Something of interest from Autodesk… This week, Autodesk released Civil 3D 2020.1, which introduces the latest integration of BIM and GIS as a result of a partnership with Esri: the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS in Civil 3D.
From Autodesk:
The Connector for ArcGIS integrated BIM & GIS by enabling you to bring ArcGIS data layers that contains points, lines, polygons, feature lines, gravity pipes, parcels, or structures directly into your Civil 3D drawings. When you bring in each layer, you can specify what type of Civil 3D object to create. This helps you more efficiently generate the existing conditions for your specific area of interest.
Now that you have brought GIS data from ArcGIS directly into a Civil 3D drawing, you can make changes to that data in Civil 3D and use the Save Back option in the Data Source Manager to update ArcGIS with your changes. Because the Connector for ArcGIS maintains a live link to ArcGIS Online, this helps ensure that consistency is maintained between what is being designed and what is in the GIS.
With the Connector for ArcGIS in Civil 3D, not only can you Save Back to ArcGIS, you can also Publish Civil 3D objects to ArcGIS, including: alignments, feature lines, parcels, pipe networks, and points. Why would you want to do this? With the ability to Publish to ArcGIS, as you go through design process and reviews, you can create new features that are needed for your project and update those back into ArcGIS directly. This helps ensure that not only existing conditions data is up to date, but all stages of the project data is up to date and can be accessed by all stakeholders.
You can also connect to ArcGIS in order to bring in data to create gravity pipes and structures. To do so, you will need to first set schema mapping settings in order to map the specified ArcGIS attributes to Civil 3D properties. Bringing in data to create gravity pipes and structures in this manners helps eliminate errors and saves time.
Read more on the Autodesk Infrastructure Blog
You can learn more about Civil 3D by visiting the Civil 3D product center.