Friday, March 30, 2007

What to do if C3D crashes after performing a grading??

I am mulling over whether to publish this topic on Grading. I have been blogging about grading and I felt that it is only apt for me to give some tips on grading before I close this chapter. The best thing about the grading feature is its simplicity. It is straightforward and usually works very well with simple feature lines. However, this is not always the case in civil engineering. Have you ever notice that if you create a feature line from surface with intermediate grade points, it'll usually becomes unstable? I figured that it depends on the number of vertexes (intermediate grade points) that is created from the process. The more grade points/vertex your feature line contains, the likelihood for it to crash is higher. What to do if it crashes?
This method is by no means discounting the benefits of grading. I still need the slope scheme that comes with it afterall. Let's look at the illustration below:
What am I supposed to do? I proceeded by using stepped offset instead as shown:

I got the result which is sufficient for me to generate my proposed surface but how about the slope scheme? I for one copy the feature line/3D polyline and paste it into a new drawing. Next, I simplify it by reducing the numbers of vertex but make sure you don't compromise on the accuracy. Then, try to the grading again. Remember, the main purpose of doing this is to get the slope schemes as you already have your projected line from the stepped offset function.

You then need to explode the slope because as alluded to earlier, the program crashed due to grading instability, thus you'll need to dissociate the grading component from the drawing. Note worthy of mention is that it is always a good practice to purge and perform audit check on the drawing to fix any errors within the drawing you are working on. I know this is a temporary measure and I've seen the sneak preview of C3D 2008 which has enhance the grading features considerably. Do click on the link to watch the webcast : https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/autodesklearning/view?id=Civil_RO-49&pw=Audience&cn

Meanwhile, I hope this post will benefit those whom are still using the older version. Cheers!

p/s: Click on the image for larger view

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