Huge Subdivision work flow

[sfuller]

I have a huge subdivision that we are about to do in civil 3d.  The subdivision has over 1800 lots.  I am wondering what is the best way to go about this.  At the moment we are thinking we have to do the alignments, profiles and corridors all in one design drawing for it all to be dynamic?  If so this file is going to be huge.  Is there a way we can split it up and still keep everything dynamic?

Any thoughts will be appreciated!

C3D 2013 SP1

[Neilw_05]

Look into Data Shortcuts and also Best Practices/Project Management in the help system. You may also want to consider Vault, depending on your team.

If you are not familiar with this workflow I would say you are not ready to take on such a project. You will want to get some training and run a pilot project or two first. Better yet, I recommend you hire a live support service that can work with you through the project. Otherwise you'll likely end up with a disaster.

[sboon]

Does the project have any phase boundaries or do you intend to design and construct the whole thing at once?

Is there offsite design work for major access roads or utilities?

Are there logical boundaries where zoning changes from residential to commercial, or single to multi-family lots?

Any major collector or arterial roads through the site, which may have different design standards than the local roads?

[mathewkol]

Neilw alluded to data shortcuts but he didn't do so forcefully enonugh.  Your project WILL BE UNUSABLE if you attempt to place everything in a single file for a project of that size.  Indeed, if you have never before used data shortcuts or a similar workflow, you may be biting off more than you can chew unless you have a team resource who has, be it internal or an external consultant.

This all depends, of course, on you and your team's skills with the software.

[fcernst]

 "I am wondering what is the best way to go about this"

The best way would be to subcontract that to me, go golfing and collect the checks.

[sfuller]

Thank you all for your responses. We do work with all these components (data shortcuts, profiles, surfaces, corridors, pipe networks  etc) on smaller projects.  We are starting on a smaller subdivision before we start the larger one.

The larger project will be phased and not constructed all at the same time.  There is an aterial street that runs on the interior of the subdivision connecting each phase.

[troma]

I agree that this is a huge project, and needs to be split up.  But I am more interested to hear specific advice on how to do so.

For example, it was mentioned elsewhere recently that you shouldn't split profiles from their alignments, or glitches and hiccups ensue.  Also, to create an intersection, you need to have both profiles in the drawing.  So where do you split?  Do you put all alignments and profiles in one?  Or can you put each street separate, but shortcut the main street into the side streets for intersections?

If you're using pipes, you can put each network in a separate drawing, but I don't think you can split it any finer than that.

[mathewkol]

Good questions.  Youo're correct, creating dynamic ntersections that links profiles together does meand they need to be in the same file, however, you can still use intersections even if the profiles are DREFed, though they won't be linked.  I had a client place all alignments and profiles in the same file which ended up being not ridiculously large, but she created all of the intersections (not for corridors) so the profiles would link.  There were 26 intersections.  Her computer slowed to a crawl.  Even though intersections are not huge objects, they can affect performance hugely.

Imagine, you edit one profile.  It directly affects an intersecting profile, but that second profile intersects another profile at a previous station.  it isn't directly affected, but it recalculates anywaym which affects another profile.  Basically, changing one profile, in her case, caused nearly every other profile to have to be recalculated.  it took 32 seconds for her to edit a PVI!

The file was on her network.  However, she moved the file locally and it took only 2 seconds.  Go figure.

Anyway, I don't have much else to add about this; I have limited experience on these very large subdivisoins.  Just some food for thought.

[sboon]

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The larger project will be phased and not constructed all at the same time.  There is an aterial street that runs on the interior of the subdivision connecting each phase.

---

A project like this one would likely include arterial roads to be designed first, then collector streets branching from those, then finally the local roads and culdesacs.  If you can deal with each road and its intersection with a more major road separately then you have a structure for your drawings.

Start with one drawing for the alignment, profile and corridor of the arterial road.  The corridor regions would have breaks at the proposed side road intersections.  Each of the intersecting collector roads would be in its own drawing, including one (or possibly two) intersections with the major arterial.  Again these corridors would have region breaks where local roads intersect.  The third level would be drawings for local roads which have no other branches.

The only question is how finely you want to divide up the design.  You could have one drawing for each alignment or you could group together several culdesacs and the local road they all branch from in one drawing.

You didn't mention parcels.  Are you planning to include them in Civil3d, or are they being designed elsewhere?

Steve
Please use the Accept as Solution or Kudo buttons when appropriate

[Joe-Bouza]

Surely Lot 1 and lot 1800 don't share a lot, right?

I think you can break it up into smaller divisions that can reference common pieces

[troma]

With regard to intersections and shortcuts, here's an idea I've never tried, but maybe you can give me some feedback on.

You could decide in advance which streets are primary and which are secondary for each intersection.  Set up your primary profiles first, and shortcut them to the secondary street.  In that drawing you can set up your secondary street profile, and use the intersection.  I've never used an intersection on a shortcut Profile, but I'm guessing it's OK so long as it's the primary street, and therefore won't be updated by the intersection.

[sfuller]

The lots are all ready laid out, as just line work.  We will be using parcels.

[sboon]

In that case then you can have a single drawing with all of the parcels or you can break them into separate files at the phase boundaries.

[jmayo-EE]

I strongly recommend phase boundaries as Steve suggests. The workflow from survey to design, build and as-built will flow suit. The smaller files willl also help as mentioned before.

[Anonymous]

Wow 1800 lots that's a lot. Well majority of my projects I work are subdivision and here is what I would do. First try to break this property into phases. I am sure each street is most likely broken up into blocks in your plat. I would create one drawing with blocks A-D and the second drawing E-H and so on. Then definitely using the data shortcuts to bring it all together in your plans. Or maybe you want to corridor the subdivision in one drawing and have al all the lot grading in another drawing. These are just a few ideas. What ever you don't try to create one drawing with your corridor and lot grading. This also depends on how powerful your computer is. 

Tony

CAD Manager

AutoCAD Civil 3D Certified Professional 2013

www.tonycivil3dworld.blogspot.com

[troma]

I'm wondering where my data is.

I had one drawing with 6 streets, 10 alignments, 7 corridors, many profiles, 75 surfaces and 25 sites.  Many feature lines & gradings.  I thought it was getting to be a bit much, so I split it up.

Now I have one drawing with all the alignments, profiles, corridors, corridor surfaces.

Other drawing dreff's the alignments, CL profiles, and corridor surfaces.  Then it has all the sites, feature lines, gradings, surfaces.

Before the split I had one drawing at 107,506 KB.  Now I have two drawings.

Profiles is 98,922 KB.

Gradings is 105,500 KB or so.  (I've added a little to this one since the split.  But I was watching the file size, didn't change much.)

They both x-ref another drawing with linework in it, that one is 2,745 KB.

I have to admit I'm very disappointed.  I was hoping to get both of them close to 50 or 60 MB.  Why are they both so huge?  The total size is now 200 MB, whereas before it was 105 MB.  Does splitting up your data like this really help so much?

I wasn't really having any problems in the drawing before, but the thought of a corruption scared me to split it.  Now I have two files about the same: OK to work in, but take about a minute to save.

[mathewkol]

I suppose it depends on how they were split up.  Tough to say without being there, so to speak.  Definitely don't expect the two drawings to be exactly half, but they should be a little smaller than what you have.

Still, the 50 or 60 megs you were hoping for is still very large; too large in my books.  I've seen very large projects which enjoy drawing files no larger than 20 megs, done through careful planning from the start of the project.  Taking a drawing and splitting it afterward can yield strange results, as you are seeing.

Maybe purge/recover etc would help at this point.  Are you certain there are not duplicate objects in the two files; meaning, when you split the file into two, did you erase the corresponding objects from the "other" file?

[troma]

I had done purge & audit, just did a recover too.  No significant change to the drawing size.  Grading is now 135 MB, Profiles is 96 MB.

The profiles drawing has no feature lines, no sites in it at all.  (They were deleted out.)  This drawing has corridors, corridor surfaces and the OG surface.  No other surfaces (they were deleted out.)

The grading drawing has only one native alignment & profile.  All the others are shortcut in.  Corridor surfaces are shortcut in. (They were deleted out, then shortcut in from the profiles drawing.)

I guess I can live with it as 'one of those things', but if you have any suggestions they'd be welcome!

[Joe-Bouza]

I too have had a balloning file way out of proportion to the scope of the drawing. It was up to 300 MB. Put in an SR and was given this suggestion and the file size went down to 13MB:

If your drawing increases its size even when you remove data tells us that something is wrong with it. I have seen similar report and all of them were resolved by recovering file. Let's start from here and see if it helps:

1. Open your drawing with RECOVER and detach XREF's (if any).
2. Select Entire drawing and location where you would like this Block to be placed (desktop)
3. Create new drawing
4. Create new drawing from your template
5. While having both drawings open (your DWT and a new file) set new drawing as current and type DC in command line
6. This will bring Design Center where you can insert your layout tabs from
7. In Design Center go to Open Drawings tab, select layouts and insert them into your new drawing (drag and drop, one by one or all at the same time)
8. Type INSERT in command line to import Block you created in step 2 and explode it while inserting it at 0,0,0 coordinate
9. Run AUDIT, -PURGE (R option), PURGE (All) and SAVES to make sure the drawing is clean.
10. Save this drawing over your corrupted drawing with the same name

[troma]

Thanks Joe.

Any report on how this affects data shortcuts in & out, or feature line labels, alignment reference labels, or gradings?