Originally built for Civil 3D and now expanded to operate on AutoCAD and BricsCAD, Civil Site Design provides you with highly efficient and simple-to-use civil design tools for road networks, driveways, highways, road reconstruction, and any number of corridor based projects.
Built for all civil designers, you can quickly and easily generate road network designs complete with dynamic intersections and cul-de-sacs, updating as you make changes to any element. The software is also purpose built for road reconstruction designers. Generate outputs including section and profile sheets, stakeout points, volume reports and more, directly into your drawing environment and customisable to suit your local drafting standards.
In Civil 3D, Civil Site Design uses the surfaces and alignments in Civil 3D, and can export surfaces, alignments, profiles and corridors and stakeout points directly to the drawing.
For CAD based systems, Civil Site Design comes complete with surface modelling and alignment design tools, as well as dynamic site grading functionality.
Civil Site Design supports multiple platforms and multiple product releases: Civil Site Design has been developed to operate on AutoCAD, Map 3D and Civil 3D from 2011 to the latest release, and recently has been updated to operate on BricsCAD.
Civil Site Design focuses on the following design areas:
Civil Site Design has been developed to provide road design and outputs directly inside AutoCAD, Civil 3D and BricsCAD. Our philosophy of combining template and string based design, as well as automating common design elements such as intersections and roundabouts, provides a familiar and complete set of tools for rapid creation and output of your road subdivision, reconstruction, rural, highway and other design projects.
With the Vertical Design Windows you get complete access to any selected design element including editing the vertical design profiles and cross sections, establish cut/fill bulking factors, generating summary volume reports and creating surface models of your designs. You can position your vertical (profile) design windows as well as cross section windows anywhere on your monitor/s and see everything update as you make changes.
Since you can have multiple profile strings open simultaneously you can see your roads, curb returns, cul-de-sacs and knuckle strings update as you edit your main roads. With multiple cross section windows open, you can track the impacts of your profile edits as you graphically make changes. And you can check the impacts over a range of stations, rather than one at a time.
The Road design tools can be used for any generic corridor design: open channels, retaining walls, footpaths, etc.
Road Subdivision | Road Reconstruction | Highway Design | Rural Roads
has all the tools you need to rapidly generate industry standard outputs of your designs directly inside the drawing, ready for immediate plotting.
With you can interactively control the sheet layout, scales, layers and linetypes as well as what to present in your outputs. Plotting outputs styles can be saved for reuse - output them to separate drawings or as layouts in the current drawing.
Stakeout, plan plotting of the models and slope patterns are all created directly inside your drawing.
You can decide whether to output to layout tabs or to external drawings.
As well as providing comprehensive civil design tools for road and site grading projects, Civil Site Design integrates driveway tools into your design workflow to instantly identify and design to avoid vehicle clearance conflicts.
The driveway tools work from polylines in the drawing and link dynamically to both Road design cross sections and the property boundary. See your vehicle clearance requirements update as you edit your Road and vertically design your driveway to avoid vehicle clashes.
It’s simple to use and gives you instant feedback:
You set what part of the Road cross sections to connect to, add a layback and set where the driveway design ends (normally the property boundary).
Open each driveway in the Driveway Vertical Grading Editor window and choose what vehicle clearance template to apply. See the vehicle clearance line and all vertical clashes highlighted.
You can design the driveway by adding, deleting and editing PVI’s to remove clearance problems—updates will occur dynamically as you change the vertical design.
You can create your own vehicle clearance templates to suit your local conditions, and check each for compliance.
With you can completely automate your road subdivision design processes using intelligent objects to handle common design elements such as intersections, curb returns, cul-de-sacs, roundabouts and knuckles.
Curb returns automatically and dynamically position themselves both horizontally and vertically to the intersecting roads. Design wizards allow for user creation of single or multi radius curb returns, or use of your own alignments. The auto curb return function creates multiple curb returns at once, all matched to the intersecting roads and with cross sections automatically matching between the main and side roads.
Cul-de-sac design can be parametrically driven with support for circular, asymmetric, tear-drop, Y and T shaped configurations. After setting the values will lay it out horizontally and vertically to match the incoming Road and with cross sections automatically matching the road at either end.
The Roundabout tools allow the designer to quickly establish elevations around your selected island and edge of carriageway alignments to suit your intersection levels, as well as assigning cross sections to describe your internal island.
Localised road widening are easily achieved using the Knuckle tool, which creates localised widening that stay attached to the Road as you make design changes.
At the click of a button a surface model is created incorporating all the road, curb returns, cul-de-sacs, roundabouts and knuckles including all trimming of strings at intersections and automatic inclusion of boundaries to trim the extents and hide internal areas.
has been developed with road reconstruction in mind. Featuring advanced cross section subgrade tools, independent vertical and/or horizontal control over any part of your cross section, and the ability to form models using any collection of independently graded strings and cross section codes, ARD is the premium design tool for road reconstruction works.
Specific vertical design tools are included to help automate road reconstruction processes, including the ability to automatically design based on resheet/overlay depths, match surface controls and string/code projections, as well as displaying design ‘envelopes’ (projections from another string/code at grade).
Advanced cross section design tools allow you to manage your cross sections easily and the dynamic cross section viewer allows you to review your edits as you make them.
Using the subgrade design tools you can generate accurate volume outputs through multiple layers, with automatic adjustment of pavement layer depths to match existing surfaces.
’s advanced modeling tools allow you to put together any collection of roads, strings and cross section codes, over user-selected chainage ranges, to allow for all your design requirements.
Major Road and Highway Design invariably involves larger scale designs that may include service roads, multiple divided carriageways and grade separated intersections.
Civil Site Design delivers with:
The design environment is a proven performer on large scale projects, with our customers report excellent performance when designing single projects in excess of 12mi and managing surface data containing over a million points - with AutoCAD Civil 3D you can work with multi-million point surfaces.
includes specific design tools for highway designers in managing grade separated roads, as well as intelligent design tools for managing multiple benching conditions and ditches.
The rural road design tools build upon the extensive road design tools for automating the profile design based on minimum pavement depths and the ability to edit cross section elements using alignment, string and surface constraints. Typical of rural road design type projects, you can apply pavement superelevation and include rules-based ditches.
After setting a speed for the road length, you can select to apply the AASHTO standards to establish changes to pavement crossfall through each curve - Civil Site Design will calculate and apply the required superelevation through each curve based on the speed, curve radius and maximum superelevation. The superelevation 'table' is a simple text file, so you can easily edit it to meet your regional requirements. Shoulder codes can similarly be adjusted through curves, by applying a relative shoulder rotation - again you have control over how the shoulder rotates, relative to the pavement rotations. You can override the applied superelevation at each curve, either by directly editing stations and crossfalls, or by re-applying a superelevation length and the maximum super to apply.
After applying superelevation you still have ultimate override control using the cross section Variation tools.
Civil Site Design includes an automated tool to include simple ditches that check for fill conditions on the ditch bottom and remove the ditch when not required. You can apply independent vertical (profile) control and horizontal (alignment) control to the ditches, and set for ditches to automatically be removed in certain fill or certain cut situations. With the conditional daylighting tools you can establish a rules based approach to the ditch and embankment designs to automatically include/remove ditches, add benching, change daylighting slopes and more, all based on depth range conditions you set.
Built for rapid design of features such as building pads and detention basins, the dynamic grading tools automatically clean up internal overlapping corners and include radial and mitre options on external corners.
With the Site Grading tools you can take a polyline, apply a cross section template (assembly) to create a graded surface complete with corner cleanup. The surface and grading linework automatically updates as you edit your grading, so you get immediate feedback on the impact of your design changes, as you make them.
You can immediately review volume outputs after making design changes, enabling easy volume checking and optimization. Use the Civil Site Design Surface Modelling tools to create one total dynamic surface model incorporating all your land development components – perfect for parcel grading.
If you're using Civil 3D, this is a rapid creation alternative to the Civil 3D grading tools, supporting a total cross section extraction along a polyline and with corner cleanup. Volume calculations in Civil 3D can be made by exporting the grading surface out as a Civil 3D surface object.
The grading tools support cross section templates (assemblies) and intelligent daylighting designs to address specific site design requirements. As well, you can combine template and string based designs into the grading models to get the fine level of control you require.
The quick elevation viewer makes it even easier to make changes to your grading string levels and see the results. You can use both the vertical grading design tools and the quick elevation viewer to make edits to the design – change PVI positions along the grading, edit and add vertical curves, either in a grid view or using a graphical design profile display.
Surface creation is quick and easy with support for multiple data inputs, intuitive display controls and outputs dynamically represented directly inside the drawing, ready for plotting and publishing.
The Surface model inputs support external point data and Land XML files as well as reading 3D data directly from the drawing. Surface display controls are immediately accessible to you, allowing for fast and dynamic adjustments to contour intervals, colors, layers, contour labeling and surface analysis.
Analyze your surface to resolve design issues with tools to show elevation banding, slope ranges, directions and slope arrows coloured to your design requirements. Create tables of your surface analysis as AutoCAD tables, ready for plotting and publishing.
LandXML file transfer is fully supported so surface data can be imported and exported readily across multiple design platforms. Create and edit your surfaces in Civil Site Design with the confidence of being able to immediately share that information with the broader design community.
Surface objects can be selected by mouse click in the drawing and edited. Surface data can also be exported to AutoCAD entities as desired, for sharing with any AutoCAD user.
Obtain volume reports between any two surfaces, including accounting for compaction factors and applying height adjustments. Volume reports can be exported to a text file for re-use in the drawing and for other documentation purposes.
In AutoCAD Civil 3D, Civil Site Design can work directly with the Civil 3D surface objects.
For surveyors, the Stringer Topo software delivers a comprehensive topographical field-to-finish modeling solution. Stringer Topo converts raw survey data into COGO points in the drawing, stylized based on point codes, and adds breaklines to the surface automatically from the surveyed points.
It’s simple and easy in Civil Site Design – draw a polyline and click to turn it into an alignment object. Labeling is fully automatic and user customizable as is the line, arc and spiral display.
Alignments can be easily edited during the creation process or via the alignment editing tools – users just click to edit an PI and get access to tools to change the spiral lengths, curve radius and PI position. Add PI’s, delete and move PI’s within the one editing environment.
When you make an edit to the alignment geometry the display updates in the drawing, including the labeling.
Label display is customizable by you, with a simple interface for the addition of blocks, arrows, lines, circles and text in the station labeling, on user defined AutoCAD layers. In AutoCAD, labels react with the drawing scale in model space so there is less work trying to get the size right for plotting, and labels flip to be plan readable in the model. Set your own standards for labeling including sampling intervals for major and minor stations.
Create alignment tables when you create or edit your alignment. You select the information to include in Alignment Tables and Curve Tables and then generate AutoCAD tables at the click of a button. As part of the editing process the AutoCAD tables can be updated in the drawing after the geometry of the alignment changes.
As changes are made to the design, the drafting updates in your drawing, ready for plotting and publishing.
Data share is made easy via Land XML transfer. Import and export alignment geometry across multiple design platforms.
In AutoCAD Civil 3D, Civil Site Design works directly with the Civil 3D alignment objects.