Creating Projects Civilly with Vault

Today’s post covers best practices with the use of Autodesk Civil 3D with Vault Collaboration.

So, you may have been told that you must create a Vault project for Civil 3D inside of Civil 3D. This is because Civil 3D also creates the project files the Vault needs to share objects such as points, surfaces and alignments. This has limited project managers in the past who wish to use the Vault client when creating a new project. While an initial project creation is required, you will see that it can be used from then on to create new Civil 3D projects. Let’s take a look…

First a project folder structure needs to be created using windows explorer. Your company may already have a template in place so that can be used if wished. You may also include documents such as word documents, spreadsheets, images or whatever else is standard when starting a new project.

Next you will have to create a one-time project inside of Civil 3D in order to populate the project files that are required for Civil 3D specific projects. To do this, log into Vault inside Civil 3D and create a new project. The key is to select the “Use project template” box and browse to the folder that houses the template folders.

What is created is a blank project folder structure with the auxiliary files Civil 3D requires for future project creation.

Now that the template folder has been created, move it to folder on your network where it can be accessed by the appropriate managers. You can now make a copy of that folder any time a new project starts and rename the folder to the new project number.

Once renamed simply drag and drop that new folder into the Vault Collaboration client and presto! You have a new project.

One final step to complete the trick. Inside of Civil 3D the user must right click on projects and choose the “Select Projects to Display” option. Once the dialog box opens check the box next to the new project and enjoy!

Special thanks to Adam Peter for the technical details in this post.