PC choking on vessel model

Tim Neumann

 I'm trying to work on this model of a reactor but my system is getting "choked" on it. Zoom and pan is taking eons and etc. My system specs. are i7 2600 3.4 ghz. 16GB ddr3 ati radeon hd 6450 1gb win10 64bit pro. Is an upgrade in order and if so what specs are recommended? See model pic attached - wanted to attach the actual dwg file but it's 5mb figured it would be too large. Any comments would be welcome!

Jason Bourhill

I would check your ANTIALIASSCREEN value. Setting it to 1 will give best performance.

You could also run REDSDKINFO to see whether you're using the latest video drivers.

BTW, Nice vessel model :-)

Regards,

Jason Bourhill CAD Concepts

Joe Dunfee

 One very easy way to bog-down a model is to include detailed fasteners. 

Any from McMaster are WAY too detailed.  And the BricsCAD versions are also fairly detailed.  If you have a particular size that is used a lot, then edit it to get rid of the threads, and perhaps even get rid of some other details of the hex-head bolts.  My socket head bolts have a hexagon polyline drawn on the top, rather than cut into the head.  Without any re-modeling of fasteners, you can simply freeze the layers that have the fasteners, and that will cause that layer to not exist, as far as the rendering engine.

Many years ago, I recall that curved items were a major drain on a rendering engine, since they are turned into polygons for rendering.  But, I don't know the current state of the art in that regard.  That issue may have been solved years ago.

-Joe

Simple Bolt.JPG

Joe Dunfee

 To add to the issue of curved surfaces, a cylinder has triangles along its length.  But, a sphere or torus has many more triangles.  Your curved pipe is a torus.  Try freezing that layer, and see how the behavior changes.   Again, it must be frozen, not simply off.

-Joe

Tim Neumann

 No bolts or hardware is included, can't imagine how slow it would be if I put them in there. I sent in a support request just to get their take on it. 

Richard Webb

 Swept helical objects also seem to up the complexity. If that's your wraparound piping (and not stacked toroids) then that could be the drag on the system.

Tim Neumann

 This vessel is probably a worst case scenario which is why I wanted to see if it could be modeled in Bricscad. Like some of you have commented, things didn't start to bog down till I added the helical half pipe coils. Tried freezing the layers of of the other items but it's still "creeping". I'll try Jason's tip regarding the ANTIALIASSCREEN value and see what happens. Thanks for all the comments!

Joe Dunfee

 I have wrestled with complex assemblies choking a computer for my entire career.

I recall my first job, where we were running AutoCAD with the Solid Modeling add-on module.  The computer was a DOS based '286 machine, and we had borrowed memory boards from other computers to bring it up to a whopping 8 meg of memory. The reason for the memory was that we had modeled a vehicle which had bent tubing around its perimeter, and some 1/4 sheet metal. The computer had already started to choke on that, so we decided to do the rest of the vehicle in 2D, and needed to generate the 2D profiles of the progress so far. To generate those 2D profiles took a week of the computer running 24hrs/day, with the hard drive active the whole time.

More recently, I dealt with some models in SolidWorks.  One of the components was a vacuum table, with over a thousand tiny holes, and a valve at each hole. The model was intimately modeled, and was choking our system.  Unfortunately, the model was now a dumb model, and each of those little valves was a separate object.  So, the process of making the model less complex took much of a day.  But, it was necessary.

So, computers and their software tend to be driven to their maximum capability, and the engineers would like more.  But, it is not until you hit that wall, that you know where the wall is for your type of project. So, your test with that pressure vessel was a great choice.

I will mention one other idea, that may help the model of the pressure vessel.  About 10 years ago, on SolidWorks, I was running into that wall , and the model was mostly square tubing. While the processing of the computer could mostly keep up, there were other issues, such as "Bleed through" where the system would reveal lines that should be hidden. Selecting through into invisible lines was also a problem.  This was simply a limitation of the video card, as it adjusted its resolution to the complexity of the model.

 My solution at the time was to omit the interior hollow of the tubes.  Of course, the mass would be wrong, but I solved that by making special materials such as "Aluminum Sq Tubing 1x1x1/8" and "Aluminum 1x2x1/8", with densities that corresponded to the real-world tubing.

You might get better performance if you omit the hollow inside the tubing, since that will cut its number of faces in half.  If it were something like SolidWorks, you might be able to make the interior hollow a separate feature, with a consistent name.  Then you could suppress all the features with that name when you were doing your normal work, and  bring the hollows back, if you wanted to do some analysis that required them.  But, I don't know of any way to do that in BricsCAD.

-Joe

Tim Neumann

 Good idea Joe, only model what you have to. Sometimes when doing this stuff I go OCD on everything and make it more complicated than it has to be.

Knut Hohenberg

Did you try to reduce display mesh density ?
(by lowering the FACETRES value, or using the finer grained modeler properties)