when does linking become too much?

[Justin Marchiel]

I have a large residential development with condos, townhouses, towers, roads, bridges, parkades etc. Then way that i see assembling the site is linking these buildings to a master site plan. but when i look at the ligistics, i can see having about 15 main buildings, and multiple copies of the same building, so there could be about 50 links in this project.

I know that there will be some performance issues with a large file like this, but at some point i would think that it would become unreasonable to have so many links in a project.

Anyone have any experience with something so big (i know there is some talk of campus' out there)? It would be nice if i could break it up into sections, and then link those section into a master, but as i understand, linking works only once? You can't nest a link can you?

Thanks

Justin

[Teresa.Martin]

Hi!
In regards to your question about links and large projects.
1) No, you cannot have nested links..Alas..That might be a good feature in a future release.
2) Actually if you have one building and you copy it 5 times, it will not really add much to the file size. Try it and see! It will be slower doing a '3d rotate shademode on + shadow' thing. You can minimize this by using filters and turning off interior walls and objects in your master file.
3) You might want to consider using worksets/sharing to manage the file. You can load and unload worksets. This will speed up your day to day work flow since you can choose what you load upon opening the project file. Kind of like having loaded or unloaded xrefs.

I hope this helps.
Best regards,

[sbrown]

Yes, in your master site file, enable worksets and insert the buildings onto a workset so you don't have to open it unless you need it.

[dhurtubise]

If you need a master plan that doesn't need to much detailed, why not just uses massing instead ?
Link the file create a mass of it using the outline and unload

[Justin Marchiel]

I have already made a massing siteplan, but now as the design is developing, the developer is wanting a more complete model.

Thanks for you help. It looks like with some carful management, i should be able to get the file to work.

Justin