Bugs!

[EngME]

So I am on my third project going from start to finish using Civil 3D. My fist two project I used corridors pretty much exclusively and they went well.

I am on my third project which was more suited to being designed utilizing fetaure lines and grading objects. I have found that this project is almost unworkable because of the program crashing due to an assortment of bugs.
Feature lines were working ok until I tried to add some vertices to some of them to tighten up my triangles and this caused the program to crash all the time. I have since learned that a better way of doing this is to add vertices via supplement distances and mid-ordinate distance when I am adding the feature line as a breakline. This caused me quite a delay, and I would think that if a "add vertices" option is there it shouldn't cause the program to crash all the time.
Grading seems to be very buggy, LOTS of crashes and lots of opening the drawing to find that the grading object is no longer there...

Is anyone else experiencing this level of frustration with feature lines and grading? I know that there are sometime work around to stop it being so buggy but why should I have to try and find a work around for a part of the program that should work????

BTW I am using 2009 SP4.

[chris805_1996]

Have you read the best practices white paper for grading? It has some suggestions that will reduce some of your problems. I also always extract a surface from the daylight gradings and then delete the grading objects that make up the daylight.

[EngME]

Thanks I will check it out.
I have a slight problem calling it "best practices" it probably should be called "work arounds to stop the software crashing"! You should be able to use the software the way it is advertised and built without it crashing...

Its a pity that you have to extract the grading because one of the nice features of the grading tool is that it is dynamic, you lose this when you extract it...

I watched the caffinated grading tutorial video from AU and one of the great features he showed was grading a feature line from an alignment and then creating grading from this.... from my experience this is too buggy to do.

[chris805_1996]

There are bugs with the program and grading is definitely a problem, but sometimes its not bugs, but memory issues. Take for example you wanting to add vertices to your feature line. Since Civil 3D does lots of work behind the scenes to make sure feature lines interact with each other, and stay updated, the memory use goes up with each vertices you add. Add enough and the program can't function because of hardware limitations.

Also if you read the white paper I think most of the issues that it raises is the user asking the program to do tasks which are not mathmatically possible, so its more about we can't do the math (and you probably couldn't either) so please stop asking us to do the impossible. LDT graded and didn't care if it was mathmatically correct, creating crossing gradings if the inside radius wasn't big enough and other problems. Just because LDT gave you an answer and didn't crash doesn't mean it was the correct answer. Civil 3D is attempting to give you the correct answer more often in grading.

I'm not trying to defend the program, just trying to provide a little perspective on why the bad things sometimes happens with the program. Sometimes getting the perspective makes adjusting our workflows easier to provide a better user experience with any program.