Volumes Surfaces are killing me.

[dcutter]

I'm working on a mine closure plan.  I have 25 design surfaces for different areas of the mine.  They are divided into 4 phases of construction.  This is our third round of design and phase revisions.  The last thee have been OK.

I have a master design drawing for each phase.  These drawings call in the data shortcuts for all the smaller design surfaces associated with the phase.  They are then pasted into an FG that represents the end of that phase of construction.  That is served up as a data shortcut and brought in to the next phase of construction as the EG, and so on and so on.

I have a separate set of drawings for calculatingly volumes.  The looks at the EG of the previous phase and the master design drawing for the phase being reported on.  Then I make a series of volume surfaces with specific boundaries for the desired volumes.  The boundaries are fairly general and simple aim to cut out the islands of the deign surface to report the volumes. 

This has worked just great until this round of revisions.  Now, my volume surfaces are throwing errant triangulation from the actual boundary of the design surface out to the approximate boundary of the volume surface.  I'm having to go in and create a detailed boundary that follows the design surface perfectly.

No big deal, right?  To compound my frustration the files have ballooned up to nearly 400 megs.  This means that even simple commands and regens take for ever.  My only course of action is spending a day rebuilding several individual volume reporting files.  This is not in the budget.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

RANT FOLLOWS:

I'm experiencing a "hate - hate" relationship with Civil 3D today. 

[dcutter]

OH,

I'm running Civil 3D 2014, SP2

[neilyj666]

A 400 Mb file would certainly slow things up....!!!

Sounds like you have several nested levels of data shortcuts? Not sure if this is a good idea or not or even how Civil handles them (inefficiently would be my guess).

Could you just promote some of the surfaces or XML to a new file and see if that helps any?

[dcutter]

Thanks for the reply Neil, but I'm hoping I can keep the data live.  Promoting surfaces basically kills the data link to the design surfaces that are in constant flex right now.  I would get better performance from the volume files, but I'd have to recreate them every time the surfaces were updated. 

I keep hoping BIM becomes a real thing for Civil design and not just another marketing ploy.

[neilyj666]

"...They are then pasted into an FG that represents the end of that phase of construction. ..."- does this mean that FG can change in the future?

Civil 3D = BIM for Civil Engineering => Marketing puff and a VERY long way to go to get to the stage that Revit is at for example.

[Mpendlebury]

I'm having similar issues and im sure it used to be much better.

It seems to me there was a change in the way data short cuts were handle some where in recent history, and now using data short cuts to bring in data dosent seem to reduce the file size like it used to.  

Each stage gets progresively worse, it dosent seem to just grab the previous stages FG data but all the data used to make that stage and the one before that and it becomes horrendously slow.

They only reprive i have found is Grid volume surfaces instead of TIN Volume surfaces, you can use grid volumes against TIN surfaces it dosent have to be a DEM surface and its much quicker and i have found the % diffrence is quite small and you can control the spacing as your required.

also might be a worth a shot using one volume sufrace for, doing EGL v Stage X and in the anlysis tab use bounding volumes instead of more volume surfaces.

but defiently feels like something is broken to me. im also using 2014 sp2