Topic: Anyone use Bentley apps?

[kindra]

Does anyone here use either Geopak or Power Civil for their civil/survey applications? Or am I standing alone again?

[Mark]

Nope!

[Dinosaur]

I am not using it but I would like to give it a try or at least hear some comments about them . . . hint

[Arizona]

I'd be interested in your questions also

[jpostlewait]

I can give some perspective from an administrative viewpoint.
I grew up in a softdesk environment, then spent 5 years in a MicroStation/Geopak group. That was probably 7 years ago.
Been on the IT end since then.
Our firm has around a hundred seats of various Adeck products and about forty seats of MS and Geopak. No powercivil.
Both Companies flood the Marketplace with BS.
Using MS/Geopak on DOT projects is absolutely the right answer.
That stuff generates cross sections like you can't believe.
It takes quite a high level of sophistication to write the criteria files ( basically script files ) but once you get past that it really runs.
Bentley is hardly the easiest company in the world to deal with.
There are straights and weaknesses with both offerings.
Bentley products generally don't offer any local support options and national support is limited.
Training options means finding somebody to come into your shop and train.
Their Local User Groups are more active. So you can find the independent trainers.
My MicroStation users are true believers. Sort of like the Apple guys or the Linuxheads.
It works for them in their environment. BUT their environment is mandated by the DOT's and the DOT's deliver a lot of  configuration files.
So most upgrades have to wait for the DOT's to figure out what they want to do with it and then write everything.
XM has been out close to 2 years and we are nowhere near adopting.
Anyway don't look at it as is one better than the other. It's just not that simple.

[dfarris75]

I worked with a Geopak user on one project and I asked him some time ago about PowerCivil. He said something to the effect of "PowerCivil is a piece of junk". He swore by Geopak and appeared to be fairly well at it. I have seen plan/pro's and sections created with it and it does a nice job. I haven't however witnessed the program in use so I can't say much else about it.

[kindra]

Thank you VERY much for your input. I've found it darn near impossible to find fellow Geopak users. We do a lot of DOT work here, and it MUST be submitted in MicroStation/Geopak format. Our DOT projects are mandated by our strict DOT standards, so those projects are easy to deal with. However, I struggle like heck with our municipal projects, which use some (but not all) of our DOT standards. Our CAD manager left before our V8 of both MicroStation and Geopak was fully set up, which has left me in an interesting (frustrating) position. I started here a year and a half ago - first job out of school - and didn't know jack scratch about either program. Since then I have had to create sheet library files, edit criteria files, all pretty much by the trial and error method. We do have access to online Bentley training, which I have found fairly helpful, but there's still a lot I don't know about how the programs work with each other, the roles of support files, etc. and I have no friggin' clue where to go for answers.

I have been able to find neither local training nor local user groups. I find Geopak to be so frustrating because there are so many picky settings, that one may be off that I don't see in whatever pop-up menu I'm using, then when I cut my cross-sections, they're generated every 20 feet instead of every 50 feet or something.

To those of you who have used Geopak (or have worked with people who have)....

Where do you go for answers?

[dfarris75]

Maybe these can help?

http://www.be.org/en-US/BE%20User%20Group/

http://www.microstationconnections.com/index.php

http://www.flugsite.com/presentations/spring2004.cfm
http://www.flugsite.com/presentations/summer2003.cfm

[kindra]

I've been thinking about my opinion of this software, which is the opinion of a beginner both in the software and in the field (I've been here just over a year and a half). Geopak has amazing capabilities, but isn't anywhere near being user-friendly. There are so many hidden settings that I run into problems all the time - I think I'm on the right track, all of my pop-up menus have been populated with the proper data (if you thought MicroStation was bad with pop-ups, you ain't seen nothin' yet - it overpopulates BOTH my screens!), but then when I go to run cross-sections/profiles/whatever, it either doesn't work at all or gives me some very unpredictable results.

There are a lot of support files necessary to run Geopak. Thankfully, IDOT sends us these files for their standards, so that I can use them as a template to create files that follow company standards. No one in our office has had any formal Geopak training - I completed an online Bentley tutorial, and that's about it. It was somewhat helpful, but the majority of my Geopak training comes the hard way - screwing something up, then having to go back and search for my mistake.

I definitely have an 'iceberg' grasp of the program. I have about a 5-10% knowledge of Geopak Road. There's also Landscape, Site, Drainage, Water Sewer and Survey, and I've never used any of them! I'd like to poke around and see if they could do us any good, but I don't seem to have the time.

Like I said, I am just a beginner in this journey, but I'd be pretty interested in starting a compare/contrast dialogue concerning these programs. What kind of work to you use C3D for? Do you find it easy to use, or is it a pain in the butt? What would you do to make it easier to understand and more user-friendly? What's the learning curve? How much training do you have? How much more would you like?

Not that I'd be able to make the switch - like I said, we MUST use Geopak. I'd just like to have a basis of comparison.

[Arizona]

... Geopak has amazing capabilities, but isn't anywhere near being user-friendly. ...

And being a Bentley product, this surprises you?

[kindra]

... Geopak has amazing capabilities, but isn't anywhere near being user-friendly. ...

And being a Bentley product, this surprises you?

Yeah, I know, I should be used to it by now 

It just seems like it's poorly laid out, kind of like Wal-Mart. That's the only way I can describe it. When I went back-to-school shopping for my son, good ole' Wally World had two aisles that were five aisles apart of school supplies - I guess putting everything together would have made way too much sense. And it's the same with Geopak - when I create a profile, for example, I create it in Coordinate Geometry, I visualize it in Design and Computation Manager, and I edit it in a whole other menu altogether! Why isn't there just a 'profile' tool?!! Oh yeah, because that would make SENSE. :realmad: :realmad: :realmad:

[jpostlewait]

It takes years to get really good at it, that is if you can.
But the guys at my firm that are good can really make it sing.
Complicated pile of code. But I guess everything is that way anymore.