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.
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- posted 06/06/07 by Daniel Philbrick Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets
- There is a new document supplement called "Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets" available at this location:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8777904#section8
This document presents detailed advice on how to configure AutoCAD Civil 3D and your drawing templates for greatest efficiency in large projects, and also how to most effectively manage the project data.
There is also a section in the document on enabling the "3 GB Switch". By default, the Windows operating system limits the amount of physical memory available to applications to 2 GB. It reserves the remaining memory for the operating system itself. However, if you have more than 3 GB of physical memory, it is possible to increase the amount of memory available to Civil 3D to 3 GB.
The following link takes you to a detailed solution on how to enable the 3 GB Switch:
http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1071001
We have done some prelimary testing of our large benchmarking datasets and we have found improvements by using this option.
To complement the sections of data managment, there’s an updated version of the Civil 3D 2008 Project Management Using Autodesk Vault white paper available here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8777438
The Best Practices for Working with Large Datasets paper was written by member of the Civil 3D Project Team. On behalf of the Civil Development team, we hope that you find this material useful.
Dan
User Comments
Excellent stuff Dan.
I'll add two more tips, based on my experience.
- If you have to display contours for a large surface then turn off the smoothing option as it requires more processing time and memory to generate.
- For long alignments, try to set the locations of all of the PI's and fixed objects before adding floating or free curves between them. Editing an alignment forces the software to recalculate stationing for all of the downstream entities so the fewer the better. Alignment edits also force dynamic profiles to update so consider deleting any that aren't required for design, and recreating them later.
Posted 6/7/2007 2:46 PM by Steve Boon
Steve,
Great points. We should have put the smoothing option tip in the paper - missed that one. Good suggestion on the alignments.
Dan
Posted 6/8/2007 2:03 PM by Daniel Philbrick