Generation speed of General Arrangement (GA) views

When you are experiencing slow generation of General Arrangement views, then it is important to consider the following factors that will slow down the view generation : 

  • The number of objects within the camera's bounds
  • The type of objects within the camera's bounds
  • The amount of annotations that will be added
  • The amount of dimensions that will be added


To reduce the time for General Arrangement view generation you can take the following actions : 

  • Reduce the amount of objects in the 3D model. The more objects, the more time will be spent.
    Remove as many unnecessary helper objects, blocks and XRefs from the 3D model as possible.
  • Always be careful with drawings that you received from someone else, and that you are using as a 2D underlayer for example.
    You will not know how many objects that such drawing contains. Often these are full of small lines, curves, points, solids, faces, meshes, and blocks.
    But each object is processed for view generation so if speed is an issue then it is advised to remove all the objects coming from external drafters, or at least rigorously clean up the objects.
    You could erase these objects from other drafters to learn whether they are slowing down the generation.
  • Use a Camera box to limit the amount of objects on the view
  • Disable the creation of annotations and dimensions during view creation to learn whether the cause is the generation of the view itself, or the large amount of annotations or dimension
  • Does the model contain a lot of gratings? You can reduce the Grating display accuracy to rule this out as the cause of slowdown.


Generation speed of workshop drawings

The generation of workshop drawings can be slowed down by the following factors : 

  • Enable the Fast sheet generation mode in the Generate Part and Assembly shop drawings dialog box.
    Enabling the fast mode will reduce the time spent on choosing the best location of dimensions on the views and views on the sheet.
    The resulting dimension and view location choices may sometimes be less optimal due to this, but the sheet generation speed will be greatly reduced.
  • When there are many formats and many scales in the sheet generation settings, then this will slow down the entire process.
    When the first format and scale combination in the list does not fit, then the next format and scale in the list will be attempted until a combination that fits is found. But each of these attempts take a considerable amount of time because the dimension and annotation positioning are completely redone for each attempt.
    Reduce the amount of entries in this list to reduce the total time of generation. You can use larger gaps in scales to achieve this.
  • Single parts with many cuts and assemblies with many parts will take longer to generate because of the amount of dimensions and annotations. The more dimensions and annotations there are, the complexer the placement will be and the more time that is needed. There is nothing that can be done to speed up the process if this is the cause.


Tip When you are working on a project with many sheets, it is advised to Refresh the sheets instead of deleting and regenerating them after a change to the 3D model.
Refreshing workshop sheets is very fast compared to generating them, and you will also keep the manual changes and additions that you did to the sheets.