I was just curious if anyone has had the privilege of designing around large customer supplied files (.step, .iges, catia, NX, etc.) and what youve done (if anything) to improve performance in Inventor when working with these files.
To answer your question on how large are these files:
- individual step files that average 600MB with the largest being 1.2GB which then once transalated yield multiple ipts and iams with the "master" .iam being about 30MB to 60MB and made up of multiple ipts that range from 1MB to 150MB
-individual catia files that average 400MB that when transalated become 200MB+ individual IPTs
Now maybe these files arent that large maybe this is small by todays standards I dont know which is why I am curious if anyone else is using inventor to design around files this size or larger and what kind of performance they are seeing along with any tricks, tips they might have for working with these sort of files aside from the computer hardware (see computer specs in signature)
Thank you
Have you tried either using LOD's to turn off the excess parts not needed all the time or create a factory file with members that do the same thing?
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What do you mean by factory file? And yes we've tried LODs for the files that come in as assemblies with little performance increase
What I mean is an iassembly (or factory file) and in the member table you can specify parts to be suppressed.
If this solved your issue please mark this posting "Accept as Solution".
Or if you like something that was said and it was helpful, Kudos are appreciated. Thanks!!!!
Ok but how is that different than just creating a LOD, Also we generally remove anything that we do not need before we start designing around the data that translates into an IAM. I think the bigger concern is the single IPT (Usually a single Base or complex surface) that is 200MB+ in size that we have to design around.
IMO.. If nothing is done in the native system (catia/nx) to reduce the file size before exporting then very little can be done in Inventor besides
#1-LOD
#2-Completely remove components (ie get rid of all screws/fasteners/non-critical components)
#3-Simplified Represantations/Shrinkwrap/Assembly substitutes.
Try the simplification functions (envelopes/simplfied parts) if you haven't already done so.. It can take some time but I suspect it might be less that the time you spend just waiting on Inventor because of the large file sizes of other parts.
Sometimes when I import iges files I first repair them, then derive the solid and leave the surfaces behind. They are much smaller, but I wouldn't like to do that over 1 000 times.