Shadows and printing

[clog boy]

Are shadows slow for anyone else here too? Regenerating a view (with every zoom, pan, in other words movement) takes forever. Printing a sheet with shadow views takes ten minutes to process (well, five at the very least) and when printing to high quality raster images takes even longer. Only to find out the plotter runs out of memory and prints the last ten inches white.

What, if anything, am I doing wrong? This stuff is agonizing when pushing for a deadline.

[rmejia]

Do you have OpenGL turned on ? The way I work, I turn shadows on only on finished views ready for printing. They are off while I am working the view. When it is time to print I usually open up another Revit instance to open the file read only, and print on that Revit instance while I continue working on the other Revit window open with the same file. I do not use the highest quality (presentation) because it takes forever, the one before it (high) works well and takes half as much time.

[clog boy]

I have OpenGL turned off, because turning it on messes up the shadows for me. But I already know it's faster.

[Andre Carvalho]

Only to find out the plotter runs out of memory and prints the last ten inches white.

I had problems trying to print with shadows from Revit. My plotter was behaving the same way yours is. The solution I found was to print to PDF. Once the PDF was created, I opened it and sent it to the printer. Worked like a charm...

But you are right that wen we turn on shadows, it's almost impossible to work. At least on my workstation here...

Andre Carvalho

[rjcrowther]

Yep, shadows on only at the last instance.

[mruehr]

i use the Zan Printer it prints to pdf tiff jpeg png bmp
some of our elevations take 1 hour so before i go home i print to Image(Png).
the next day i put the image via Drafting view on the sheet
now a Quick print run is easy
besides at times i have to make last minute changes to the floor plan
so i know my elevation may not be 100% right but looks good
we do the same for Perspectives with Shadows
http://www.zan1011.com

[brenehan]

Has anyone had any more ideas on this?
Printing a sheet on one of our jobs currently takes an hour. This makes workflow very difficult.

Currently we print to a CutePDF driver. We are using OpenGL Hardware acceleration. And it still takes 60 minutes.

The only thing I have done to speed up the process, is to print to a DWF and then create the PDF (our job is overseas so our drawing transfer standard is PDF). Going through the DWF system seems to save 20 minutes or so.

Any suggestions in speeding printing up, would be great. Thanks.

Brian