2010 and 2011 Tips of the Day

Today I'm going to provide you few quick tips and tips how to improve performance with CD3  2010 and 2011.

TIP #1: For those of you that are experiencing  slow zooming and jagged panning when you first install C3D 2010 or 2011 you need to turn off your “Enable hardware acceleration” option. Typically this feature is turned on by default. When I first install both trial version of C3D, I experienced these same effects. After spending a few minutes playing round with setting and browsing through all the feature in the Options dialog box I came across the Enable Hardware Acceleration feature. I decide to turn it off and I immediately noticed a drastic performance boost. You can type “3DCONFIG” to get into your performance tuner dialog box. Select Manual Tune. In the next dialog box uncheck the “Enable Hardware Acceleration”. See images below.

 

 

TIP #2: For those of you that work with projects that have large aerial images C3D has a feature that allows your make changes to the amount memory C3D used. Here some helpful information: “Civil 3D reserves 25% of the total physical memory (RAM) on your system for inserting images with Raster Extensions. If you increase the default amount, more of the physical memory is used for images and less is available for other operations in Civil 3D and for other applications you might be running.

If you require additional memory for your images, the Civil 3D’s Raster Extension uses a temporary swap file. For example, if you insert a 100 MB file, and the Memory Limit is 8 MB, Civil  3D stores the remaining 92 MB in a temporary file. You can specify where the swap file is created.

You can change the following Raster Extension memory settings:

• Temporary File Location — The default directory for the temporary swap files is the Windows temp directory.

  Tip For best performance, use a local drive for your temporary swap file. It is recommended that you do not use the drive where the operating system is installed as the drive for the swap file unless this is your only local drive.

• Memory Limit — Specify the maximum amount of computer memory that AutoCAD Map 3D can use to store image files.

Note The more physical RAM you have, the higher you can make your Memory Limit. The higher the Memory Limit, the less swapping to hard disk occurs and the faster your images load and display. However, do not allocate all available physical RAM because doing so slows overall performance.

Note Close and restart Civil 3D after adjusting these settings.”

You can make the changes to the memory by either typing “MAPIOPTIONS” command or changing your workspace to Tool-based Geospatial. Then select the Insert contextual Tab. Click the small arrow at the bottom of  the Image Ribbon. This will bring up the

 

 

Note: If you have drawings with large aerials or images that are not being used but need to stay in the drawing , its best to hide the image for faster performance. You can either type the “HIDEOBJECT” command or click on the yellow light bulb at the bottom right corner of C3D.

 

TIP #3: If you ever need to know who has a certain drawing open you can use the “WHOHAS” command. Once you type the command the Drawing Open Query dialog box will appear. Just select a drawing file and if the drawing is in use by a user, a dialog box will appear like the image below.

TIP #4: I don't know how many people know this but you can use the featureline Insert PI feature for polylines, parcels, survey figures and 3D polylines. I use this feature on a daily basis.