The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show
Dan Philbrick and Dave Simeone add their colorful and insightful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Civil 3D and the civil engineering marketplace.
About Daniel About DaveLatest Post
- posted 10/28/06 by Daniel Philbrick Service Pack 3 - Performance Improvements
- We are right around the corner from releasing Autodesk Civil 3D SP3. This service pack fixes over 100 defects and integrates in the AutoCAD and Autodesk Map 3D Service Packs. There are also several performance improvements which you will definitely notice. I want to provide some additional detail on these performance improvements.
Vault/Data Reference
If you are working with Vault, or with Data References, we were able to optimize the memory usage when creating surface references in projects which have multiple surfaces. I obtained a subdivision project from a customer and this improvement resulted in a reduction of 400 Meg when creating a surface reference! The results will of course vary, but it is safe to say you will see an improvement if you have more than one surface in the project. Secondly, the amount of time required to create the reference has been dramatically improved. For the same customer project, I found that it was taking 100 seconds to create a surface reference, and with SP3 it is down to a blazing 2 seconds.
Surface from Contours
We have also made an optimization when adding contour data to a surface. You will notice this if you are adding a large number of contours to the surface and rebuilding the surface. I have a good test surface that adds about 10K contour lines, resulting in a surface that contains about 800K TIN points. For this surface, there is a reduction of about 380 Meg on the build and rebuild. Results will vary, but you will see improvements when adding contour data to your surface.
Contour Labeling
Another user reported that the contour labeling performance was impacting the Plans Production phase of their project. We were able to optimize the algorithms for label placement and we have found about a 5X improvement in drawing regen speed. This will be very noticeable if you are creating viewports and xref’ing or Data referencing a surface with labels.
Corridor Rebuild
Lastly, the Corridor rebuild time has been improved by about 50%. We have conducted a short beta program for SP3 and here are a few comments regarding this improvement:
I'll just say that from my testing that is actually being conservative. I had a corridor that took about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to rebuild and after SP3 was installed it took less than 30 seconds.
Thanks for the Corridor build speed increase. It's very noticeable.Wow that is a huge improvement. But this completely ruins my coffee breaks while rebuilding corridors.
I immediately noticed a performance increase right off the bat in launching the application, opening drawings, and just using general features. Both Corridor and Surface performance is much better.
Dave and I will provide more detail about the Service Pack at the November 3rd webcast.
Dan
User Comments
That's not just Marketing B.S. either, it really is much beter.
Quote from by best end user, after his first test drive" WOW..................wow."
Posted 10/29/2006 11:28 AM by John Postlewait
If this reference improvement really works you may have prevented premature baldness and heartattacks in this office.
Posted 10/31/2006 5:52 PM by Dieter Delloch