In Active Development

Survey Tools for
AutoCAD and Civil 3D

R3Survey Acad and R3Survey C3D are two add-ins developed in-house at Mitchell Land Surveyors — built to streamline the cadastral calculations, traverses, drafting and field data workflows we deal with every day.

C# C++ AutoCAD API LandXML Civil 3D
R3Survey properties panel
The Tool

What the Tools Do

R3Survey started as a set of AutoCAD tools to handle the repetitive parts of cadastral and boundary survey drafting — entering traverse data, managing survey-specific layers, importing LandXML from field instruments, and running standard survey calculations.

It's used in-house on real jobs at Mitchell Land Surveyors, which means it gets tested against actual surveying problems rather than hypothetical ones. Development is ongoing — new features are added as practical needs arise.

Both add-ins are written in C# as compiled .NET applications — not AutoLISP routines. This gives access to the full AutoCAD and Civil 3D APIs and the performance and reliability that comes with a proper compiled add-in.

R3Survey C3D is a companion Civil 3D add-in in active development, focused on feature coding, surface modelling and DTM creation.

Core Feature

Smart Strings

A rule-based survey stringing engine that goes well beyond joining points into lines. Smart Strings evaluates field codes and point attributes, applies user-defined rules, and executes a wide range of drawing actions automatically — polylines, circles, symbols and blocks, offsets, dynamic blocks, conditional layer assignment, text labels and more. Works in both AutoCAD and Civil 3D using the same plain-text configuration files. In production use at Mitchell Land Surveyors, Smart Strings has significantly reduced drafting time and errors on every survey job.

Other Features

  • Traverse Entry — efficient entry of bearings and distances including arcs, with support for metres, feet & inches, links and more
  • LandXML / ePlan — import and export survey plans in LandXML format; export in the NSW ePlan format for digital plan lodgement with NSW Land Registry Services
  • HexagonXML (Leica Instruments) — import and export survey data in HexagonXML format; export set-out data for direct import into Leica total stations, with full control over feature naming on the instrument — meaningful identifiers in the field, not generic codes
  • Drafting Tools — commands to efficiently draft survey plans; quick text from field data, auto-generation of plan elements and hundreds of small workflow tools developed over years of production drafting
  • Survey Data Auditing — tools for reviewing and validating survey data
  • Survey Plan Tools — custom tools for cadastral plan production
Open Development

View the Work on GitHub

Some of the development work is publicly visible on GitHub — including portfolio projects, tooling and related code. It's not common for a surveying practice to also have a public code presence, but the work is real and the repository is there if you want to look.

Mitchell Land Surveyors — GitHub

github.com/SteveJ71

Public repositories · Surveying tools · AutoCAD development
Custom Software

Custom Development

We occasionally take on custom software development for other surveying and engineering practices. If you have a specific workflow problem in AutoCAD or Civil 3D, or need tooling around LandXML data, get in touch and we can discuss whether it's something we can help with.

  • AutoCAD & Civil 3D add-in development
  • LandXML processing & validation tools
  • Survey data tools in C, C#, C++ or Python
  • Surveying & engineering data automation
Discuss a Project