Working With Large Files in Autodesk Inventor

IMAGINiT Tricks Tutorial: Don't get stuck waiting for your files — update your settings and save time now.

Next, select the Drawing tab (figure 3).

Figure 3. In the Drawing tab, adjust line weight, view previews, and more.

Line Weight Display. De-select the line weight display check box improves performance of the drawing during edits, annotations, and activation, but not during printing.

View Preview Display. This option determines how the view previews when you are in the process of placing a view in a drawing. The default is set to "All Components." This selection causes Inventor to not only preview all the components in the view as you move the mouse around the graphics window to locate the view, but in the background the computer is heavily crunching the numbers to display these entities during the entire process. The system recalculates these edges at a feverish pace as you move the mouse around. You can understand how this default setting can eat up processing speed. To solve this problem, select the least taxing option from the pull-down, the Bounding Box.

Bounding Box offers a rectangular boundary of the view once you set placement, then the program generates the display edges in the view. Selecting the Section View Preview as Uncut check box to the right of the Preview pull-down accomplishes the same preview, but for section views be sure to select that option as well.

Enable Background Updates. When you enable this option, raster views are created temporarily as the precise view display is calculated in the background, thus allowing you to keep working in the drawing of very large assemblies. The views will be shown with green border until completed and a green node in the Model Browser which you can hover the mouse over and see the percentage of the computing process completed.

Note: You can save and/or close a drawing while the raster views are computing. The process will be stopped at that point but will continue when you activate the drawing file again.

Memory Saving Mode. This option loads the components into memory before and during view creation then dumps them once the view is created. Because of this memory intensive process, this setting should only be used for very large assemblies and parts. You might be better served to set this as a file specific setting by opening the drawing file and activating Document Settings | Drawing, and set the Memory Saving Mode drop-down to Always (figure 4).

Figure 4. When working with large assemblies and parts, check out the Memory Saving mode.

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