Folks are always looking for strategies and best practices on how best to work with large surfaces in Civil 3D.
In today’s “Tool for Tuesday” we will explore one of these strategies… Cropped Surfaces
The situation…
You have a large Existing Ground surface and would like to use it in other models but do not want to have to carry around the entire surface. Instead, you would like the ability to leverage only the portion of the existing ground surface in your model that is relevant to the area where you (or someone else) are working.
The solution…
Create a cropped surface from the Existing Ground surface. Essentially, creating a cropped surface copies a subset (sub surface) of your larger surface into a separate .DWG file. This smaller surface can then be used like any other surface. Performance is improved as well as file size reduced because you are only working with the portion of the larger surface.
The best part is that the sub surface isn’t just a copy of a piece of the larger surface. Instead, it remains linked to the larger surface via. a surface snapshot. In short, if the large surface is updated, the sub surface can be updated to reflect any changes made to the larger surface.
Watch the brief video below to see how it works.
-Jerry
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