Prevent update grading

[mcjohn]

Hi, I'm using Civil 3D 2010 (very new user) and have a question about grading.

 

How can I change/move points from my feature line and not have it update grading every time until I 'command it to'. I created a feature line polygon around an area of rock to eventually be blasted and am using grading to determine the volume and size compared to original ground. Everytime I resize the polygon or change elevation points manually, etc. it updates the grading right away instead of allowing me to change multiple things at once beforehand.

[mcjohn]

The update of the grading takes a good 10 seconds each time which is why I'd like to set it manuualy.

[mcjohn]

Does my question need any clarifying? I would really like to know how to do this because it's very time consuming changing one point of my grading shape at a time while waiting for it to update the grading.

[sinc]

To my knowledge, there is no way to disable this. As far as I know, grading objects are designed to recalculate immediately, in order to give you feedback on the results, and they have no "Auto Update" property that you can disable.

 

What sort of hardware do you have? In my experience, grading objects update decently, usually within two or three seconds at most. But I don't use them all that often, and may not be pushing them hard enough to really expose their problems.

 

As one possibility, if you have your grading object creating an automatic surface, you might want to make sure you don't set that surface to automatically rebuild.

[mcjohn]

I have automatic surface creation off. Well it's about 5 seconds I just counted and I have excellent hardware.

 

Is there a better method of creating a surface and getting a volume? Imagine an uneven ground surface you have topo contours for and you want to know the volume of that down to a known elevation (to blast it out). Preferable to be able to set a wall slope/grade but it's to be near vertical so I'd except a simple method if need be. I want to make the volume a surface creating for alignments/profiles and showing a 3d view of it from object viewer.

[sinc]

I haven't ever had to do precisely that. When I need to do a similar task, it's usually to calculate pond volumes. For that, I usually just create a flat surface at the top elevation, and do a volume comparison or volume surface between the two surfaces. Kind of clunky, but it's relatively quick.

 

In your case, if you have a polyline surrounding your pit area, you could set it to your known elevation and use it to create a comparison surface. Then create a volume surface, or do a volume comparison (in Surface Utilities). This method can't do that slope calculation, however - it would simply calculate the volume over the area where the two surfaces overlap.

[vorno]

12 Years later - is there a solution to prevent Gradings from automatically generating when moving Featurelines?

[kspear]

The easiest way to get AutoCAD (and by extension Civil 3D) to not calculate something is to freeze the layer. In this case, just freeze the layer the grading objects reside on. For the NCS layer standard, that is typically C-TOPO-GRAD.