Speeding up 3D - Please help

[MarkySparky]

I doing 3D modeling in autoCAD and i am having great difficultly in editing, or even zooming or panning my drawing. It is either very slow, or stops responding completely. Have you any suggestions ? I have 1Gb of ram with a P4 2.8Ghz. Thanks....

[VERYCIVILDRAFTER]

What is the size of the file that's giving you trouble, and can you reduce it at all?

[csiarch]

How much VIDEO ram (Vram) do you have? Adding more Vram can speed things up considerably.

What size is your file? (Already asked)

Are there any 3d objects that could be composed of 3d faces and/or 3d regions instead of solids?

Suggestion: Make a copy of your drawing (Saveas) some other file name.

Start WBLOCKING 3d objects out to separate drawings. Use 0,0,0 for the insert point.

Insert each one of the blocks you created back into your test drawing.

See if this speeds things up any. Also Purge, delete layer filters, non-used layers, text styles etc.

Hope this helps.

[VERYCIVILDRAFTER]

I don't work in 3d much, so I needed some time to think about this. Are you viewing your drawing as Hidden or Shaded? If you are, load the "SHADE" toolbar, and use 2D or 3D Wireframe. That will definitely speed things up for you.

[csiarch]

V.C.D: The way I interpreted his original post was that he had many, many 3D objects included in his drawing. I suspect many of them are solids which are VERY memory intensive.

Creating blocks of 3dsolids and reinserting them into the drawin will help speed things up considerably. The ironic thing is that many people don't do this, forgetting that AutoCad works faster when it only has to reference an object (i.e. an inserted block) as opposed to chewing on it real time.

Using 3dface and/or regions to depict simple objects that have no complex faces will significantly reduce file size and cut down on slow regens because these objects are must less complex that 3D solids.

A combination of using blocks and less complex 3D objects will noticeably improve performance.