I need to really speed up 3d hidden line. HELP

[mcobbs]

I draw some very extensive 3d solid models, and I need to drastically speed up my hidden line times. I am using Vectorworks Fund. 12.5.1, and have the following system specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz with 3 GB Ram @ 666mhz, ATI X1300Pro 256MB PCI-Express card, XP Pro SP2. My Autocad hidden line times are easily 5 times faster, maybe even 10 times. I really need to speed my Vectorworks up. Please let me know of any suggestions. I have adjusted my OpenGL to "program controlled". I'll do anything to speed this puppy up, it's killing me. I have all the ATI updates, windows updates, and vectorworks updates installed.

Thanks

[P Retondo]

Unfortunately the only thing I think you can do as a user is to purchase a faster processor. It would help enormously if NNA were to make all the rendering processes work to utilize multiple processors more fully.

[Biplab]

Check your 3d conversion resolution in the application preferences, and make sure it is not set to high or very high - which may result in performance problems.

[DDDesign]

Are you rendering in the design or viewports in the sheet layer? Are you mainly concerned with speed for printing or on screen? Viewport renders will speed up if the dpi is reduced via the sheet layer settings. 300 dpi is probably the best you need for printing, 100 dpi for screen.

When you're designing maybe you don't need to see the whole model every single time (eg during the design phase) - you can reduce the viewport size, or the perspective boundary.

Some times you can use the render bitmap tool - set to artistic render/tapered lines with the taper and wobble options set to zero, although it's a pity VW doesn't give you a HLR setting with this tool.

Maybe there are features that are on the model that can be simplified? Eg remove fillets - HLR doesn't display them well anyway.

Some geometries are slow to render, and sometimes the way you do things can make a difference, eg in a model with several boolean add solids, it is better to do the adding all in one operation.

Have you made good use of symbols to represent repeated elements? eg 6 instances of one symbol can take less time to render than 6 duplicates of an element.

[islandmon]

Using NURBS & Symbols really does speed things up tremendously. Also, as DDDesign mentions the end result is important. Often rendering to the screen resolution and doing screen captures can be 20x faster ( just like AutoCad which renders at 72dpi ; )