Topic: more resources to Civil3D

[drizzt]

I am working on this file that takes forever to do any grading, or to edit the feature lines. The project is huge with massive surface data (lots of very steep slopes etc.)

I was watching my cpu and memory performance and noticed that Civil3D never uses more than 13% of the CPU and 33% of the ram. Is there a way to bump this up?

[mjfarrell]

you may want to try these grading exercises as 'corridors'

it's more powerfull than the grading feature IMO

[drizzt]

I was thinking of trying that. Once I create an assembly, run a corridor, can I udate the assembly to add a ditches etc.?

I guess I could just create another assembly, and change the assembly in the corridor properties once I get to that part of the design?.

[mjfarrell]

yes I do it all the time..

also take advantage of this Prime Power Tip:

Any Tool in the palette can become any sub assembly in the assembly
by using a Right click Apply Tool Properties to Sub Assembly function.

and remember sometimes the corridor isn't the solution...

it's a step towards the solution by leveraging alignments and profiles from the corridor,
that can then be quickly edited and targeted to add more finite control for the 'final' corridor solution

[mjfarrell]

for your corridors you would want to explore the Daylight Multi-Intercept given the terrain conditions

[drizzt]

will give it a shot

thanks

[reno]

i don't think the corridors are more powerful, i think they are less powerful, that's why they will give you a quicker solution

as to performance, what are the specs of your machine?

[drizzt]

I have an Intel i7 930 @2.80 GHz (dual) With 8GB of Ram. I have two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards with 4066MB of video memory. All on Window 7 64 bit.

The existing ground surface i am designing to is very steep with a lot of washout draingage. The eg surface itself is around 100MB and I believe this is the problem, not the machine as I can look at the performance and it never uses more than 13% of the CPU and no more than 33% of the RAM. But tell me what you think.

[mjfarrell]

and how is that corridor doing at modeling your design?

[drizzt]

I didn't go back to corridor design yet as I was almost done using feature lines. I figure on the next round of edits, I will go with corridor.

[reno]

I have an Intel i7 930 @2.80 GHz (dual) With 8GB of Ram. I have two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards with 4066MB of video memory. All on Window 7 64 bit.

wow, wanna trade?

[sinc]

I have an Intel i7 930 @2.80 GHz (dual) With 8GB of Ram. I have two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards with 4066MB of video memory. All on Window 7 64 bit.

The existing ground surface i am designing to is very steep with a lot of washout draingage. The eg surface itself is around 100MB and I believe this is the problem, not the machine as I can look at the performance and it never uses more than 13% of the CPU and no more than 33% of the RAM. But tell me what you think.

Are you saying you have a dual-processor system?

Civil 3D is primarily a single-threaded app, and can only use a single core on a single processor for almost all operations.  There are some features in core Autocad that can make some use of your other cores, but they will generally remain idle for the most part.  So the best buy for C3D tends to be to get a CPU with no more than four cores, and the ability to turbo a single core up to a high speed.  Adding more processors doesn't help.

Also, you didn't say what version of Civil 3D you are using, but based on your memory limitations, I'm guessing you're running C3D 2010 or earlier.  C3D 2011 is the first one with a 64-bit version, so you have to be on C3D 2011 to access more than 4GB of memory.  And really, because of fragmentation etc., you typically end up with less than 3GB of usable memory available to C3D if you're using the 32-bit version.

[drizzt]

Sinc,

that sounds about right.