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displaying contours takes a long time............

23 REPLIES 23
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Message 1 of 24
rcdrafting1
13782 Views, 23 Replies

displaying contours takes a long time............

It seems to happen randomly and I can't tell what triggers it. Everytime I regen or autosave/save the status shows "displaying contours" and a load bar that takes way too long and slows me down... very frustrating and would appreciate any help regarding this problem! Thanks

 

Rob

23 REPLIES 23
Message 2 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: rcdrafting1

BTW:

 

I have:

Civil 3d 2011

Windows 7 64bit

 

Message 3 of 24
envirocad
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Is your contour interval too small ? That will slow things down.

Civil 3D 2011
Windows 7 64bit
12GB RAM
Message 4 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: envirocad

it's at a typical 1' interval. I've had contours at 0.4' intervals and it didn't have this problem. I can be working in the drawing and everything is fine and then out of left field it will start doing this to me. Thanks for the input!

Message 5 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Sooo, I changed the surface label view to "false" so it wouldn't show my minor and major contour labels and now it's lightning fast again...

Message 6 of 24
sjg
Advisor
in reply to: rcdrafting1

I've found it easier to create a "No Show" style so everything is turned off, this makes it quicker than changing visibility from true to false each time you don't want to see the surface.

Steve Goessling
Land Consultants
Civil3D 2015
Windows 7, 64 bit
Intel i7 2600 @ 3.40Ghz
16 GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro 600
Message 7 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Thanks for the advice. That's what I ended up doing and I still haven't figured out how to find the labels I turned to false since I had the label line turned off also... Smiley Sad any ideas how I can relocate those labels so I can change their styles. Thanks!

Message 8 of 24
sjg
Advisor
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Yeah, go to your Toolspace, Settings Tab, hit the plus next to Surface, then hit plus next to Surface Styles and Label Styles.  You will notice this lists all the styles in this drawing.  Here you can select one, right click and then click on Edit.  Just find the ones you changed to false.

 

Hopefully this helps.

Steve Goessling
Land Consultants
Civil3D 2015
Windows 7, 64 bit
Intel i7 2600 @ 3.40Ghz
16 GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro 600
Message 9 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: rcdrafting1

I think I'm SOL. I manually changed the label lines to false, instead of changing their style views to false (hind-sights 20/20). Their styles are still set to true. Thanks for the help, those labels will just have to be space junk floating around in my drawing.

Message 10 of 24
Jeff_M
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Use QuickSelect, Choose to only select Object Type: Surface Contour Label Group, for the Operator select Choose All. This will then select all of the ContourLabelLines which you can then change the Label Style visibility in the Properties Palette (or delete if you so desire to start over).

Jeff_M, also a frequent Swamper
EESignature
Message 11 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: Jeff_M

ahhh, good call!! I don't use quickselect as much as I should, pretty handy tool. Thanks!!

Message 12 of 24
rcdrafting1
in reply to: Jeff_M

So I don't know if I'm the only user to have this problem but I think I pin-pointed the issue and wanted to share.

 

When I change the masking to "contour line only"  using the properties box it slows down displaying contours dramatically. Once changed back to "from label style" things went back to normal speed.

 

When I changed the style to "contour line only" (instead of doing it through the properties box) it works fine. I accessed the override by going to annotation>add labels>surface>[box next to label type] and setting the contour label default override to contour line only.

 

Thanks everyone for the help; I'm sure it seems like an easy fix for most but this frustrated the hell out of me.

Message 13 of 24
ssomers
in reply to: rcdrafting1

This actually does not work the same.

 

When you switch all the currently drawn labels to mask "from label style," you are setting them all to mask based on the actual label style which will either a) mask EVERYTHING behind it (including hatches - which can be ugly) if the label style has background mask set to "True," or b) mask NOTHING if the label style has background mask set to "false."

 

When you change the feature setting to mask "contour line only" the way that you mentioned second (which can also be done via the settings tab of the Toolspace by right clicking "Surface" and selecting "Edit Feature Settings") it will only apply this to future labels that you add. It will not change the labels which you've already changed to mask "from label style" through the properties box. Those labels will still only mask from their label style as mentioned above.

 

There is some kind of conflict where masking the contour line only is slowing down the processing of the display of the contour lines, so unless all your labels are set to mask "from label style" the drawing remains slow when displaying contours.

 

To verify this for yourself, add a solid hatch below the contour labels and set the labels to mask "from label style" and you will see that you can only make them mask everything or nothing. Quite annoying in my opinion.

 

Hopefully AutoCAD addresses this soon, as I hate having boxes of emptiness around my contour labels when there is a solid gray hatch behind them for paving.

- Shawn
-------------------------------------
Running Civil 3D on Windows 10 Pro
Custom PC with: Intel i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60 GHz (8 core); NVIDIA Quadro P1000; 64GB RAM
Message 14 of 24
Joe-Bouza
in reply to: rcdrafting1

I grt that opening a blank drawing. ..."Reading Point Database".. too. No points and no surface in drawing

Thank you

Joseph D. Bouza, P.E. (one of 'THOSE' People)

HP Z210 Workstation
Intel Xeon CPU E31240 @ 3.30 Hz
12 GB Ram


Note: Its all Resistentialism, so keep calm and carry on

64 Bit Win10 OS
Message 15 of 24
rbunner
in reply to: ssomers

Does anyone know if this has been fixed? or if there is a work around?  Drawing was extremely slow then I saw this post and change my labels back to the style.  Really would like to use the “contour line” label so that it won’t look like holes in my aerial …..

 

I’m using C3D 2012

 

Thanks for the help!

Message 16 of 24
j.spell
in reply to: rcdrafting1

This came up today, I have an array of complex surfaces.

The standard style has contour smoothing turned on.

By turning off the smoothing on the referenced surface, the  "Displaying Contours" became considerably faster.

Hope this helps.

Message 17 of 24
sreedUNNZV
in reply to: rcdrafting1

What do you think I should do if the contours are all xref'd in and the styles etc. aren't even in this drawing.  It is still constantly taking a bunch of time to display them.  Also, in the case I want them to be displayed including the labels while I'm working, what would be the computer component that would be most helpful in speeding this up?  The GPU?

 

Thanks

Message 18 of 24

i don't get it. i've got 4 video cards and it still takes forever to do anything in a drawing with contours in it.

Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2245 CPU @ 3.90GHz 3.91 GHz
64 GB RAM
C3D 2023.2
Message 19 of 24

When civil3d reads a surface it goes down the list of build instructions in the definitions tab. Taking a snapshot of the surface definition is supposed to eliminate that.

 

maybe that will help? 

Thank you

Joseph D. Bouza, P.E. (one of 'THOSE' People)

HP Z210 Workstation
Intel Xeon CPU E31240 @ 3.30 Hz
12 GB Ram


Note: Its all Resistentialism, so keep calm and carry on

64 Bit Win10 OS
Message 20 of 24
asankaHW
in reply to: rcdrafting1

Hi rcdrafting1,
can you please tell me how you change the defaults to have this settings you are mentioning here? I can get to do what you are referring after i place the labels, which takes for ever. But how do you change the defaults, so when I create the labels, it follows what you are referring to. Maybe a few screen shots will be very helpful. Thank you.

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