point limits?

[cadtag]

Are there any known hard limits to the number of points C3D can handle? I'm trying to recreate a surface in C3D that is based on LIDAR generated contours. There are approx 3.9 million contour points (not lines) supplied as 3d polylines. LDT can create a surface from that data, but C3D crashes with complete consistency.

The amount of data in the surface is to much for LDT's LandXML Export ability, trying LandXML Export against that project will crash LDT.

<Update>
Web support warned that there are are 'known issues creating surfaces from contours', and suggested exploding the objects and and creating the surface from drawing objects, rather than trying to treat the 3d polys as contours.

[dfarris75]

Maybe you need a new computer that could handle it?

[jpaulsen]

The way I understand it, Civil 3D surface size is limited. I do not know the exact number. There was a webcast on working with large surfaces in C3D. Basically they just broke the data up to make several small surfaces. At least that's what I remember. You can get to the webcast yourself here (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=7668113).

See "Working with Ultra Large Surfaces in Civil 3D 2007" and you may want to take a look at "Working with Large Datasets".

[Aquaserpent]

Basically they just broke the data up to make several small surfaces.

That will help with production