Surface integration

[perry]

Folks

Hopefully you can steer me in the right direction.

I’ve been working on and off on a subdivision as shown in the attached screen capture.  When we first started it we had the terrain outlined in blue digitized and imported into the drawing as a surface.  The red area was then designed (alignment, profile, pipe network).  Very soon we will have to expand the designed area to now get into the green area.

We now have the entire area as one very large terrain (contours, points, etc) which includes both green and blue areas as one file.

My question is what is the best way to get the new terrain included in to the overall model, without buggering up the old design.  Pasting both surfaces into a new model could work for any new design, but the old initial surface would have to be kept in order for the original design to work.  I don’t think the client would be too happy if I had to redo all the original bits as well.  Since all other additional design is linked to this initial phase, I have to keep it as a functional set of data.

Would a completely new drawing be the best bet with data shortcuts importing the data from the original phase drawing?

There’s probably a number of options, but I hope to narrow it down to the best and cleanest way to do it.  Right now this existing drawing is a pig and is very slow to regen.  It was my first run at C3D (way too big a project to start with-I know) and I made the mistake of putting EVERYTHING in the one drawing – points, terrain, alignment, profile, pipes, labels.  Now I’m stuck with that, at least for the first phase.

The drawing is in C3D 2012 and we won't be upgrading it to 2013.

Thanks in advance.

[ToddRogers-WPM]

Data shortcuts would be the best practice in your case.

[brian.strandberg]

I love taking projects like this and breaking it into smaller drawings, then sharing between them with data shortcuts.  It has a ton of advantages including smaller, quicker drawings and I can have more than one person working on the project at once.  Having the entire project in one Civil 3d file is just asking for a crash-happy slow drawing.

An over-all existing ground is fine by me, but I would have it in a separate file, and data shortcutted into whatever drawing you need it.  

I recomend reading the AutoCAD Civil 3d Best Practices Guide in the help.