The last release of Land Desktop will be C3D Land Desktop Companion 2009.

Word on the street (civil3d.com) indicates that while this is the last official release it will be available from the subscription center as an extension in with the release of Civil 3D 2010.  I haven’t heard the fate of Civil Design or Survey.

This is surprising as Civil 3D isn’t to the point to replace LD completely and that there are a lot of firms out there still utilizing Land Desktop.  On the other hand it will be available as an extension so not a lot has changed.

I understand Autodesk not wanting to spend the resources on updating LD to the latest version of autocad.  However if your user base wants it I would expect they would keep releasing LD as a companion to C3D for many years to come.

It will be interesting to see the industry response to this news.

The Civil3D Storm Sewer Extension is now available for download in the Autodesk Subscription Center. Log in here.

The Civil3D Stormwater Discussion Group is Live as well check it out via this link.

Be sure to add us to your favorite RSS feeds by clicking here.

Autodesk will unveil their first integration of Hydraflow Storm Sewer into the Civil 3D product tomorrow morning during a webcast at 9AM PST sign up HERE.

It’s been a long wait for C3D users to see a hydrology & hydraulics tool integrated into the software. It’s great to see Autodesk releasing the extension prior to the April release of Civil 3D 2009.

We will post more information after the webcast. The following is from the Autodesk Civil Community Web Page:

Join Dave Simeone, Civil 3D Product Manager for this live webcast where he will demonstrate the capabilities of the new Autodesk storm sewer functionality. He will also review recommended workflow for integrating analysis operations with the layout, design, and drafting capabilities of AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2008.

Enjoy the web cast.

Autodesk employee Sanjay Asnani’s blog 2D to (Civil) 3D is reporting that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is moving to adopt Civil 3D in the near future.  That will be a huge leap for C3D entering into the DOT realm of Microstation and GeoPAK.

This will be very interesting for the transportation consultants working with WDOT who will be making the leap from GeoPAK to Civil 3D.

We’ll post more details when they become available.

Autodesk has acquired InteliSOLVE.

Exciting news for those of us who have been waiting for Autodesk to incorporate Hydrology and Hydraulics into Civil3D. Now we can, sit back and wait some more.

While the acquisition is good news for Civil3D users, it will take some time for InteliSOLVE’s products to be integrated into Civil3D. Most industry experts are expecting their products to be included “in the box” with the C3D 2009 release this coming April. I wouldn’t expect anything beyond importing/exporting data between the products. Hopefully they will have time to tighten up the interaction between to two products before the April release.

I was disappointed that Autodesk didn’t acquire Haestad Methods. Haestad is the most respected H&H software on the market. While the InteliSOLVE acquisition is good news for C3D users I was hoping Autodesk would have pursued a different direction by bulding on the Land Desktop H&H tools.

In my opinion the H&H tools in Land Desktop have the best user interface on the market. They are easy to use, intuitive for engineers, and they run inside of Autocad. The user interface for pipeworks far surpasses StormCAD’s. The report features could use some improvment and overall updating. I wish Autodesk would have taken a look at what they had in house and put the acquisition war chest toward internal development of H&H.

It will be interesting to see how far Autodesk takes the intelisolve products. Will they build the software into C3D or will it only run stand alone? Will it be dynamically linked? Will they evolve the two products to include basin, culvert, open channel and weir C3D objects? Meanwhile all we can do is wait.