memory hunger - not to say voracious...

[Anonymous]

As a designer you learn all kinds of programs and try to make best use of it. For my graphic work i use Corel. For a poster for a theatre play I had to use a picture from the internet that I couldn't find in sufficient resolution. No problem, there is Trace, generating a vector drawing from bitmap. When I did this from the bitmap below it turned out to be so coarse that a steplike zigzag line was created. No problem I thought, these are very geometric figures, lines and circular arcs, all i have to do is draw them on top of the vectors from Trace. Well, that didn't work too well...

The figures :

The bitmap is 100k maximum. On my old Dell laptop with 2GB memory and Windows XP SP2 (shows how old it is, millenium stuff) it took no more than 2 seconds to generate the vectors. Corel afterwards needed about the same time to translate this into a 1MB DXF-file.

The CAD-machine is an Intel Xeon 2.8GHz - 8 cores - 12 GB RAM. I first opened the DXF in Autocad to copy-paste it in an Inventor sketch afterwards. Now here it gets intresting. Autocad took minutes to import the DXF and show it on screen. Again minutes to transfer it to Inventor and then...

Nothing was moving anymore. I looked at the task manager and saw that the memory graph was hitting the ceiling. All 12GB in use and Windows trying to manage.

Not expecting answers here but i find it entirely "over the top" that a 1MB DXF can turn in a 10GB memory block.

Alex

[JDMather · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

.... Autocad took minutes to import the DXF and show it on screen.  

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Q1. Did you have AutoCAD set to Constrain Endpoints?

For an image that simple - rather then fooling with bitmap-dxf conversion - I think I would simply sketch over the original image with lines and arcs.

[Anonymous]

Select everything in AutoCAD and see how many entities are there.

The Vectorization might have created too many lines and points.

[Anonymous]

That was my conclusion also .... afterwards.

Still crazy that you get a 10000-fold increase in memory mapping. Probably a lot of activity going on in the background that is - in this case - not needed. Didn't want to start another CAD-software thread but I tried it also on my equally old Solid Edge at home. It worked, in 2GB of memory, but because sketching found too much points to connect to, it was really slow. So the reason I took it to work was in the hope that my "Ferrari" here would outperform the "roller skates" at home. Which was not the case.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! Did you try using DWG Underlay workflow? Save the vector file in AutoCAD as dwg. Then start a new part in Inventor -> Import -> pick the dwg file -> pick an origin plane and the center point to place the underlay. It should be very fast. When you try to create features, just create sketch on top of the underlay and then us Project DWG command to project the lines to Inventor sketch. Does it work better this way?

Many thanks!