Speeding up Surface Shading

[Karl@CP PISTONS]

Hi All,

How do I speed up surface shading? It took twenty five minutes to shade a drawing containing about 35 surfaces. The computer here is running XP-home @ 2.0Ghz and 512 mag ram. Video card is an NVidia GForce Ti 4200. I know that I need to upgrade to at least 9.1 but only have 8.? (newest supported)

Thanks

Karl

[betts]

Do you have "open-GL" unchecked in your config?

[gcode]

Check "Chord Height" in the Shading Settings.

 

The defualt setting is .002"

The bigger it is, the faster a model will shade

the smaller,the better the appearance.

 

Is the part very large? Last year I did some

aircraft bulkheads that were 15ft by 4ft by 6 inches. It took a while to shade the solid model, but not 25 minutes !!!

[Lee.]

Betts,

 

That check mark has not much significance on the problem.

 

The checkmark will appear disappear depending on the staus of shade / no-shade on your model.

 

HTH

[kwolf]

Did you check (model) the surfaces? Probably there's something wrong with them, like a self intersecting surface or alike.

[Karl@CP PISTONS]

Thanks for the replies,

I did a analyse - check model with the default setting of .005. message box says

0 of 50 are trimmed

20 internal sharp corners found ????

Does this mean the surfaces are bad?

If so how do I fix them?

 

The shading settings are still at the default of .002

 

I just learned not to save the file while shaded!!

file get takes 20 - 30 min.

 

Size of the model is approx 20" diameter.

Any other suggestions, Other then upgrade to 9 then X.

Karl

[Lee.]

Do you have a solid?

 

If not, maybe check model at different tols until it iis good, then shade at that tol or greater.

 

HTH

[betts]

No Lee you are mistaken. From personal experience I can say that depending on your system, the open GL setting makes a big difference. Now with my current system it means nothing, but when I was using other older systems in the past, probably running V8 at the time, there was a huge difference, and hitting the shade button would actually puke MC if there were tough surfaces to shade. I can't remember the exact system specs of those boxes right now (CRS), but it was real.

 

As for Karl's current problem, all the suggestions above are good and I didn't mean to take us off track here.

 

If the internal sharp corners are severe, it may cause trouble, but with only 50 untrimmed surfs I would guess that they were created from something pretty funky, and could be simplified. I have made surfs that were from nasty splines and really stretching MC's ability and they would take forever to shade.

 

Well that's my .02

[Müřlıń®]

quote:

---

file get takes 20 - 30 min.

---

Woah...

 

What I do in a crappy spline situation is to break up the spline and create arcs and lines.

 

For most general purpose machining apps, surfaces made from arcs and lines that are slightly non tangent will not be noticed.

 

This will greatly improve file get.

[Allan]

I'm guessing the file get slowness is when the shading is on and you read the file in?

 

Where did the file originate, how big is the file?

[El Scotthead]

I've found that when I have a large(inch-wise) surface model, it will take forever to open, shade, and toolpath. Murlin's approach of "cleaning up the geometry"(even making new surfaces) seems to help the most. Sometimes making a solid works too. Both approaches take some time, but when compared to the time(an aggrevation) of working with a slow model....well, you see where I'm going.

 

Good luck,

 

scott

[Richard Thomas - Mastercam UK]

Just wondering... have you checked the graphics acceleration setting on your computer? Maybe someone had slowed it right down at some point in the past.

 

You can check this by going into the Control Panel, then Display, then the Settings page, press Advanced and finally look at the Troubleshoot page. Usually the slider would be on full, all the way to the right.

 

I have a TI4200 at home, and V8 never had any big problems with shading.

[Karl@CP PISTONS]

Thanks guys for all the advice, to all

Nothing seems to help. File was created by me in MC

and is almost all splined coons patches. File size is 63.8 Mb huge for the drawings I am used to. Guess I'll work with it as is Can't wait til I add toolpaths might take a week for file get. Maybe I'll load file at 5:00 then at 8:00 next day it'll be ready.

Thanks again for all the help

Karl

[Allan]

If the file was created in Mastercam and you have 20 internal sharp corners, you will have nothing but trouble with it. The surfaces should be recreated as I doubt that youll get the results you want. Perhaps you can upload the file to the FTP site so we can have a look?

 

Allan