AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

If someone could help me find a way to speed it up that would be awesome!  Especially a way to get it to quit doing the displaying contours thing.  Thanks for all your help so far!

[#2]

Autocad has always been a dog with regard to imagery. In a bind you can try exporting to Autocad. That will dumb down all C3D objects and possibly reduce processing. Make sure you explode any C3D flotsam and purge everything in the export file to reduce size.

Another thing to try is turning off all the images and then turn on only those needed for the layout being plotted. It requires manually initiating each plot, but it might help. To reduce processing even more you can try turning off viewport display in all the layouts and turn on the ones needed at plot time.

Here is a workflow:

1) turn off the images in model space and unload any xref's to speed up processing when stepping through layouts.

2) Step through the layouts and turn off the viewports

3) Reload XREFs and go to first layout.

4) Turn on the viewports and images for the layout and plot.

5) Turn off images and turn off viewport and go to next layout.

Repeat until done.