Meridian Architects and Engineers (http://www.meridianengineers.com/)  is a small firm in Milton, DE that does surveying and land development engineering.  Though they may not have a giantic staff, they do HUGE amounts of quality work in our booming county (home of Lewes, Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach) and there is much more on the horizon.  There is just a ton of work to be done, and qualified staff is hard to find. They knew they needed to start leveraging the power of Civil 3D if they were going to stay on top.

Click more to read more about Meridian and see some more of their portfolio

I began working with Meridian almost a year ago.  Meridian has an eager crew of CAD savvy designers who wanted to tackle Civil 3D to complete the piping portion of a project in progress. 

I made them some baseline templates and we dug into the pipes, then slowly began other pilot projects. 

The road was rocky at first (and that piping project sometimes seems as if it will be around forever), but over the past few months lightbulbs have been going on left, right and center at Meridian- and I felt it was about time we showed off some of the great things that we have done together- and the great things they have done on their own.

The screen captures in this post consist of 100% Civil 3D objects.  Not one single piece of dtext or mtext, not one line, arc, or circle.  These are label styles, parcels, pipes, structures, corridors and surfaces.  So YES.  It can be done. (That isn’t to say that there is never a line drawn, but you can really, truly end a great deal of manual drafting)

Also note that the 3D shots here are were not specially prepared or rendered. 

 All I did was rotate the drawing into 3D and start taking captures.  3D visuals are a side effect of a well modeled project- you are building this model whether you know it or not.

For more images of Meridian’s work (and my work as well), visit my Flickr album: Meridian Portfolio on Flickr

I’ve created a set in my Flickr portfolio with even more screen captures of Meridian’s work.  I will add to the set as their projects grow, so be sure to subscribe to my photostream feed at Dana’s Portfolio Feed to get new captures delivered to you as they are posted.