KobiLabs - Toolkit for Civil 3D | Autodesk Civil 3D Add-Ons

Our Consulting and Services Manager, Shawn Herring, wrote an article for this month's issue of AUGI World. Below is a portion of the article:

It’s always interesting to see all the add-ons to Civil 3D that bridge the gaps on what out-of-the-box software can do and what is really needed to pull off projects - especially on the civil side of things.  There are so many different sectors and sub-sectors of civil engineering and the project types are endless.

For this article, I reached out to my awesome network on LinkedIn to get an idea of what add-ons they use that are out there on the market.  There are literally thousands of add-ons so I narrowed it down to a few.  It was kind of like choosing your favorite child…..which in my case is easy because it's Addison!  She is my favorite, and here are a few of my favorite add-ons for Autodesk Civil 3D!

KobiLabs – Toolkit for Civil 3D

KobiLabs has developed a set of tools for AutoCAD, Revit and Civil 3D. For this, we will focus on the Toolkit for Civil 3D.

Kobi Toolkit for Civil 3D is a set of essential productivity plug-ins that will make your work in Civil 3D fast, easy and efficient. These tools will dramatically reduce the number of tedious tasks and help you focus on your engineering challenges.  These tools are broken out into 8 separate “workflows”, these workflows being:

·         Points – Simple items such as assigning station & offset to points, and having that alignment data available within a table is now possible with this tool.  Extracting the symbol, or blocks, from the points is easy to do using these as well.

·         Surface & Grading – Multiple tools for surface and grading design/editing are available on the Toolkit.  The grading functionality lets you design various spatial entities with different grading criteria allowing you to save the templates. Edit the source geometry and review the results in real time.

·         Alignments – The options to join and alignments, create offset alignments and even export a polyline to LandXML are very helpful.

·         Profiles – There are some very helpful profile tools in the Toolkit, one of my favorites was being able to create simple offset profiles and multiple profiles very quickly.

·         Corridors – There is a powerful Corridor Spreadsheet Editor that allows you to edit corridor in an MS Excel like editor. It provides possibilities for various kinds of workflows like editing regions, targets and reconstructing corridors in new drawings.

·         Pipes – This is where most people need help in Civil 3D.  With these pipe tools you can swap multiple parts, design your gravity systems quickly and many other great options.

·         Analysis – The Check Utility Crossing tool calculates crossings between utility segments (gravity and pressure network pipes), inserts COGO points at crossing locations and marks crossing elevation differences.

·         Navigation & Visibility – There are a few navigation related tools, one that manages the visibility of all Civil 3D objects on a single panel. Make your working area more transparent by toggling the visibility of features on/off.

A couple final things to highlight from KobiLabs would be:

·         They shoot for 6 to 10 new tools each year.

·         NO additional fees for the new tools any customer on subscription automatically gets them.

·         They are always requesting ideas for new tools. If they like the idea they build it at no cost and it is then put into the tools for every user to take advantage of. 

Additional tools and videos can be found here:  https://kobilabs.com/civil-3d/


To learn more about Autodesk Civil 3D add-ons, click here.