Using Bricscad for civil engineering/survey problems

cecil bearden

I have access to  Autocad for my design use.  I work with contours and surveys and then design a dam & reservoir and the works with the dam.  It is a combinatio of surveying, civil, and mechanical engineering.    I have just downloaded the trial program to evaluate.  Can anyone here tell me if this will do the countour work as Autocad, or am I just stuck with paying the $ 5K+ price of Autodesk.  I have a small civil engineering office (1 man) so price is the object!

Thanks in advance for your advice

Cecil Bearden, PE

www.thatdamengineer.com

Vincent A. Popish

 There are low cost programs that can do this for you, see  http://www.cogosoftware.com/dpcogo.html for one, 

http://www.4d-technologies.com/blogindex_en.htm  is another.  Way cheaper than Autocad with some contouring package.

Vince Popish

Damian Harkin

 Search for 'Terrain' or 'DTM'  here:

http://www.bricsys.com/common/applications/applicationlist.jsp 

LanDTM is free (or donation).  That's a good start!

Damian Harkin

Terry Dotson

Take a look at the MapWorks 4.0 add-on at http://www.dotsoft.com/bricscad/mapworks.htm.

Vincent A. Popish

 Do you use DotSoft? Are they easy to work with? Do they respond quickly to email support requests? Seems like a decent product, do they gouge you much on upgrades? Any information would be helpful.

Vince Popish

martin@enco.us

I'm not sure that Terry Dotson is the best person to ask for an impartial review of DotSoft.....

I've used ToolPac for Autocad from DotSoft for several years and have been very happy with the product and the service.  The pdf to cad conversion for computer created pdf files (not scanned files) is the best I've found. 

Pricing information is shown at the bottom of the feature list for each product, http://www.dotsoft.com/bricscad/index.htm   You can get an idea of upgrade pricing by looking at the upgrade form at http://www.dotsoft.com/index.htm / Products / Purchase / Upgrade

Terry Dotson

@H Martin Shoemaker:I'm not sure that Terry Dotson is the best person to ask for an impartial review of DotSoft.....

You might say I put the "Dot" in DotSoft, so I'm quite biased.

Rakesh Rao

Cecil,

I am the developer as well as marketer of two add-ons for Bricscad & AutoCAD.

You may want to give GeoTools / CADPower a try. It is inexpensive, pretty useful and I am always here to listen to you.

More here:

www.4d-technologies.com
www.coordsys.com
http://rakeshrao.typepad.com

Regards
Rakesh Rao