Tool for Tuesday: “Map Display Manager”

Today’s post is all about improving Civil 3D performance, specifically around working with large Surface objects. 

If you are required to work on projects containing large Civil 3D surfaces, I’m certain you have several strategies of your own.  :)  

One of my favorite strategies is to offload some of the surface object entity display (contours) to Map 3D’s FDO tools as they can process the information far more efficiently than Civil 3D.

Let me explain….

I once worked on a large project that contained surface objects representing 2 counties.  Whether I used the surface “level of display” setting or not, my Civil 3D performance suffered because of the sheer number of contours that needed to be displayed.  I noticed that I could substantially improve performance by setting my surface(s) style to display “Border Only” however, the surface became difficult to work with because it was now essentially invisible.  As a result, I was forced to get creative with Surface Styles, Surface definitions, Surface sizes and/or some other black magic I could come up with to do my work.

One day I used Map 3D’s FDO functionality to display a .SHP file containing 165,000 parcel objects.  To my surprise, it was able to display the information in a couple of seconds.  Being very impressed with the performance, I wondered if it were possible to achieve a similar level of performance using the same tools to display my surface contour information.  Long story short, Yes, it works! 

It involves a little creativity and several of the tools contained in the “Map Display Manager” tab of the Map Taskpane within Civil 3D.

Check out the video below to see how it works.

-Jerry

 

Comments

[Randy]

Thanks very much!