MEP Model - Lengthy regen

[jamesgchambers]

working on a 40,000sf building where the MEP engineer has been building a pretty thorough model (we're currently in CA). I've been avoiding having the MEP model's workset loaded because it drastically impacts regen time. However, I'm doing some work that requires me coordinating their model with ours. If I load their model into the 3D view, it takes 1min 16sec to generate the view (hardware acceleration is on). Any thoughts on what's causing this? And any potential fixes?

The arch model is 147mb, MEP is 49mb.

I'm running Windows 7, 64-bit. 2.67GHz, 8GB ram. NVidia Quadro FX 880M (driver 8.17.11.9805).

[cliff collins]

The performance seems about as expected given your description of files sizes, model complexity/size and your hardware.

You might consider adding some more RAM as this is a memory-intensive chore for the system to handle.

If using RAC 2011, you can now also control worksets across linked models.
You might see if the MEP model could be broken up into more worksets so that you could
control/turn on/off a bit more of their content as needed.

cheers

[jamesgchambers]

Okay, thanks Cliff - reasonably reassuring!

We're still on 2010 in this project, so I guess I'll just push on.

[kyle.bernhardt]

working on a 40,000sf building where the MEP engineer has been building a pretty thorough model (we're currently in CA). I've been avoiding having the MEP model's workset loaded because it drastically impacts regen time. However, I'm doing some work that requires me coordinating their model with ours. If I load their model into the 3D view, it takes 1min 16sec to generate the view (hardware acceleration is on). Any thoughts on what's causing this? And any potential fixes?

The arch model is 147mb, MEP is 49mb.

I'm running Windows 7, 64-bit. 2.67GHz, 8GB ram. NVidia Quadro FX 880M (driver 8.17.11.9805).

James,
If you're specifically talking about View Regeneration, the performance slowdown you're seeing is likely related to the complexity of the MEP elements, specifically the number of "faces" that our graphics engine has to process.

Although you only see lines typically in a 2D Plan view, under the hood our hood the graphics engine starts with the 3D geometry of the elements within the View Range of the current view, and then extracts the lines that result from those faces given the various factors at play in the View (Cut Plane, Plan Regions, Model Graphics Style, Visibility/Graphics Settings, etc.). In some cases, this can take a whole lot of time.

I could go into detail on how all these factors influence the performance, but let's just focus on the major ones:

Model Graphics Style
This is probably the single biggest thing you can change. The Model Graphics Style defines what level of processing we do to the Faces as we render the linework in the View. For example, if you were to set the View to Wireframe, most likely the View Regeneration time would be extremely fast compared to Hidden Line, simply because the graphics engine didn't need to compare the Faces spatially to determine which one to extract Lines from.

Now, that may not be practical given the View type, but if you just want to do some modeling/annotating, and can handle the "visual clutter" that might result from Wireframe, this is likely to b the biggest bang for the buck. In some cases, Shaded with Edges could also be faster than Hidden Line, but just play around a bit.


View Discipline
As an Architectural User, you're likely not to be dealing with anything other than Architectural View Discipline, but this setting can make a huge difference, as it can enable different View Behavior, some of which can take more time to render. Setting a Hidden Line View to Mechanical or Electrical View Discipline will enable special rendering of Hidden Lines suited to MEP document output, like dashed lines and gaps. These require additional passes through the faces in the View as we render it.


Category Visibility
Depending on the objects in the View, simply shutting off certain categories will remove elements, and their Faces, from the View Rendering process, which can make a big difference.There you go, try those out and report back if they help.

Cheers,
Kyle B