Splitting up large projects for design efficiency

[Anonymous]

I am working and it long pipeline project that includes multiple pipe in conduit alignment many Crossing services in significant Earthworks. The project is about 8 km long and covers 50 m width. I have had problems creating the surfaces over such a large area.

It dawned on me that I should split the project up into a couple of sections for calculation efficiency. I know other civil design programs we use we adopt a limit to 4 to 5 kilometres per section.

Is there any guidance on spitting up large projects in Civil 3D in particular given consideration of the following:

1. Surfaces using a combination of Lidar points for the background and regular survey for the detailed areas. I have stripped the Lidar data points to one per metre in an attempt to improve performance.
2. Corridors that need to differentiate out up to 5 different material types and trench volumes for a pipe and conduit runs.

From the design I would like to generate usual deliverables including plans, profile and cross section and quantities.

[schroederC3D]

I can't offer direction regarding how to split based on length of pipe - but it's more a combination of how many concurrent users, filesize, drefs/xrefs, surface sizes, etc.

I'd suggest looking over the Civil3D Best Practices section of the help for some direction - although how it applies to your particular project will be different.  Once you have a vision for how to manage the data, come bounce it off us and we'll be able to advise a little better on any issues you might run into.