Slow Contour Labeling in 2011

[Adam_Farnsworth]

My coworker and I are working in C3D 2011 (64 bit) on Windows 7 with what does not appear to be a particularly complicated surface or covering that large of an area, however any time we go to add surface labels, the program pauses and has to regen the surface. The status bar says it's "displaying contours". If I zoom in to a small enough area or apply a mask to some small corner of the surface, I can get it to only regen initially if I am labeling multiple contours, but even then it still pauses if I am trying to label individual contours. Our current work around is using the "multiple at interval" option so it only has to regen once, but gives us a lot of labels in places that are not optimal.

The surface is being brought in as a data shortcut. In both the original file and the file I'm working in, surfaces are not set to auto regen. I do not have this problem when I am working in 2008, 2009 or 2010 so I have to think that it's some sort of system variable in 2011 that I need to change, although I have not been able to find any such setting to update. I have 12GB of RAM so I don't think memory is really the issue here. Has anyone else had a similar problem?

--Adam

[nloder]

I have the same problem in Civil 3d 2010.  When I create a surface that is not very complicated (only defined by 200 points or so) and try to label the contours, about 5 seconds elapses between clicking on the contour line to label and the actual contour label disappearing.  Times that by 40-50 contour labels, and time starts to add up just to label contours. 

I am also running Civil 3D in Windows 7, but had this same problem on XP.  The time to label a contour goes up dramatically depending on the surface size.  The last project I worked on had a relatively large surface, and it took 30 minutes just to add contour labels to the existing and proposed surface.

[Adam_Farnsworth · Accepted solution]

I think I've figured out a solution.  In my surface style, I was using Contour Smoothing.  (Surface Style > Contours Tab > Contour Smoothing > Smooth Contours > True).  When I turned this off (set it to False), it sped up my contour labeling considerably.

Let me know if that works for you as well 🙂

--Adam

[nloder]

Yes, that did help, great suggestion!

[Adam_Farnsworth]

Rock on!  😄