Improve Civil 3D large surface performance using the Map Display Manager

hi everybody just a brief video today to look at a strategy to help us improve our productivity when we're working with large surfaces and the way that we're gonna do that is through a concept that's called Maps tiles will actually take our surface and represent some of the contours and things that my bogged down civil3d using some of the FTO tools that are in map so let me show you how that that's gonna work what I've got is the surface displayed on the screen right now with a number of contours this isn't necessarily a relatively large surface it's big enough for our purposes here but this would be something that we would do on a surface that might represent an entire county or maybe a couple of counties where once we start showing contours even with the level of detail on our performance degrades because of the physical number of entities that just need to be displayed when representing that surface so what we're gonna do to start is I'm gonna select my surface and right-click and we'll change the surface properties so that it's only being represented by the border only and when I do that it significantly increases performance and you'll notice if I hover over the surface it still knows it's a surface it'll still work like a surface I can still see tooltips with respect to elevation but the place that I'm challenged now is it's kind of hard to work with because I don't get much of the detail with respect contours to see you know how the terrain you know is graded and and what what's exactly happening in in different spots so the way that I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna take those entities and I'm going to manage them instead in map using FDO where will a manage that information substantially faster than what civil3d is able to so to do that the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna make a copy of this surface that I can leverage in map so I'm going to come down to my surfaces here under existing ground I'm gonna right click on that and I'm gonna export it to de m2 a digital elevation model and what we'll do is we'll give it a name well it's very important we'll set it to geo TIFF we've got two options TIFF or de em because I've got a projection established with this particular project TIFF is going to be the that we're gonna go so we're gonna set this to just eg for existing ground and we'll put it in my Tuesday folder and we're gonna come down and I'm gonna set a grid spacing to every 10 feet it's gonna make a 10-foot grid across the entire surface once again you know theoretically that would degrade perhaps the contours that are splayed but once again remember that our surface if we use it for any aspect in civil3d is still going to leverage the surface this is just the visual representation that assists us in knowing you know exactly what's going on on the surface so I'm gonna do a grid spacing of 10 feet if it was larger surface maybe I go 50 or 100 whatever would make sense for the size of the surface I was working with so we'll go ahead and click on OK it builds my surface representation for me then what I'm going to do is we'll turn around and we'll bring that directly in the map so we'll come down and we'll launch the task pane turn that on and then I'm gonna connect to that data so we'll go from the display manager connect to data we will use a raster connection and then I'm gonna have the system go out and connect into my Tuesday folder to the eg geo TIFF that we made I'll say open and then connect and if I had multiple ones I wanted to combine those into a single layer that'd be fine I would check that box here I've just got one don't necessarily need to do anything with respect to the coordinates it tells me that my a coordinate system I'm working with is Illinois nad83 e so and US feet it says it's unknown but it's that's the system that I was in so it knows where it's at we'll go ahead we'll add that to my map it brings it in and it's displayed and it's it's a solid green all right so I can see surface I can kind of see some elevational information by the shading I'd like to see it a little bit more clearly and what I can do is I can apply some map Styles now to the components that make up my task pane so we'll go ahead I'll double click on this to change the style will come in the theme now is just from a light green to a dark green I'll click on the down arrow here we'll go to theme and then I'm going to assign a pallet to this particular surface representation and we'll assign that pallet a USGS de M pallet you could experiment with the other ones but this one looks pretty good for for surface terrain so we'll click on OK I'll apply that and when we close our dialog I can now see as i zoom in information about the surface as we pan around I hover over I can still read an elevation remember that's once again being pulled directly from the surface model however the the colored areas from the theme that was established or assigned to this particular surface representation are giving me more visual detail as far as what's actually going on with the surface all right now this can help in many cases we can use this as an exhibit this works great some folks would you know hey that's alright but I'd like to see some contours I can I can build some contours from this as well I would just come over to my surface here right click and there is an option that I can create contour layer once I create that I'll establish some parameters for that I think when I built it before we did was one in five foot so I'll do one in five feet so we'll set my units here I'm gonna check the box which will automatically label the elevations for me I can tell it how to display the contours within my model as well as I can save these to a file and in this case it'll be an SDF file we'll put in contours save that into my Tuesday folder as well and we'll click OK and it automatically displays my contours for me all right if I want to see contours maybe not the Hill shading or the the theme I'll go ahead and check the box that'll disappear if I'd like to adjust the the theme on these contours we'll look at this in just a moment we can improve how those are displayed one thing that is kind of nice doing this in map as I moved around you can kind of see the the annotations moving around with it so it will maintain annotation for every fifth contour wherever I'm at so that those continually show up for us on the screen all right so once again I can throw this contour representation around far more productively far faster than I can with representing the contours on the surface itself all right now folks are probably familiar with level of detail you know if I work with this approach to dealing with a large surface am I you know can I still do something with level of detail because maybe if I'm this far out I don't need all of that contour information I'd like maybe some of that to be suppressed to make it a little easier to see and the answer to that is yes what I'll do is I'll come over to my contour layer here and I'll double pick on that and we see that my scale range up here that I have set from zero to infinity this is what the display of my contours are so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take and add a new range and we'll say from zero to we'll say five thousand and we can come back and tweak these numbers to whatever works so I'm going to go with five thousand for right now so from zero to five thousand I would see both levels of contours from five thousand to infinity then I would maybe only want to see the the highlighted ones so well oops we'll go ahead and highlight this guy and we'll pull him out and then maybe I'll double click on this style will drag the style down here maybe give it a we'll leave it as solid width of let's say one we'll see what that actually here's we're all set my set my width will set my width to zero so that it's thinner we'll set this back to four so it's a continuous line all right so we can tweak some of these values with respect to how that should be displayed color just so we can see the color change for us on the screen maybe let's make that a brighter orange we'll apply that and we'll close out of the style so you'll see now that if we're at this level we have this level of detail on our contours and as we zoom in as we reach a particular point we get additional ones all right so it'll function very similar to level of detail on the setting that we have for our contour objects within civil3d we can create something similar in this environment and we actually have tons more flexibility because we could create three levels of visibility we could create four levels of visibility maybe have a certain level I don't want it to display at all maybe at another level I won't want to display different colors different contours different widths different annotation you know tons of flexibility with that so once again just wanted to show this to you as an approach to maybe improve our performance when working with large surfaces because the contour objects that are associated with the surface itself carrying those around even with level of detail can put a strain on our system resources if instead we convert our surface display to a boundary or in this case maybe we could even shut the boundary line off as well and instead represent the those things that consume a lot of resources using the FDO tools within map and applying a style to control layer display will can be a strategy to help us improve their performance so anyway I hope this helps and I look forward to talking again soon see ya you

Channel: Jerry Bartels

Views: 29,726

Keywords: akn_include, bartels, tutorial, education, training, free, Civil 3D, map 3d, Autodesk, Large surface, performance, How to, tip, trick

Id: 1OSkdEqHcA8

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2016