AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Hello

I had a good search for an answer to my problem but as I need a fix asap I thought it would be best to just go ahead and ask;

I have a fairly high spec machine at work running Civil3D 2013 -

Intel Xeon X5675 @ 3.07GHz

24 Gb RAM

W7 64bit Enterprise SP1

Samsung SSD PM81 250Gb (Main system drive)

1Tb Samsung SATA drive (for everything else)

NVIDIA QUADRO 4000

On a fairly regular basis I am suffering crashes or extended periods of "white screen of death" after carrying out what seem to me to be extremely basic tasks in Civil 3D. Here is the most recent example;

Working on a drawing with a topo TIN surface (displayed as 20m & 100m contours). Created long & cross section profiles from alignments then proceeded to make some details of these at various scales, presented on 3 layout tabs. On tab 3 I grab the top right hand grip of my viewport and Civil freezes for 15 mins so I kill task and start again. As soon as I move my mouse over a grip to attempt to resize my vp the same thing happens. After restarting my machine and going back into model space in the drawing I move a multileader from one feature to another and Civil crashes again. I have found that these crashes occur a lot more frequently when I have object snap switched on.

In the same drawing I have had Civil crash about 10 times when simply selecting a hatched area with or without object snap on.

I wonder why I can model large surfaces and detailed corridors with little to no problem on large topo surfaces but a simple task like grabbing a grip and resizing a vp or selecting hatch kills my machine. I have been watching resource manager and task manager to see if CAD is using an unusually high amount of system resources but it appears to be crashing while the system is virtually idle and not being taxed at all. In all honesty I suffer from these "mystery freezes" several times everyday, sometimes several times and hour. Very very frustrating.

 There are 5 others with me at work using the same spec'd machines as me suffering the same problems to varying degrees. Interestingly I have Civil 3D installed on a much lower spec'd machine at home and when I open problematic work drawings on it I have no trouble at all, yes there are occasional freezes but my home machine ALWAYS recovers, my work machine rarely does.

[#2]

Sounds like a graphics driver issue to me...

[#3]

I am also having problems with my drawing crashing while trying to complete simple tasks (like hatching a large closed region).

I have tried making the area one complete shape (which ended up being a spline), and it crashes everytime.  I even crashes when I try to simply select the object.  It's very frustrating, I have been trying to hatch this are for about 3 hours now...

[#4]

Try moving the polyline/entites to another place in model space, hatch, then move them back..

[#5]

I did try moving the entities into another drawing.  It didn't do anything.  What actually seemed to be the problem is that C3D really doesn't like splines.  C3D had converted the entire string to a spline without me noticing.  If I even clicked on the string, C3D would crash.  I ended up breaking the string (why it would let me do that command and no other is beyond me) and converting the seperate pieces to a polyline by right clicking (while selected) and using the 'spline edit' command.

Once the entire string was a polyline, everything went smooth.

WHHHHHHY?

[#6]

I went through something similar. I got a drawing that showed planting areas. The drawing kept hanging and crashing. I found out that the person who had drawn the planting areas had drawn very small line segments, joined them in to polylines and splined them. There had been hundreds, maybe thousands, of segments. I just redrew them as polyline arcs. I needed only a small number of arcs to duplicate the edges of the beds. How accurate does the edge of a planting bed have to be anyway?

I'm not sure if this is a problem with Civil 3D or with plain AutoCAD. Since there are no Civil command involved with creating massive splines or with hatching. I don't think it's Civil 3D.