AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Hi guys.  I am working on a wind farm, it isnt particularly big, it has 14 Turbines.  I am having a problem with the grading on the hardstands, its taking so long to make amendments, or add gradings.  I have all 14 surfaces on the same drawing.  Should I have a seperate DWG for each hardstand and use data shortcuts for each?  I just thought that would be overkill, but starting to think that would have been a better way of working.  (I actually have a seperate data shortcut for each hardstandsurface).  Just a pain flicking between DWG's.  But probably quicker doing that than waiting for the computer to process doing it the way I have done.  Wondering what others have done with wid farm hardstandings?

Regards

Martin

[#2]

What are you using to create the surfaces? I would assume this would be simple enough to use featurelines and that it shouldn't be a hassle to make amendments. What is the area you are grading? What size is you DWG? Which version of Civil 3D are you using?

[#3]

My typical workflow for this work is to create an EGL and then a surface representing competent material that could be used in cut and fil i.e. base of peat/soft clay etc and these surface are then created as data shortcuts.

I draw up the turbine manufacturers hardstand (including adjacent road, blade finger area and rotor assembly area – if required) and offset by 1-1.2m to get the formation area. The hardstand “block” is then copied to the WTG locations and rotated so that the long side is parallel to the EGL contours (for minimum cut and fill)

There is usually a 1:100 longitudinal fall allowed so I use the C3D Surface Working Plane 2013 application to create a working plane from which the formation featureline takes its level such that finished platform level is within the tolerance above/below the WTG concrete base level.

I then use the grading tools to create a 1:1 cut & 1:2 fill batter to competent material and then balance the grading to zero (where possible). The competent material surface and individual cranepad surfaces are then pasted to a composite surface which is used for the alignments.

I regularly calculate volumes in this way for 20 turbine windfarms and don't encounter problems. The best practice is to keep each cranepad's featurelines and grading together and each cranepad in it's own different site e.g. 14 sites in your example (see screenshot of one I'm working on at present)

What are the specs of your computer/OS and which version of C3D are you using??

PS do you work for a developer, consultant or contractor?

[#4]

Hi Neilyj

Thats roughly the steps I took.  The working plane tool in 2013 sounds good.  I use 2012, so I just create a working plane with adding breaklines to a surface, drape the featureline over that suraface and grade from there to the sub formation.

We use the HP Z210 workstation:

Intel Xeon® E3-1225 3.10 GHz

Windows 7 Professional 64bit

12GB RAM

NVIDIA Quadro 2000

[#5]

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allanmm wrote:

Hi Neilyj

Thats roughly the steps I took.  The working plane tool in 2013 sounds good.  I use 2012, so I just create a working plane with adding breaklines to a surface, drape the featureline over that suraface and grade from there to the sub formation.

We use the HP Z210 workstation:

Intel Xeon® E3-1225 3.10 GHz

Windows 7 Professional 64bit

12GB RAM

NVIDIA Quadro 2000

---

This "free but unsupported"" tool is also available for 2012

[#6]

Sorry, I was signed into a different account there, and replied under that account.  Will look for that add on thanks.

What do you think of our machine spec?

[#7]

Here's a link http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D-Customization/Working-Plane-Grading-tools/td-p/331059...

You machine spec should be fine for these tasks  - you could always WBLOCK the drawing and see if that clears away any unwanted data that's slowing the macine down (this has worked for me in the past)