Workarounds all Around!

It seems like Civil 3D is just a series of workarounds to get it to work in a somewhat of fast manner. It seems like instead of Autodesk programmatically fixing the issue, they require us, the user, to implement workarounds. Slow corridor drawing? Why would you want to use the product as designed? Instead split the corridor into several drawings time wasting drawings! Who the heck wants to do that?

This post is all about a workaround to get faster printing speeds of cross sections. As mentioned in my last post, Civil 3D process all of the objects in the entire drawing when processing each and every viewport. The workaround to prevent this is to come up with a list of layers that only show up in plan view and won't affect the section views you are printing. Then set up a layer state that goes through and freezes and turns off all of the layers in plan. Now when you print you'll experience a faster printing experience. In my testing of a simple set of 8 cross section sheets reduced the print time from 3 minutes to under a minute!

Unfortunately, this doesn't help with an increasing number of cross sections in the drawing. This workaround works great and then starts declining once more sections are added to the drawing. I once saw a person start printing 75 sheets and after 4 hours it wasn't even done printing!

Why does Autodesk burden us customers with this huge negative return on investment? I don't know.