GeoDin® and GeoDin® Ground: where each fits

GeoDin® Ground is intentionally scoped. It handles ground visualisation and interaction inside Civil 3D — nothing more. The rest of the geotechnical workflow stays in GeoDin®, where the reporting engine, templates, scripting surface, and data-entry UI live.

Knowing where the boundary sits helps you answer the question "which tool do I use for this?" quickly.

A simple rule of thumb

• Use GeoDin® for anything that touches the geotechnical record itself.

• Use GeoDin® Ground for anything that combines that record with a Civil 3D design.

What stays in GeoDin®

The following are not exposed inside the Civil 3D plug-in:

• Report generation — borehole logs, cross-section reports, and bulk PDF output. The reporting engine and templates live in GeoDin®.

• Standards-compliant geological hatching — GeoDin® supports 11 international hatching standards. Inside Civil 3D, soil units are communicated through Civil 3D layer colours only. For report-quality, standards-compliant hatching, produce the cross-section in GeoDin®.

• Python scripting — the scripting surface available in GeoDin® is not available inside GeoDin® Ground.

• Data entry and editing of the underlying records — add, edit, or reorganise boreholes, samples, and test results in GeoDin®. Changes made in Civil 3D to drawn boreholes or solids stay in the drawing and do not propagate back to the database.

What stays in GeoDin® Ground

• Connecting the Civil 3D drawing to a GeoDin® database.

• Drawing boreholes as 3D sticks with metadata and layer annotations.

• Interpolating surfaces and 3D solids between boreholes.

• Creating virtual logs to refine the ground model.

• Opening attached borehole documents from Civil 3D.

• Handing the combined design + ground model off to BIM via IFC 4.3 (see BIM handoff).

Why the boundary is drawn here

Two reasons:

1. Data integrity. Civil 3D drawings are easy to change by accident. Treating the GeoDin® database as read-only from the Civil 3D side protects the geotechnical record from unintended edits.

2. Avoiding duplication. Civil 3D already has strong tools for editing surfaces, computing volumes, running alignments, and generating sections. GeoDin® Ground deliberately does not duplicate them — instead, the ground model is exposed as native Civil 3D objects, so Civil 3D's own tools work on them out of the box.

Frequently asked "where does this happen?"

Task	Where
Add a new borehole to the record	GeoDin®
Correct a typo in a borehole name	GeoDin® (then reload in Civil 3D)
Draw a standards-compliant borehole log	GeoDin®
Draw a legal-quality cross-section with hatching	GeoDin®
Model the ground under a Civil 3D design	GeoDin® Ground
Compute volumes of each soil unit under a road corridor	GeoDin® Ground + Civil 3D tools
Run a Python script against the geotechnical record	GeoDin®
Push a borehole to ArcGIS Online	ArcGIS for AutoCAD, alongside GeoDin® Ground (see ArcGIS integration)