What’s New in Civil 3D 2025

 Autodesk recently released Civil 3D 2025 and spent a lot of effort on performance improvements. This, from their blog on Civil 3D 2025 gives more detail on what performance increases you can expect:

Civil 3D has long been the design tool of choice for civil engineers. But complex projects with large design files can still take a lot of time to open, edit, and save. We have been working to make Civil 3D faster so that you can deliver your projects on time and within budget, especially for common and routine functions.

Workflows such as regenerating corridor models and editing pipe networks will take less time to process. Some processes that once took almost a minute, now execute in under 10 seconds. Working with surface files has also been significantly improved. The bottom line is you will notice a substantial boost in performance.

Autodesk – What’s New in Civil 3D, InfraWorks, and ReCap Pro 2025

Additionally, Autodesk has added other features that have been requested by users and integrate Esri ArcGIS features. You can read about them in more detail below.

New Features in Civil 3D 2025

MMS file saving

Any time a large DWG surface file is created in a Civil 3D project, an MMS file is also created. MMS files can get very large. In some cases, these files can be several gigabytes in size. In the past, the MMS file was saved anytime the surface DWG file was opened and closed—even if no surface changes were made. This took additional time and processing power unnecessarily. Now, MMS files are only saved when the surface is modified. This one change will reduce Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) file processing time dramatically.

Coordinate System Modernization

Civil 3D 2025 features an improved, more intuitive UI to help civil engineers set up coordinate systems quickly and efficiently. The new version allows users to set NAVD 88 vertical datum and import customer-requested coordinate systems. Autodesk also expanded the database of available coordinate systems.

Streamlined Multi-Baseline Corridor Setup

With this improvement, designers don’t have to wade through the “pick and click” process when setting up a corridor model that has multiple baselines. With a single click, they can now set up these elements in one go. The UI has also been significantly updated to facilitate this time-saving update.

Esri ArcGIS®️ basemaps

Autodesk expanded their partnership with Esri to include new integrations in the Civil 2025 release. To help designers and engineers visualize terrain, streets, and structures, they’ve added five Esri basemaps to the Civil 3D ribbon under the Geolocation tab:

• Open streets
• Esri streets
• High-resolution satellite and aerial imagery
• Light and dark grey monochrome maps

The full release notes for Civil 3D 2025 can be viewed here: Civil 3D 2025 Release Notes. Below, I will summarize the other features added.

New in Surface Workflows

This version added the ability to reduce the surface level of detail to improve performance when working in drawings with large surfaces. There are contextual commands in the Prospector tree, In canvas, the ribbon, and command line commands.

New in Corridor Workflows

Improved performance and efficiency in:

• Corridor property dialog box enhancements
• Other corridor property and parameter dialog boxes
• Corridor surface creation
• Corridor updates to rebuild affected corridor sections commands
• Corridor regeneration efficiency improvements

New in Dynamo for Civil 3D

• Package Manager
• Search for nodes by category
• More readable Watch node text
• Gate node and Remember node in the Dynamo library
• Workspace geometry scaling range message
• Object Binding update

API Enhancements

• Support for the .NET 8.0 framework
• Added .NET API support for the surface level of detail feature