ACAD Civil 3d

[jmichael]

I received a civil #d file from a client to use in my preparation of a master development plan. When I inserted the file in a new drawing the size of the file doubled and all of the items that were poly lines in the original defaulted to millions of tiny line segments. The file was extremely slow in responding to commands and I could do nothing to improve the situation. As a last resort I called support and the person I spoke to said the civil three d would not work in VW. Why can't we have the ability to import those type of files in a usable format? I see that you allow Revit but more and more of the Civil companies are going to Civil 3d and this creates an issue.

 

Any ideas on how I should proceed?

10-01-2020 Project Drawing Base.vwx

[Art V]

Without the dwg file I can only make some guesses.

 

Did you import the DWG file as 2D, 3D or 2D/3D?

 

The elevation contours are 2D, not 3D and given that these were apparently coming from a GIS program it may very well be that these lines were already tiny line segments in the Civil 3D file. 2D Polylines in a DWG tend to import as polylines into VW, some objects are polygons (i.e. not tiny line segments) which is another reason for me to think the contour polylines may already have been tiny line segments in Civil 3D.

 

The support you called, was that VW support (local distributor or VW HQ depending on whether you are in the US or not) or your in company support?

I've used Civil 3D in the past and usually had few or no isues importing the DWG files into VW. The one kind thing that can be a problem to import are Civil 3D specific objects that are not standard DWG objects, but even plain ACAD would have trouble with those objects so that is not unique to VW.

 

The ODA has been working on a Civil 3D library to be able to read those specific objects, like they did for Revit, but it is still work in progress I think.

 

Civil 3D has its issues as well, there are a lot of people complaining about long standing bugs etc. in Civil 3D not getting fixed and there is lack of development as well, Microstation used to be and still is another big player in that area and now that BricsCAD is part of Hexagon (who also owns Intergraph) it will be interesting to see how things will be panning out in the future as Hexagon seems to have an intent to go after AutoCAD and its verticals. (They failed doing that with Intergraph but with BricsCAD they may have a viable option because Leica GeoSystems is also part of Hexagon so they can now offer an integrated solution with the Leica Totalstations and PlantWorx etc. for Civil projects). So for now I wouldn't worry too much about Civil 3D as things may get solved over time one way or another by other options becoming available.

 

If you are on Windows you could get DWG TrueView (Windows only) or BrisCAD trial (BricsCAD is also available for Mac and Linux) to look at the dwg file if you don't have a DWG based application like e.g. BricsCAD to open the DWG files. Then you can check whether the contours are tiny line segments in the DWG file or actual continuous polylines.

 

Edited October 5, 2020 by Art V

[Pat Stanford]

If you are only using the Civil 3D (or any DWG file for that matter) as a background for your other work and don't need to edit it, one option is to import it into a separate VW file and then reference that file into your primary drawing. This will isolate the complexity of the file and not "contaminate" your primary file with all of the DWG Layers (VW Classes) as they will be contained within the reference.

 

I can't remember for sure, but you may be able to do this directly with a Referenced Design Layer Viewport from the DWG and never have to convert the file to VW.

 

[Art V]

7 hours ago, Pat Stanford said:

I can't remember for sure, but you may be able to do this directly with a Referenced Design Layer Viewport from the DWG and never have to convert the file to VW.

Yes it is possible for dwg files to do this unless it got changed for VW2021.

 

Personally I have never used this because usually I need to able to turn parts of the drawing (in)visible or split things across multiple design layers (without altering the classes to remain compatibility with the ACAD layers of the imported DWG file) for specific purposes.

 

For GIS related drawings like the one from jmichael I would advise to import it into an empty VW file anyway to make sure the georeferencing is correct and will match that of the working file and then reference this VW file into the working file.

[jmichael]

Thank you for the help. I'll give this a try.