NavisWorks Crashes

[art.theusch]

I continue to have a multiple crashes when using NavisWorks 2009.

The problem arises when I am navigating through the model and it has a abnormal amount of detail to regenerate. I can duplicate this problem fairly easily by navigating with the "walk tool" through highly detailed areas. Using the hand tool and the orbit tool can crash, but not nearly as often as when using the walk tool. The program stops responding and the NavisWorks Manage 2009 Error Report comes up indicating Error: Unhandled Exception. I have submitted the information to Autodesk several times using this tool. I don't believe this was happening prior to updating to 2009 from 2008.

I am running this on a Dell Latitude D620 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz processor and 3GB of memory. The video card is an nVidia Quadro NVS 110M with 256MB of memory. I am running Windows XP Professional 32-bit.

One interesting note: we are using a license server for this (and other) Autodesk products. We have one license, which I use. I typically have this license checked out for a long period of time as I frequently go out to sites and work from home as well. This crash behavior does *not* occur when I am not on the network where the license server resides. It doesn't seem like the licensing should be an issue when using the walk tool, but I do not recall any instances where I've been at home, on site, or at a regional office (which is connected back to my office via VPN) where I have experienced this crash. Is there anything I can look at to determine what is causing the crash? I have viewed the data that is included in the report (a .XML file and a .DMP file) but the contents do not make sense to me (and the .DMP file cannot be viewed with a text editor).

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[david.kingham]

Have you tried turning on Occlusion Culling or turning off Hardware Acceleration?

[art.theusch]

That seems to have solved the problem. Just curious, what does each of the functions you suggested do. I noticed that objects are not as crisp as they used to appear on the screen. For example I typically make all the HVAC 60% transparent so we can see through them. Which one of those functions affect that.

Thanks again, I have dealt with this fustration for far to long and finally had enough of it.

[david.kingham]

You should try to leave hardware acceleration on and just use occlusion culling, turning off hardware acceleration will have a negative effect on performance

From the help file:

Select the Hardware Acceleration check box to allow NavisWorks to utilize any available OpenGL hardware acceleration on your video card. If your video card drivers do not function well with NavisWorks, then you may wish to disable this option. This option is grayed out if your video card does not support OpenGL hardware acceleration.

Select the Occlusion Culling check box to have NavisWorks only draw visible objects, i.e. ignores objects that are behind other objects. This option will improve the display performance when much of the model is not visible. For example, when you're walking down the corridor of a building. Occlusion culling can only be utilized on a machine with an OpenGL 1.5 compliant graphics card.

[Teresa.Martin]

Updating your graphics driver will help as well. I changed my driver to the Nvidia driver certified for Autocad 2009 and witnessed an immediate improvement. I would research your graphics card and driver to see if this might be the case.

[dgorsman]

Stupid question time - is the Quadro NVS 110M graphics card FULLY compliant to OpenGL 1.5 or DirectX 9.x (or higher)?

[Teresa.Martin]

I would check the manufacturer's website...