Who is using Civil 3D for full or partial production?

[okonforti.91529]

Hi,
We have been trying to implement Civil 3D 2009 in our company. We have created a Pilot group that works with our software resellers to learn the product ins and outs.

As we were going into grading (which is our main subject as Land planners) we started to crash right and left. Our instructor was stunned and seemed confused as he wasn't able to fix the problem so he ended contacting Autodesk and got a code# for this issue.

The next training day, the instructor came in with a work-around that includes Auditing and purging after every time we added a point elevation to the feature line. This worked well and every time we added a point and P+A there were somewhere between 4-8 errors fixed. Every time!

This work-around worked 80% of the time and when it didn't the drawing will either crash without letting the user the option to save it or will just not let the user save it at all.

Not sure if anyone is experiencing the same issues but I will imagine that we're not the only ones seeing this.

We are using the latest service pack (3) and the computer hardware is up-to-date.

We haven't heard from Autodesk to date (this was a couple of month ago) and I was wondering if there is someone out there that is using Civil 3D as the primary software for production and either not experiencing or found another work around to stabilize the software?
The way we look at this today is that the software is so unstable that we can't work with it on production.

Please let me know.
Thanks O. Konforti

[sinc]

I have not seen any such issues. There are a lot of bugs in the software, but I haven't seen anything like that. It seems like there may be something bad in your template....?

Have you tried creating brand new drawings from something like the acad.dwt template, to verify that you still get this problem? (Warning - do NOT copy in any styles from your "bad" drawings when you do this test. If you need some styles to accomplish the test, create them from scratch.)

If you do not get the problem in new drawings created from the acad.dwt template, but you DO get them in your other drawings, then that would indicate something in your template(s) is possibly causing the problem.

[okonforti.91529]

Thanks Sinc,
Is this common that the Template will corrupt the drawing?
We have started with the NCS Extended Imperial DWT and added styles as we moved forward.

I will try to do it from scratch as you say with the Acad.DWT

To create new styles takes time and we have been developing the template as we worked on the Pilot drawing... this will not be an easy job to start from scratch to develop all the styles...
Do you know of a way of finding or isolating the problem with the existing drawing/template/styles?

Also, is the NCS Extended DWT corrupt as well? or you think I can start with it?

[sinc]

You should be able to start with that NCS template.

There is really no difference between a template and drawing, except for the extension. You can open a DWG and save it as a DWT, and vice-versa. So yes, your template can become corrupt, and that corruption will exist in every drawing created from that template.

That is not necessarily what is happening, but it sounds like a possibility. That's why I'm saying to start there. If you only see this problem in drawings created from your custom template, then we know where the problem lies. We don't know what the problem is, but at least we've narrowed it down a bit.

On the other hand, if you see this problem with drawings created from the NCS template, then it would tend to indicate a problem in your setup somewhere, since others do not see this problem.

[iain9876]

Sounds like the drawing might be corrupt. Rather than starting again, try fixing and purging then save your drawing as a block.

Open up a brand new drawing then insert your block (existing drawing). 90% of the time this fixes such issues.

Hope this helps!