Drawing does not appear but takes up space

[Anonymous]

This might be a little difficult to explain so bear with me. Encountered this problem before, had a backup, in this case do not have a backup and need to figure out what is wrong. I have a .dwg that displays a tumbnail of a corridor that I created. The file is large, 123MB, however when it is opened the vast majority of the drawing does not exist. As in with all layers turned on nothing appears, the surfaces do not show up in the prospector, nor does the corridor or any assemblies. The drawing is far too large for what is in it, there is one surface and minimal layouts. Additionally the mouseover previews for the layout tabs display correctly what should be there, however when the layout tabs are actually selected, they are blank. Restoring from backup does nothing. Attempting to purge etc. does nothing. Attempting to insert the entire drawing into a blank drawing causes autocad to crash with a memory read exception. (That tried on multiple machines with identical results.) I'd say that everything got deleted, but the file size indicates otherwise. cntrl-A finds nothign other than what I can see and select normally. Any ideas? Again, this isn't an isolated case and I have no idea what causes it.

[Neilw_05]

Run QSELECT and see what it finds in the drawing. It should find and select any objects that are not visible. Then hit Delete or run Erase+Previous to delete them.

Also check for objects in Paper space using the same workflow.

[Jeff_M]

Have you tried opening it using Recover?

I have had a few drawings act this way, unfortunately I never found a good solution. Recover did find errors, but didn't bring most of the objects back.

[Anonymous]

I have tried qselect, doesn't select anything that isn't already visible. (paperspace or model) And yes recover does show errors, when it opens at all, but is unable to recover them. I'd post the file, but its too large for this forum. This current issue occured after an autocad crash, but the other was not. Both were on removable storage devices, saving to normal discs did not remove the issue. As this has shown up a few times I feel like its a(nother) bug in Civil3D. Not sure how to go about reporting it.

[Jeff_M]

Can you post it to a Dropbox or your Autodesk360 account?

[SurveyorLee]

Instead of inserting it into a blank drawing, have you tried using a Map Query to bring everything in?  I have used that method on some before after a crash.  Not corridors, but all had surfaces and alignments in them.

Hope this helps.

Surveyor Lee

[Anonymous]

Tried the mapquery, didn't get anything unfortunately. Apreciate all the help, here's a link to a dropbox folder containing the file:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ru6oq79uvpooge9/lW7hRl5BTK

[Jeff_M]

OK, this worked for me....

Start "Civil3d as AutoCAD"

run the RECOVER command on the drawing, this took 5-10 minutes to complete.

It found 11 or 13 errors (bad memory here, I should've written it down)

Save

Close

Open in C3D

[SurveyorLee]

I downloaded and opened the drawing.  I have CD 3 2011, so I had to convert it with TrueView.  When it opend, there are lots of *.PNG files attached.  They are probably causing the size to blow up, and could be eating all of your memory.  If you can, try detaching, or at least unloading those files and see if you can't open and clean it up then.  I have had files with large aerial photos that would become unstable iwth the photos turned on when i opened the file.  Just ptu them on a separate layer and freeze it when you aren't using them.

Surveyor Lee

[Neilw_05]

Here are a few things I found when examining the file:

1) The EG surface has over 800k points and over 1.6 million triangles. It is built from 3D polyline contours. Erasing the EG surface and 3D polylines reduces the file size by 100 MB. After removing these entities, Audit finds and repairs 1 error.

2) After deleting the EG surface there remains only a Surface1 in propsector. However there are 11 surfaces found by QSELECT but they do not show up in prospector. If surface1 is deleted then the 11 other surfaces show up in prospector.

3) After deleting Surface1, several assemblies appear within the yellow circle above the profile. These assemblies are not listed in prospector.

4) There are no corridors in this file. Apparently they were deleted at some time prior to this version of the file

Conclusion: There are several aberent behaviors with this file that I can't explain. I'll speculate that these problems are due in large part to the large amount of data in the file.

Some steps to remediate these problems include:

Using a data reference for the EG surface

Use points and breaklines vs. contours as EG surface data. Otherwise convert 3D polylines to 2D polylines for the contours used to build it. Once the surface is built, make a snap shot and remove the countours to reduce file size.

Put layouts in seperate drawings

[Neilw_05]

Correction,

After deleting Surface1, two corridors are found by QSELECT but they do not appear in prospector.  I also note there are parcels that show non-zero perimeters but 0 area. Again strange behaviors in this file.

[Jeff_M]

Using the instructions I provided, there are 2 corridors and all of the surfaces listed as 'good' in Prospector. Yes, there are some best practices that should be followed, but I have opened the drawing with little, to no apparent, data loss.

[Anonymous]

Appreciate the help folks. I feel like this is an actual bug in Civil3D, and I feel like it should probably be addressed; especially if it's memory related as it looks like it is. If anyone knows where/how I report something like this please feel free to pass it along or tell me where to go. Thanks!

[Neilw_05]

I don't think you'll get much attention by reporting this as a bug. As has been noted, there are some workflow issues that you'll need to address first.

I recommend reviewing the Best Practices topic in the help system for tips on how to manage your projects.

[Neilw_05]

I didn't try your suggestion Jeff but it looks like running Recover in plain Autocad does a better job of repairing the file.

[Jeff_M]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Appreciate the help folks. I feel like this is an actual bug in Civil3D, and I feel like it should probably be addressed; especially if it's memory related as it looks like it is. If anyone knows where/how I report something like this please feel free to pass it along or tell me where to go. Thanks!

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I don't believe memory is the problem. I saw the same thing you do when opening the first time in C3D. Only by running Recover in plain AutoCAD was I able to load it correctly. I previous cases like this, it was usually due to errant polylines, featurelines and/or hatches. I'm not sure which, if any, of these was causing it in your drawing.