Workflow for very large long sections [what do you guys do?]

[spittle]

I've picked up a job from someone else, a long section 17KM long. This is split onto 28 tabs within a dwg.

 

This is a lot bigger than anything I've done before but the time it takes to flick between tabs is rediculous ao am wondering if anyone's found a tried and test workflow for making these kind of jobs manageable?

 

Each tab contains about a 500m section of the long section and this is the requirement of the job

 

There are 5 xrefs and the C3D alignment is referenced from another drawing.

 

Any takers?

[Tiger]

so we're talking a road section here?

 

I have projects with about 8-10 plan-drawings and about the same amount of section drawings (I do district heating pipes, in this case to a new neighbourhood).

 

The way that we work is that we have one drawing where all the design and drawing takes place. Then that DWG is xreffed into each drawing. So instead of the 28 tabs that you have, I would have 28 DWGs. I'm not saying it's the best way to do it, but it comes from a need in the end to have each and every drawing as a separate DWG for archive-purposes.

 

During the work-process, there is not much need to look at the finished drawings, so those are not opened really until its time to finish the drawings with texts and stamps and whatnots. But yes, then it takes a whole lot of time to open each and every drawing and make sure that they all look alright...

[spittle]

It's just a pipe with the profile plotted on the long section.

 

So are you saying that you have a main C3D drawing with your surface and alignment. And then you reference the alignment into multiple dwgs and create profile view in each of them for only a specific length of the alignment's chainage?

 

Or do you still create your profiles within one C3D dwg and then XREF the view into separate dwgs? I think having one DWG per profile view would also be unamageable as verticle changes in the profile are not neccesarily going to be either end of your multiple profile views.

 

Also how do you manage your XREFs if the amount of OS data for example required is huge?

 

I'm wondering if it would be efficient to keep each tile separe and then XREF only those in to your drawing that are specific, rather than having huge OS xrefs containing multiple tiles that arn't needed for every tab (this is assuming I've adopted a method that splits some of the tabs into separate drawings). Next step would be to use layer filters to allow layers within the OS tiles to be grouped so that their properties can be quickly edited for the entire drawing rather than having to find the same layers within the different XREFS.

 

Not tried it yet though. Well not on a large enough job to make it a good test.

[Tiger]

I have a main DWG with everything. All the necessary backgrounds (roads, houses, other pipes..this one that I'm doing right now has about 25 xrefs of varying size) are x-reffed into the main DWG, so that we only have one level of xrefs.

 

I do both plan view and profile view in that DWG. I basically do everything there, and make sure that it looks like I want it to look in the actual drawings. I try to keep the backgrounds that should not be on the drawings (like other pipes) as Overlays so that they don't show up on the drawings. I use non-plottable layers as well. Everything that I can to make editing necessary in the layout-drawings as little as possible.

 

What you can do is explore the use of Xref Clip, I haven't used it but some collgeues do, and it might help you.

 

I've added some screenshots, tWO two first (black background are from the main dwg, plan and profile and the last one is what all the layout-DWGs look like. Every yellow or white square in the main DWG is one drawing in 1:200 scale.

[spittle]

But what about your profile views? Do you need to create long sections on dwgs?

[Tiger]

But what about your profile views? Do you need to create long sections on dwgs?

 

The actual profile drawings on this particular project is what I'm doing right now so I have no drawings to show. The middle picture that I showed in previous post is part of the profile in the main-dwg.

 

In another project, this is what the finished profile drawings looked like. There are two viewports on each drawing to show the profile, with connection-lines if the profile spans more than one viewport.

[jammie]

but the time it takes to flick between tabs is rediculous

 

Check the setvar LAYOUTREGENCTL and set it to 0 if it isn't already done

 

From the AutoCAD Help file

 

If LAYOUTREGENCTL is set to 1 or 2 and performance seems slow in general or when you switch between tabs for which the display list is saved, consider changing to a setting of 0