as well as going all the way down, doing our grading, drainage design, and just making sure the project as a whole is moving forward and making sure we do a good product.

The biggest thing there is, I'm in the weeds with Civil 3D. So when we were testing ACC, it was easy for me to catch on. If this wasn't going to be something that was going to work, there was enough time to pivot with our projects. That's a perfect transition there as to, why ACC?

So I want to give you a quick story and catch you up to where my experience here. So around 18 to 24 months ago, we had a site plan team actually worked for Austin ISD, and they had a couple of buildings on this existing school that they were going to have to come in and add more buildings, grow the footprint of the building itself, and then work with a different civil engineering firm to get this project fully put together, construction documents put together, and then design and permit it and fully construct them. So those two things were a huge, major point for us, where it was going to be an [INAUDIBLE] project, where we were going to be collaborating with another civil engineering firm.

So we weren't talking-- just working with a MEP, where-- and another firm was going to come in and submit their stuff, and then we're going to slip them into the back of our plan set. Or maybe we were going to just send them our grading and storm and utilities, and they were going to lay out their utilities around them. This was a full-on site plan, working together with another engineering firm alongside us. So any file that we had at any point, we could have had them jumping in to work on labeling, or even in our base files, working on storm utilities or anything like that.

So keep in mind ACC, Autodesk Construction Cloud, a.k.a. ACC, it's been used before with Civil 3D. Most of the times when it's used for Civil 3D, it's for projects that are really big. And the typical big project I would say is just miles and miles of roadway or miles and miles of water line, where your team is designing and laying out all of these utilities or roadways, and they're connecting and collaborating with the contractor, making sure that they're getting everything ready to bid and then the client, a.k.a. the state where they're reviewing everything. So a lot of hands in the project as a whole.

But we're talking miles and miles. This was not the case for us. So we had a unique opportunity, where we were taking the small to medium project and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to get to upload it to the cloud, use ACC and Desktop Connector to go ahead and work in the files in the day to day. So it being the two firms, we wanted to make sure we communicated to the other firm is, this wasn't going to be the old typical way of working together. So most of you are familiar with having to bring in all of your files, overlay them, and then export them, and then send one CAD file or a group of CAD files to this outside firm so that they could come in and overlay everything and then work on top of it.

This was not the case because these-- this other engineering firm was diving straight into our files, like I said before. And ACC made it so we could work seamlessly together. The perfect example I want to highlight was we had a guy going in, running, laying out his inlets where they felt like they needed to go, and this other team was running, working on grading. When the engineer at our company placed an inlet in one location, the engineer for this other company could come in, shift around their load points and high points, and then make changes on the fly that were updating as if they were sitting down with us in the next cubicle over.

But thanks to ACC, our projects were able to stay on track. They made it through multiple reviews, permitting, and approval, and now construction only because we were able to work cohesively together and we could dive into the files together, like I mentioned before. So ACC allowed us to work seamlessly and collaborate with another firm and it was worth it 100%.

Before we move on, though, I want to give you a quick summary of what we're going to be going over. First, I'm going to take you through a quick demo of ACC and Desktop Connector. Actually, I'm going to take a deeper dive into our experience. And I have some pros and cons of ACC. I want to make sure I tell you the good stuff and the bad stuff, and some of the issues, how we got over the cons that we were seeing with ACC. And the last point is how to get started. So there's a couple items you need and a couple of things you need to make sure you get some permissions and licensing for before you can take a deep dive and start moving all of your projects from your typical server or from your hard drives up into ACC and the cloud.

All right. So the first thing we're going to show you is the ACC web page. So we're going to go here. If you go to ACC.autodesk.com/projects, if you have an ACC license and you have your Desktop Connector and everything working, you can access this page here. This page is specifically for you so that you can see what projects you have. There's a Home tab here, where it'll talk about everything that you've ever worked on, the projects that are currently being worked on, and any templates that you have to load up for everybody on your team to use as a, like I said, template for their new projects.

So the Projects page on the ACC web page is-- looks like this. It's my favorite because you can go through and take a deep dive into everything through the web page. You don't have to open up anything in Civil 3D or Windows Explorer to review or do something or switch around some file formats or maybe some folders or PDFs and stuff. So click on this one, Austin gastroenterology. So on the left, right here, under Project Files, you have everything that you would have in your Windows Explorer. You have the folder. You have them all listed out alphabetically.

And inside of these folders is where you house your drawings, exactly like what everybody's used to. There's no big changes to how everything has to be laid out or the workflow that you have to put into these folders to make sure that X refs or D refs worked. Everything just is housed the exact same way. That's what I want to make sure you understand. No big difference here.

You're going to click on the plan sheets here to show you it's a small project. So we only have two little sheets here. Chose that so you could see it easily, but in here, you have your drawing that's housed on ACC. This is 100% in the cloud right now. This stuff and the PDFs, the drawings, everything is sitting up in the Cloud. So if you look, it just looks normal, 100%.

One of the cool things, though-- I'm going to go off on a little tangent her-- is this version's here. If you click on this, each one of these drawings has a version history. So I don't know how it works in your company, but with ours, if you need to pull a backup, we get to reach out to IT, have IT come up, and you tell them, hey, I want a file from this folder around this time. And they go through and find the closest that they can find in that folder, and then they pull backups for you and save them in a separate folder, maybe named Backup or Archive.

With ACC though, every save creates a version. And after that, you don't have to have someone come in and pull a version or anything. You, yourself, can come in here and copy the file, download the source file, revert back to a different version so that you can pull any data that you might-- say the drawing is corrupted, and you need to pull data from before it corrupted, or someone made a mistake and you're trying to erase the mistake and go back in time and fix it. So versions, pretty cool, one of the big pluses for ACC here.

So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to shift gears from the ACC web page. I just want you to remember how this looks, because there's a little bit of a difference. So ACC in your Windows Explorer, again, these are typical projects, but on your hard drive, you're going to have a connection to Autodesk Docs, which is this guy right here. Autodesk Docs is what houses where you're going to be connecting to say, a different company or your company. And that's how your project is going to be connecting through them.

So I only have Kimley Horn right here because that's the only database that we've been accessing. But some of you might be jumping between different companies or say, different contractors where they house the projects on their ACC server, and you have to have access before you jump into it. I'm going to click on Kimley Horn. Right now, I only have two projects uploaded into ACC for you to see. If you look here, there's status. I'm going to dive into those a little bit more once we get into ADWG.

All right, so we'll go to CAD. Bam, same exact folder, everything looks the same. You don't have the versions in here, so you can't access the versions. You'll have to do that through the web page. But what you do have is Status Updates. So if you see a green circle filled in with white with a green check mark, that means you're good. It's synced. Everything's good. It's on your hard drive, no issues there.

If you see this cloud right here, the cloud means that it's sitting in the cloud in ACC and it needs to be pulled down to your hard drive so you can work on it. But other than that, all of this works the same. It's just housed in ACC versus being housed on your server or on your hard drive.

Before I jump into ACC and Civil 3D, let me just show you the Desktop Connector. So see the Desktop Connector? It's always running in the background, just kind of floating back there. But say you wanted to click on it, you want to come down here to this little caret on your Start bar, you're going to find the icon with the little D on it. So click that guy. This Desktop Connector is going to pop up. And what it is, it's going to be a list of everything that's changing.

So I tried to explain this to somebody recently, and the best analogy that I had is, you're sitting down here, working on your hard drive. And any time you need to pull information or even save and push up information, Autodesk Desktop Connector is the little guy that you hand the parcel, you hand the object, and they run and they go take it all the way up to the cloud and drop it where you need it. You hit Save on a drawing, he's going to run that copy and push it all the way up to the top. So this connects the two worlds together.

You're going to see, anytime you make an update, I'll try to show you in just a second, but this will be constantly updating. That's why it runs in the background. And you're just going to have to pay attention to it at some time, especially when you're jumping around between files.

All right, so Civil 3D and ACC-- this is the Start mode, Start tab inside of Civil 3D. The left side here where you have open, typically, people have it on reset like this right there. If you click one more down into Autodesk Projects, this is going to be the same location that we all saw where it had Kimley-Horn, the database. So if you look here, here's the group or the database. If you had different companies, here's where you would shift around in it. And it's all housed inside of Civil 3D.

what you're not seeing here is the status, which that's OK. You can go look at Windows Explorer if you have any issues or you want to see what the status is of something. But you do have a version right here. You can't click on it and pull versions like you can in the web page, but you can look at what version you have so you can see if there's maybe a different version that's being pulled at the moment.

So going back, let's look at the folders again. All the folders are mapped the exact same way. You just click on the folder and it tells you what you have in here. And you have the author, and then once you get inside of it, it will tell you something is locked. So it looks a little different than what you're used to in Windows Explorer, where it has a little lock. But let's look at that real quick. So I'm going to open one of these drawings right now.

Bam, it loaded pretty quick. This drawing, it pulled a copy from the cloud, saved it on my hard drive, and then loaded the drawing all at the same time. It's pretty much instantaneously, and it happens in the background. So you shouldn't see a lag in say, anything you're streaming or you're pulling data from or you're downloading. It's just pulling off of your internet, and it's working again, off of your hard drive. As you can see, we can just pan around, switch into model space, do all kinds of little demonstrations here. You can edit everything. This is a normal CAD file. The only thing is, it was pulled from ACC.

Now, what we're going to do, let's take out the circle I drew there just for-- so I could hit Save so you can see it saves a version. So I hit Save, close out of it. Let's go down here to the Desktop Connector. I don't know if you can see that, but it had a little blue dot. So if you're looking at your Desktop Connector and you look down and it has a blue dot, something in your project folder is being updated at that moment. It could be, you hit Save on a different drawing as you're switching between them or something. But it's going to make changes and update constantly. And so you'll look out for the gray little symbol with the blue dot.

So you saw here when I switched over to it quickly, it had a blue loading bar where it was updating everything. Once it gets fully updated, it tells you, hey, thumbs up, this is good. We're good to go. Typically, if you have multiple drawings getting pulled around by different people, you'll see a lock that's on the typical Windows Explorer. Here, you see a little something a little bit different. So let's see if we can pull that up and show it. Give it a second. I'll go back to our Start bar. There you go. So it still has the lock, but it has a pencil, little orange-ish, yeah, orange-yellow circle. And that's telling you, hey, someone has it open. They're editing it. If you try to open it, you'll have to open a read-only file again, like you typically have in Windows Explorer. So I'll go ahead and shift right back. Close that guy. Let's Save. You look at our Desktop Connector there for a second. Then uploading 3.4, bam, up to date.

Real quick, one of the things that I definitely want to show you is Sheet Set Manager. What stood out to me from the beginning was my Sheet Set Manager changed. I didn't even realize it at first. But you'll see here, it's the Sheet Set Manager for Web. And it looks like my session timed out from earlier, so I just need to click Reload so it goes back and pulls the latest Sheet Set. Bam, now it pulled it up.

It works the same way. It looks pretty similar. Maybe the colors are a little different and the location and stuff. The properties for the sheets, that all gets housed underneath. And you can change a bunch of different information like you typically can with the sheet set. But everything else works the same way. So you have your sheets and everything's working. When you need to access your sheets, you can come in here and pull your sheets and your references and everything else.

So that's it for ACC and Desktop Connector. Again, I just wanted it to be a quick demo. You don't need to remember everything. This wasn't a deep dive into ACC. But I wanted you to be familiar with it. As we're talking about some of the stuff we experienced, I want you to remember what we were talking about.

And second is like, go mess around with it yourself up there when you're working on your projects. That way, when you jump in ACC, it's not completely brand new like it was for us. Just take a look at ACC and poke around with it. And then go look at your own projects on there and see how everything works.

All right. So now, I want to talk about our experience. So I mentioned the biggest thing, the pro, that's the top of pro for everything, was collaboration. And with collaboration, it almost fell, one by one, into efficiency and productivity. And collaboration affected efficiency, which then affected our productivity. So the pros kind of work together and it's one big pro.

But wanted to break them up and tell you a little bit and give you examples of to how some of this stuff end up helping our project in the long run. I mentioned collaboration. But again, this was the best part of ACC. It was so easy to work with this other engineering firm, where yeah, they weren't sitting across from you. But every time you updated something or you needed to switch something, you could just pick up the phone and tell them, and then their files updated automatically. So there's a huge thing to say, I worked with this different company seamlessly and as efficiently as possible because they were updating everything in real time and running through projects and updating sheets and doing grading, and we were seeing all the results instantaneously on our side.

So all of that collaboration leads me to the second pro, it helped with efficiency. So being able to talk to each other and coordinate made it really easy to go through and update everything. But we also saw almost a boost in the way the drawings were working. And we're talking, yeah, they were mid-level drawings. They weren't these ginormous GIS drawings, but they were still running pretty fast. So you saw how when I opened one, it took maybe a couple seconds to open. The same thing was happening constantly when we were in-- deep in the projects and we had multiple people running on pulling the files from the server. It was just constantly at the same level of production and the same level of performance.

these drawings would open really fast. You could pan around, move around, move stuff, manipulate everything. There was very little lag between jumping from model space to sheets, between viewports. Everything reduced the amount of time it took, so our efficiency went up. And that even-- that includes, sorry, closing-- because I want to say that was a big one we've had in the past where giant files. We would hit Close, and you had to wait a couple minutes before it finally hit save and the drawing would fully close out. We did not see any of that with ACC. It was super efficient, and it was running. The performance was really high.

So with that collaboration and we're pulling collaboration with this other engineering firm, and then we're running efficiently, we ended up with extra time, which was the oddest thing for me is, people were finishing things a little bit faster than they typically were. And what they were doing is getting to jump into different parts of the project. Maybe some people were learning different aspects of a project, so someone that hasn't really been involved in grading was getting to touch a couple things in grading, because everything that used to take a little bit longer is now shortened down, and they got a little bit of free time.

So the project as a whole ended up getting set up pretty quickly, and then updates and review cycles and everything got shortened a little bit. And so people were able to be a little bit more productive on their projects, which then bled into other projects. Like we all know, being productive is awesome. And if you can increase your productivity, that's where you're going to get a lot of bang for your buck. And ACC helped a ton with that.

Now, the cons. So the biggest thing, the major headache that we had, and it took some working through to figure out-- was working through a bunch of stuff to figure out the Sheet Set Manager. I kind of explained that it looks the same. It works pretty much the same. But one of the issues that we had was the Sheet Set Manager was getting stuck, for lack of a better word. You could jump between Project A and then jump to Project B, and then jump back to Project C and then A, and typically, your sheet set jumps between each one, and it's auto-updating as your cycling in and out of sheets.

For ACC, for whatever reason, it would stay stuck on Project A. And no matter what we tried, we would shift and try to open different sheet sets, maybe open one back inside Sheet Set A, and them jump to Sheet Set B and cycle between them, but we could never get-- once it got stuck, we could never get it to jump between different sheet sets. The only thing that we could do is close out of Civil 3D and then reopen it. And that typically fixed it. So there was a fix, but if you're going to be running with your sheets and there's a lot of people working on it and you randomly get a sheet set that gets stuck, the Sheet Set Manager gets stuck, then yeah, there's some of that productivity starts to dip down a little bit.

The second major issue, which is what I would say was one of the biggest hurdles that we had to jump over, and even when discussing ACC with different people in our office, this is the main thing that gets brought up to us. And it's plotting issues. Every time we plotted with the Sheet Set Manager and we plotted multi-sheet PDFs, we would have to make sure that you had someone that was running the set themselves, making sure that they're keeping an eye on it, which is good practice that you have someone running in the PDF, back-checking and reviewing their own work. But this person would be just specifically sitting there making sure everything's printing correctly, that it's loading everything, no errors pop up, or there's not a weird glitch or something just blinks out of existence.

But with this person sitting there, sometimes, we still had issues where the multi-sheet PDF, it would take out sections of surfaces, or it would go through and a viewport wouldn't load all the way, and you'd have floating labels. Or the worst one, it would just skip a sheet. So it would go through, think that a sheet was loaded, it would think it printed it, and it would just jump on to the next one. All of that though, we fixed, and I would say was not really an ACC issue, more of a drawing cleanup issue.

So what we did is we made sure that people who were working on it had good CAD manners and they were making good, clean CAD files. And they were able to reduce the amount of issues with printing. And that ended up being a lot easier to print to PDF, even for multi-sheet PDFs.

And the final issue that we saw was syncing. Issues. So in peak hours, we did have some people saying that they would try to open a drawing, but then it shows that it's open. And then as you're clicking and everything's loading, there could be where it switches it to where it's locked all of a sudden. Or vice versa, a drawing, you would try to open it, and it would go through and show that it's locked even though everybody's logged out. It's like 9:00 PM at night, for whatever reason you're here, and you know nobody is working on this stuff. So how is it locked in someone's-- when nobody else is logged in? So there was a little bit of waiting for that file to sync up. And I'll talk about what could have happened there in a second.

But the same thing would happen with folder creation or PDFs. Sometimes, when there was a little bit too much of a pull on our internet or there was too many users using the internet bandwidth, there would be a little bit of a lag, and folders would take a little bit before they finally popped up in ACC and the web page, in Civil 3D, and in the folder, the Windows Explorer. And then the final one, which I believe is what was making us have those files stay locked up, was closing out issues.

So it's the end of the day. You've been working hard and sitting at your desk all day and barely even got up to go to the bathroom, or you can get any water, and now it's time to go. Most of us are inclined to just hit-- closed out of everything, hit Alt-F4, shut down. And all of a sudden, it pops up that, hey, the Desktop Connector is still working on something. Don't shut down. Do you want to shut down anyway? Do you me to force it?

And people were not paying attention. They were just hitting Shut Down Anyway. What it was doing is that little guy that we were talking about that was running from your hard drive all the way to the ACC cloud server, there was no door for him to get out of. So what was happening, the ACC connection was getting broken and these files were getting stuck because the users weren't sitting there waiting for everything to sync up and load 100%, and they would just close out and strand these files. And eventually, we had a couple instances where some of the users where they said, I already worked on this. It's like, well, nobody was working on this so I jumped in it. And then you had conflicting files. And somebody had to lose some of their work there. So verify 100% that your Desktop Connector has fully synced and is ready to close out before you go through and shut anything down.

All right. So that was our experience with ACC with these little small to mid-sized projects. Let's go over and take a look at what you're going to need to get started. So with ACC, you're going to need to make sure you have access to ACC. You're going to need to download the Desktop Connector. You will have to reach out, maybe discuss with your partner, whoever is the one doing the licensing for your firm, and you're going to have to ask them, hey, can we get ACC for our office? This could end up being a little bit of a harder conversation because ACC is in the beginning of stages of using it with Civil 3D. But it's worth asking and saying, hey, I need this ACC license. So verify you can get an ACC license with your team, and then get the licensing going so that you can go ahead and start uploading your project.

The second one was the Desktop Connector. So the Desktop Connector is something new. You need to make sure that you have the latest update. And the biggest thing that you need to verify is that your team has the same exact update constantly. So when you're going to update, make sure you reach out and say, hey, I need to verify you have the same update. And once everybody's going through and you say you need an update, you go through an update everybody at the same time. There could be a little bit of issue with someone having outdated Desktop Connector.

And finally, Civil 3D 2024 and above-- ACC, it did exist before Civil 3D 2024, but in our experience, anytime we've used ACC, it's worked better with Civil 3D 2024 and above. The workflow inside of Civil 3D 2024 is just easily accessible with the way it works with their Start menu. And I believe you can't really pull this with anything older than 2024, but it's worth checking out and verifying. But yeah, verify you have these three things, and then you can start taking your projects and slowly transitioning to ACC.

All right, in closing, ACC ended up being extremely helpful with these projects. At the beginning, I was a little hesitant, like I said before. Thinking of moving our projects onto the cloud and being at the mercy of our internet connection, I was actually scared, saying, well, what if I have a submit and I can't access these? But in the end, the collaboration, efficiency, and productivity, it was worth it 100%.

So at Kimley-Horn, I can say that we're going to start using this, especially for projects that require what we call shifting, where it's going to be shifting users from a different office to work on your projects while they're sitting in a different office. And it could even be a different region, or it can be anybody across the firm. But our goal is to get every project that will require people working from outside of your immediate office into ACC to help with the collaboration. It is 100% worth it for just the collaboration in general.

So with my personal experience, I can honestly say ACC is worth it. And I think everybody should go and try this out on their own. So again, you might see some issues. You might have some hiccups. But I'm looking forward to see what Autodesk does and how ACC gets implemented across our field and especially with Civil 3D in the future. All right. That's all I've got. Thank you so much for listening to my experience. Have a good rest of your day.