How many points can Carlson handle?

[Joe H]

I've got a project surveying large lengths of the Colorado River with total station ground topo and multibeam bathymetry. The end result will be an ESRI ArcMap DEM.

The issue is breaklines. The total station data was collected w/ breaklines defining water's edge, dune tops, cutbank edges/bases etc with random topo coverage in between. It seems I have two choices for combining the two data sources:

1) export grids from Carlson of the total station data and combine it with the multibeam (already gridded at 0.25 m) in ARC; or

2) combine the topo and multibeam data in Carlson so that I can more readily add/change breaklines to represent the best surface.

If I go the latter route a potential limitation is the number of points Carlson can handle. I have Carlson 2010 w/ Intellicad. I believe if you go alphanumeric the program can handle more but I'm talking potentially millions of points. The program already freezes up when I manually edit a crd file and try to save it. Would I need the point cloud module? Anyone else have experience with extremely large datasets in Carlson? Thanks for any input.
Joe

[emorse4487]

My guess is the limiting factor in your setup is currently IntelliCAD. I have a CRD file with 673,000 +/- points and it works 'fine' (slow) in AutoCAD but as soon as I import the points the Carlson w/ IntelliCAD it creates problems. IntelliCAD doesn't freeze it just takes forever to reprocess the CRD file and update the points in the drawing. If you let it sit for a while it should update your points without losing everything.

Point Cloud could be exactly what you need, it runs on AutoCAD, but it costs $5000.

[Joe H]

Thanks for the reply. I'll look into Point Cloud.

It seems a pity that for me to work with a large database I need a $5000 module. I would hate to just use Carlson to edit raw files and for field to finish for breaklining and then use Arc for the real meat. I'll keep playing with it.