Can Plant 3D survive in the market?

[vannmannen]

Highly disappointing that Autodesk did not upgrade Plant 3D 2014 to a level that is closer to the competing softwares.

Major shortcoming IS STILL 3D-clipping. This topic has been commented over and over again.

See attachment of how it looks when I use the section plane (which I assume is supposed to give me a volume box) The whole thing is just a joke (I get zero clipping) and you do not need to be in the engineering businees for a long time to realise that a 2 or 3 storey process module can NOT be designed in this software without any proper clipping features.

And please do not ask me to use Navis for this. The feature has to be impletemted in Plant 3D.

[paragnewe]

my machine is with 10GB RAm. and still it takes time to reload.

Sometimes after SAVEing.. it will take much time.. i don't understand why i m facing this problem. 

are you running any accelerators  for this?

have you setup your project on "server" or it is in "Local and then share folder" to all?

while xref of those 4-5 lines designers might to RELOAD those drawings again and again. m i right?are you using any LISP for that?

[patpat79]

We dont have any lisp right now, and as for xrefs, i dont see the need to delevop one, at least in our case. Have you turned on the hardware acceleration?? We set up our project in an SQL server, normally  our IT office holds our SQL database, as per our company standard. I was the one suggested it because i had read in forums that 6+ user's ideal server is SQL not SQLite. Maybe thats a factor.

[paragnewe]

is it really worth to ON acceleration? if yes then which are the options we need to check ? 

We are not on SQL.. that might be a problem for slow software. 

[patpat79]

In my machine, checked all. Texture compression and smooth display is off. Maybe that's it, how many are your users??

[paragnewe]

as i earlier told you... we are in evaluating mode.. so we are only 3 users as of now..

[patpat79]

Considering you are only 3, we had finished many projects actually , large and some small, with only SQlite and it works good. There just times that the project feels slowing when we are 5+ with SQlite only. That's why we try using the SQL for our new project which we had been working and it works fine. I am thinking of the DWG file size you are having. How many lines are there in your file. I had a recent small project consisting of only 100+ lines and tried to model all of does in just 1DWG. But as my lines were modelled one by one, i noticed the slowing performance of my machine therefore, created a new DWG file to work on. Well that's what i ahd experienced.

[Arun_Kumar_K]

Clipping function (section box like in Revit) is an imperative tool which is required for plant 3d for selecting certain portion of area and to work. Without this, no big projects can be handled. It is not a justifiable answer by creating 1000 drawings for 1000 line numbers. Autodesk please include this feature, this my request since 2012, but no one there listening, this function missing will drag your sales down, please understand and act.

[dgorsman]

All excellent points you have brought up 🙂

The two most common methods for modelling are one model per line number, and one model per design area.  The former can be thought of as wide-but-shallow, allowing models to be kept small and nimble but with the stated drawbacks.  The latter (model per design area) can be though of as narrow-but-deep, keeping all of the piping in a geometric area in a single model.  It has the advantage of letting a designer directly control all of the piping in a given area.  It really shines when doing modular design, as everything is already broken down into modules.  The drawback is dense piping arrangements can be difficult to visualize without clipping and/or isolation.  It also requires good area breakdowns to keep the models workable in file size, number of designers, and connectivity.  I would *never* recommend all piping in a single model except for the most simple work e.g. wellsite tie-in.

Turning on hardware acceleration is vital for performance.  When its off, the computer is using the CPU and RAM to handle the display instead of the dedicated video card.  With only 10 GB RAM to play with, thats a huge slice to take off.

[JohnHolder]

This has been a great discussion!

I don't fit into any nitch since we design Aquaculture sites.  It seems I fall into both wide-shallow and narrow-deep catagories.

I use a lot of xrefs but I have a single drawing for each piece of equipment and a single file for each type of piping.  Then a sub-master file for each area and a master file to tie everything together.

eg all the supply piping in one file, return piping in one file etc for area 1, 2 ,3 etc.

then when I start doing ORTHO drawings, I make seperate files to xref all relevent files into it to make updating easier - controling what is shown without having to freeze or unload any xref's

John.

[Arun_Kumar_K]

John, dgorsman, Pat and other valued users,

We should all give a joint conclusion to Autodesk.

Section box tool is required for clipping for a complex models for better visualisation, clashless routing.

If all agree, please put kudos for this reply, so that it will be easy for Autodesk to conclude our requirement based on the kudos received.

Hope Peter is seeing this whole discussion of this topic.

[patpat79]

Having always a new and better feature for each users is always the BEST. ^_^ i dont really know that clipping but maybe its a huge help for everyone.

[Arun_Kumar_K]

Peter, we would like to get your views on this section box tool, whether is it practically possible to develop a tool in Plant3d. Can you through some light on this topic

[Prasanth_R]

Any solution yet?