Hi @PKINGSTON
Divide and conquer is my rule of thumb! Design each category in a separate drawing file. existing ground drawing, alignment drawing, grading drawing, pipe network drawing etc… the more drawings the better, if for example you 10 large pipe networks to design, don’t hesitate to subdivide them in a couple of separate drawings!
Then use data shortcuts to reference Civil 3D object and AutoCAD Xrefs to reference AutoCAD geometry to assemble the sheets and construction deliverables. To make it easy to handle the references, try not to have a design file drawing with AutoCAD and Civil 3D objects living together, keep them separate!
For surfaces, especially Lidar, you might consider using the Create Cropped Surface to divide up the large surface into smaller areas or quadrants if there is a large acreage for the project site.
Performance is impacted with large drawing, personally I prefer to invest the time in managing references and data structure working with small drawings than waiting while working on a a single large but slow drawing!
Just my thoughts,
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Samir Rezk
Technical Support Specialist