Making grading faster

[bbostic]

I am making pits to borrow material from using a feature line and the grading tool. I have two surfaces a bottom and the existing ground. I have ran a volume analysis and know what my cut value should be. I have a crop line that represents where my bottom surface daylights to the exsisting ground. I am working with big areas my one feature line is 152.5 Acres in area. I am running secnarios in which I add a parcel of land to my sequence increasing my area. I am designing cut pits at a 0.5:1 from my feature line to the bottom surface using exsisting ground as my volume base surface. I need to speed up the grading process, I need to be accurate but no as much as the default settings. How can I adjust TIN size or make the process faster.

[Joe-Bouza]

There are tools to simplify a surface but THIS MAY HELP

[Neilw_05]

No doubt your performance problem is due to having too many elevation points on your grading footprint. I presume you are draping your footprint on the existing ground surface and then grading down to your target. When you drape a featureline it acquires an elevation point at every triangle it crosses. C3D is very slow at processing featurlines with lots of elevation points. As implied in Joe's link, you might want to sacrifice some of your volume accuracy to improve performance by weeding some of those elevation points from the featurelines, OR, as Joe implied, simplify the existing ground surface before draping the featurelines on it, OR by applying both techniques.