Another Civil 3D site? Why?
This may sound controversial, but Civil 3D is not designed to put civil engineers first. That’s why it is very powerful and yet completely unintuitive. Beginners are put off by the out-of-place UI elements, irrelevant buttons at prominent places, and confusing naming detached from the actual use. That Civil 3D is built on top of AutoCAD and not from ground up adds to the confusion. Even for veteran users, gotchas and mines are everywhere.
Who are you?
My name is Ngu Soon Hui. I’m the owner of this site. You might know me as the Benevolent Dictator for Life for MiTS software. I build MiTS software, and also the corresponding MCIntegrator, that synchronizes the data from MiTS to Civil 3D, and vice versa.
I’m also an Advisor at Autodesk forum ( whatever that means)
My background in civil engineering is as unorthodox as it can get– not many people write civil engineering software for a living. But it’s precisely my strength here.
Coming from this nontraditional background, I feel that I need to definitely appreciate the design of Civil 3D viscerally. The way that Civil 3D is designed is precisely how I would have designed such an immensely complicated software that supports so many use case for so many users that spans so many years and so many technological cycle.
Civil 3D UI layout simply doesn’t make sense unless you view it as an evolving programming platform that has its genesis in the AutoCAD system.
What do you hope to accomplish?
It is my hope that by sharing my Civil 3D knowledge I could save someone from banging his head against the wall when trying to figure Civil 3D out. Been there, done that, the world can use one less hapless guy.
To differentiate this website from the others, I’m not contended with merely teaching you how to accomplish a task, I want to give you deeper understanding of the software– why something is named in this way, why you have to do this step before the next, and what is the philosophy of the Civil 3D Product Manager.
The readers must judge whether I succeed in this lofty target.
And of course, preserving knowledge is important: my hope is that this website will serve as a backup– however inadequate– against Autodesk random policies in deleting useful Civil 3D forum posts.
What do I get by visiting this website?
Chances are you stumbled upon this website via Google Search ( or ChatGPT), I hope that our documentations will enhance your understanding on the Civil 3D, in addition for you to get Civil 3D to do what you want to do.
We also have NEW, exciting products coming, so stay tune!
One final thing: On LLM and Generative AI
I can assure you that all the texts are fully written by human and not simply generated by LLM such as ChatGPT ( I can smell the soulless, bland LLM texts from a thousand miles away, so don’t even try them on me). All the software screenshots are captured and curated by human as well. There are some filler arts that are LLM generated, but they are not integral to the understanding of the texts.