AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

C3D 2013. 64 bit. Windows 7.

Question 1.

In C3D 2013 is there a ceiling to the number of points allowable in a C3D surface? Is it 1.5 million?

Question 2.

In C3D 2013, when creating a surface from Point Cloud data is there a maximum point count based on the answer to question 1 - or is a different point count limit applied?

Thx.

Kevin.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Number of points 17 143 972, read from a text file.  The text file size ± 560mb.

 

[#3]

Willie, is that the maximum number of points C3D can accomodate or is that just a surface you made? I don't think C3D has a limit per-se.

Regarding point clouds, I think there is a 1.5M point limit but I can't find any documentation to back that up.

For normal surfaces larger than that, C3D writes out to an external MMS file.

[#4]

The surface was created from a file we received from a municipality and C3D writes a mms file.  Tha file took about 25min to load.  But afterthat, it worked quit fine.

I am not sure about the maximum amount of points that C3D can handle.

Have  a look at one one of the Autodesk University classes on point files.  It describes the way C3D handles Point Clouds in detail.

http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=class_listing&filter_keywords=point&chunk=15&filter_track=&filter_softwar...

[#5]

We use Trimble Real Works to process our point cloud data.  We find the tools in that software are FAR superior to C3D's abilities.  (Don't have any experience with other scanners than Trimble, but suspect you may find something similar.)

So we use TRW to "prune" our point cloud data down to a reasonable level, then only import that smaller set of data into C3D.  We find that works much better.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

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kevin.barnett wrote:

Question 2.

In C3D 2013, when creating a surface from Point Cloud data is there a maximum point count based on the answer to question 1 - or is a different point count limit applied?

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From the 2013 help file: 

1. Note

   The displayed value is the percentage of 1.5 million points, which is the maximum number of points that can exist in a drawing, regardless of the number of point clouds in the drawing.  

Althougth I can't find it in the help files right now, the surface will be created based on the points that are being displayed in the cloud. In other words, I have 3 million points in my point cloud. I've set the slider to the max so 1.5 million points are being displayed. I then stylize the point cloud so only the ground shots are displayed (I'll assume that's 50% of them) so we are now down to 750k points. I then draw a rectangle around a quarter of the point cloud to add those points to my surface so you are now down to around 190k points.

Hope that makes sense.