<p>As a civil major, which CAD softwares are most important to know? As in, learning WHICH ONES will give the greatest advantages as to job opportunities? How do AutoCAD, SAP2000, Inventor, and Revit stack up?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>Know all of them. Those all serve different purposes. AutoCAD is for drawing, SAP2000 is for structural analysis, and Revit is for building information modeling. I haven’t encountered Inventor in the industry (and I actually don’t know what it is).</p>
<p>There are two primary CAD software. One is AutoCAD, and the other is Microstation, which seems to be favored more by firms in transportation projects.</p>
<p>I realized I didn’t answer your question. I’d go in the order of 1. AutoCAD, 2. SAP2000 (for structural engineering), 3. Revit (you can probably learn this on the job if you need to).</p>
<p>Ah, cool. I think Inventor is more in the “educational” realm–I met someone who had a class in Inventor in high school.</p>
<p>Thanks for your reply.</p>
<p>I just checked the website for Inventor. It appears to be marketed towards the manufacturing sector.</p>
<p>Inventor is AutoDesk’s mostly failed attempt at 3D solid modeling. They just couldn’t break into the market already dominated by Dassault Sistemes and PTC.</p>
<p>I see… I’m spending half of my summer teaching myself CAD (starting with autocad), so I was just wondering about this.</p>
<p>good stuff.</p>
<p>I’m surprised you didn’t have to take a course for it already. They usually teach the basics for AutoCAD in a freshman introduction to engineering or mechanical drafting course.</p>
<p>^Well, then–I suppose my school (UCLA) is an oddball. I’m a Civil Engr. major (just finished my first year), but not a single CAD class is required for a BS. Likewise for MechE and all the other engr. majors at UCLA.</p>
<p>Odd, huh?</p>
<p>Though I should mention that in our ASCE chapter, there were some students who happened to know either autocad or sap2000.</p>
<p>Maybe they teach CAD on an as needed basis during the courses that require the use of it?</p>
<p>CAD was supposed to be taught to us in our first numerical methods class but we never saw a thing. I ended up buying the student edition of the program over summer with one of those massive instructional guides and really didn’t have any problem learning it myself.</p>
<p>AutoDesk offers (or at least used to, I’m not sure about its current status) free student versions to college students. You’d only have to buy a book, and for a student, you can just use AutoCAD for Dummies (or similar) to learn the basics.</p>
<p>Okay, there are two things going on here. The first thing is CAD- it’s primarily just for drawing stuff to convey to those who are going to construct it. The second thing is analysis- that’s primarily used by engineers to see if the stuff they’re designing actually works.</p>
<p>Now we’re getting crossover between the two platforms in something generally called “BIM”… Building Information Modeling… it takes the CAD platform and allows you to do modeling and analysis with it. It’s a useful tool, and it’s becoming more useful as it’s getting a toehold in the industry. It’s only within the past five years or so that BIM has really caught on.</p>
<p>CAD programs:
Civil engineers who do site development and pipe networking are going towards AutoDesk Civil 3D (which is BIM, but we use it more as a CAD program still). Structural engineers are all going towards Revit (BIM also). Bridge and road engineers still stick with Microstation (CAD only, not really BIM-capable… not that I’ve seen, at least), a competitor to AutoCAD that’s made by Bentley. Then there’s still AutoCAD, which is pretty purely drafting.</p>
<p>All the BIM models can be pulled into one model by Navisworks software, so you can get all the civil, structural, architectural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and other stuff into the same model (which is the nice thing about BIM-- you can check to see if there are conflicts between the different systems before you actually get into building them).</p>
<p>Analysis:
There are a lot of programs out there, and what programs are used depends upon what company you’re working for and which platforms they prefer. My old company used RISA Technologies systems. My current company uses ETABS as often as it can, and SAP2000 for the really crunchy stuff (which is most of what we do; SAP2000 is finite element-y, but for larger-scale stuff). There’s also STAAD and RAM, and we’ve got some proprietary software that we’ve developed ourselves. There are individual software packages for retaining walls, foundations and footings, post-tensioned beams, mild-reinforced beams, and pretty much everything else. I also do finite element analysis for individual components, and for that, I’ve used Abaqus, PATRAN, NASTRAN, ADINA, and ANSYS. Traffic engineers use a whole different subset of software (VISSIM, Synchro, SignCAD, and others). Hydrologists use a whole different subset of software, too (HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS). There are GIS (geographical information systems) packages, too… I know ArcGIS and ArcView. For blast analysis, I use a whole different suite of software packages (WINGARD, BlastX, ConWep).</p>
<p>Best idea: get a general knowledge of how to use basic CAD. Whatever company you work for, you’re going to need to learn their CAD standards and they may have customized toolbars and tool sets that you’ll need to start over with anyhow, but if you get a basic working knowledge of CAD, that’ll help you out.</p>
<p>Then, get an understanding of how some analysis tools work. ETABS is a good simple one to start with.</p>
<p>If you go on to grad school to get a masters’ degree in structures, take a finite element course and learn whatever pre-processor, analysis system, and post-processor that they throw at you.</p>
<p>As you can see, there are a whole wazooload of programs out there that we use… You’re not going to be able to learn 'em all before you get to where you’re going, so you might as well just pick one common drafting program and one common analysis program and at least get a taste of what you’re working with. Don’t go out there with the intent to learn everything before you get to where you’re going… You’ll pick up software skills as you go.</p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
<p>The Civil Engineers I’ve seen primarily worked with Civil 3D. In that firm they were the only group of engineers that really used CAD to any serious extent. All of the mechanical, electrical, and structural guys would generally just make a rough sketch and then tell the CAD techs what they wanted. Its the CAD techs who pulled the heavy load in CAD.</p>
<p>However, the civil guys were different because they fiddled with the elevations and such. One of the projects I helped work on was resizing the various ponds in a tank field for all of the runoff that would occur. It was the civil guys who did that.</p>
<p>and P.S.- CAD is FREE for students. That how I got it. I don’t use it much because its not required for me but I like playing with it since I took classes in HS.<br>
[Autodesk</a> Education Community](<a href=“Autodesk Education Community Resources | Autodesk”>http://students.autodesk.com/)</p>
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<p>True, CAD isn’t part of the Civil curriculum at UCLA. Even for Mechanicals, there is only one required course, and they don’t teach you how to use the programs since the course is only 10 weeks long. You basically are given an assignment and you learn by trial and error. I guess those who aren’t good with these programs are left in the dust and end up “sucking” at CAD.</p>
<p>I think the best curriculum would include a freshmen CAD course to teach the basic 3-D functions (Solidworks, Autocad), followed by an expansion of advance techniques and teaching of additional programs during sophomore year (Revit, Nastram).</p>
<p>Do UCLA students even learn the basics of drafting by hand?</p>
<p>@ken
No, we don’t. Though it just occurred to me that out of curiosity I could investigate the arch. curriculum. Maybe they do some CAD-ish work. Architecture happens to be very small here. (never met a single architecture major here…)</p>
<p>lol. Ken, I bet you’re starting to think that UCLA is on Mars. ;-)</p>
<p>I emailed the professor of the one CAD class that MechE majors take, and he says the course uses Autodesk Inventor. But seriously, Inventor??? I believe a previous poster mentioned that Inventor is “Autodesk’s mostly failed attempt at 3D.”</p>
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<p>Yep. As for myself, I’m using mycadsite.com. An older student at ucla recommended it to me, and the site is surprisingly good–perhaps a little more geared towards architects, but still very good and thorough.</p>