printing sooooooooo sloooooooooow

[CHRISTINE.S]

Allo,

I am trying to print my elevations (with shadow) on my plotter and it makes my computer veryyyyyyyyyy slooooooooow.. I am talking hours of my system being frozen because i sent a file to the plotter. If anyone has a solution it would be GREATLY appreciated.

Merci,
Christine

[neb1998]

faster machine and lots of memory.........I used to have these problems on my laptop which is an amd 3000 processor with 512 ram.

All of my workstations now have 2 gig ram with a min of a 3800 dual core amd processor and the printing speeds are much better with shadows enabled

[Chad Smith]

Working with shadows and especially when printing are painfully slow. On average it takes me about 20 mins to print a sheet with four elevations.

[dhurtubise]

Do you print directly ? Are you using a PostScript driver ? Try printing to PDF first.

[Chad Smith]

Prints are spooled, and printing to a PDF takes half as long again than printing to a physical printer.

[sjsl]

We create btimaps or tiff files and then paste them back into our final sheet for presentation. Can't wait that long.

[Joef]

Any file that is really that slow should be sent off to support. Even if they cannot do much to help they can at least see what the problem is and perhaps fix it in the next release. I printed off a sheet today with eight elevations all with shadows. My computer is nothing special and printing only took a few minutes. I have decreased the shadow intensity to about 25 or so. Perhaps that might help.

Joe

[Mr Spot]

We have a reasonable size project that when printed with shadows takes about 2-2.5 hours per sheet. There are 4 elevation sheets with shadows so we have to allow an extra day each time we need to issue. Not much fun. We disable them if the elevations weren't so flat to begin with.

One day maybe this and the view depth clipping will be improved.

[petervanko]

I am presently having this problem, too!!! Glad to hear it is not just me...

I found out something interesting, though: if you have raster images in a titleblock family, that may be the culprit. I changed my raster image printing quality to "low" and had my elevations--which took about an hour to print 4 of them yesterday--take only minutes this time.

[Revitator]

A couple of things that we find useful to speed up shadowed elevations:

Adjust the elevation clip planes to restrict the view depth - clip the building off just beyond the ridge of the roof for example.

Switch off visibility for interior furnishings, etc. (Anything you can't see in the elevation)

Substitute 2D cutouts for 3D elements (embed 2D trees into your 3D tree component families for example)

[Mr Spot]

I am presently having this problem, too!!! Glad to hear it is not just me...

I found out something interesting, though: if you have raster images in a titleblock family, that may be the culprit. I changed my raster image printing quality to "low" and had my elevations--which took about an hour to print 4 of them yesterday--take only minutes this time.
It's much quicker as the entire view is then printed at low quality. Views with shadow's turned on are printed using your raster settings.