Display patterns and materials

What is the correct way of assigning a new look to a 3D item? e.g. a roof.

Not clear how a new pattern can be added to the tool palletes and from the tool paletes to the element itself.

Right click on the item, and then edit the style. There is a materials tab in there. If you have a material that is not assigned to an AEC material, simply click the button in the upper right to create a new material. In the others tab assign the new render material, in the second tab (dont have ACA open at the moment) you can assign a hatch pattern ect.

Sorry, this is not clear.

I will appreciate a more detailed explanation if possible.

Since you mentioned a roof, I'll walk you through how to create a roof: other object types should be a similar process.

Start, obviously, by creating your roof. Select it, right click and pick "Copy Roof Slab Style and Assign."

In the General tab, give your roof style a sensible name.

Under the Materials tab, Select the "Unnamed" component. On the right-hand-side of your style definition box there should be two buttons: edit material (looks like a pile of paper with a pencil leaning against it) and create material (looks like a pile of paper with an explosion in the top-righ corner).

Create a new material and give it a name. When you press OK you will see that the unnamed component will have been assigned to that material.

Use the other button to edit that material. On the Display Properties tab Select the Display Representation you want to use (for us it's nearly always "General Medium Detail," but you may well be different). On the right of the list is a box. Select this box to put a tick in it.

Yet another new dialogue box will appear! Under the "Layer/Color/Linetype" tab, ensure that "Surface Hatch" is set to be visible. You can Set any other visibility layer, colour, linetype, linetype, lineweight, or linetype scale settings you want to make here: Don't be afraid to experiment.

Once you're done move onto the "Hatching" tab. This lets you select whatewver hatching settings you want for surface, plan, or section hatch. Set these as you need them to be.

Finally, the "Other" tab. Make sure that the Top Surface Hatch Placement is ticked. Again, feel free to experiment.

OK all you're way out, update your sections and elevations, and hopefullyit should all come out as you want it.

dJE

Thanks Daniel for your detailed explanations.

I am creating the roof using the Design menu>roofs>add roof, I then right clicked and selected "convert to roof slabs". Now I managed to create the meterials (with "edite roof slab styles" as you explained.

As I notice this does not assign the pattern to the 3D item - am I right?

One more frustrating question is: How can I improve the response time and the slowliness of the display when displaying 3D on the model or the layout. this is a huge time consuming when I use the 3D. Is there a way to instruct Autocad to reduce details/accuracy and improve performance?

Response time/slowness can be greatly influenced by your hardware. What are the specs on your machine?

Usualy I use with my three years old laptop: Lenovo laptop T5600 Dual CPU at 1.83GHz with 2G RAM and display card ATI Mbility Radoeon X1400 with 126K dedicated memory - I have also a desktop with i5 760 at 2.80 GHz CPU with 2G RAM and NVIDIA Gefoect GT 240 display card with 1G dadicatd memory and this one is a new PC yet the performance on the desktop is not too much better than the laptop. Looks like there must be something that can improve (hopefully drastically) the performance within Autocad.

By the way, all 2D display is vey good - when I try to view a 3D, the response time is very very ... bad.

Both computers are starving for RAM.

The laptop is additionally hampered by the lack of a dedicated graphics card and the fact that your integrated graphics chip when it becomes overburdened starts to steal resources from main memory which there isn't a lot of in the first place.

Regarding the desktop have you checked for updates to drivers for your graphics card? Have you checked your settings using 3Dconfig within AutoCAD?

2D performance will always be better than 3D on both computers because it puts less demands on the system as a whole.

What OS are you running on both computers?

I wonderif XP will be able to use more than 3G memory? this is the lemit as I unerstand.

Regarding the 3D config setting within Autocad how is it done and what values are better to set?

You can install up to 4GB of RAM running XP but you'll be lucky if it reads a hair more than 3GB and that's if you are using the 3GB switch in your boot.ini file. You may also have to tweak your virtual memory settings but I wouldn't do that unless you start getting out of memory errors.

Type 3Dconfig at the command line and press Enter. You can find out more about it in your Help file. Read up on the Manual Performance Tuning feature too.

Thnaks for your input - with the 3Dconfig, I managed to improve the Model 3D performance - still the layout 3D is very slow.

Also, when I press on the "check for update" I see 2 internate pages are opened - one empty and one with Autocad explanations - i do not see any place for download the update for the display device.

3D is slow because your computer's memory is being used by other programs and processes. Understand? However, there are ways to recapture memory that was used but not released back to the system. There is no promise made that it will dramatically improve your system's performance however.

We can't help you with updates to your graphics card drivers if we don't know which card you are using and which version of the driver you are using. Do you have both of these pieces of information?

As I notice this does not assign the pattern to the 3D item - am I right?

This will depend on exactly what settings you changed. If you want the hatching to show up on plan you need to assign your new material to "Shrink Wrap" as well (BTW - does anybody know what exactly "Shrink Wrap" is?). Alternatively you may have hatch display off - do any of your walls etc. show hatched? Double check your "Surface Hatch Toggle." This is bottom right of your screen; right next to your cutting plane. There should be three little symbols. The left-most of these looks like a piece of paper facing you with some hatching on and a light bulb. Clicking this will toggle your surface hatch on and off.

One more frustrating question is: How can I improve the response time and the slowliness of the display when displaying 3D on the model or the layout. this is a huge time consuming when I use the 3D. Is there a way to instruct Autocad to reduce details/accuracy and improve performance?

This will sound silly, but it works. AutoCAD suffers from "memory loss," I don't entirely know what this means but it does and it slows performance. To work round it start AutoCAD, shut AutoCAD down, and restart AutoCAD. Like I said, sounds silly but it works.

Another possibility is AutoCAD "registry-apps." I don't your level of AutoCAD experience, but you can get applications to bolt onto AutoCAD. These do specific things like vehicle tracking, or road contours, or sewer pipes. As files get used and passed around consultants they can pick up references to these apps over time and these can slow performance. There is a "reg-app cleaner" available for free from the Autodesk website: try getting hold of this and cleaning your files with it. Our performance at work has improved no end thanks to being cleaned like this.

dJE

Regapps can be purged using the command line version of purge.

No matter how many times the OP starts, stops, and restarts AutoCAD his computer's performance is going to suck because his hardware is not up to the task.

Hi ReMark and daniellis, thanks for your help.

IMHO, "Shrink Wrap" is the plastic wrap used for packages; usually this is used by stores to group two or more products for promotions. The plastic is usually shrinked using hot air.

Regarding the performance; I know that the memory is a major factor for the performance, yet when the 2D works very good (and I know that 3D required more resources) it is very surprising that when one of the View Ports is in 3D, only the display (or enlargement) of a layout that includes one 3D takes above 30 seconds, and if this is the way that Autocad works - I hope that it is improved in later versions (I am using 2008).

Try freeing up some resources by shutting down programs running in the background like your antivirus program, browser, IM program, etc. and see if that helps.

What OS are you running? XP, Vista, other?

Do you have a spare flash drive hanging around? Did you know that it is possible, on some systems, to use a flash drive as additional RAM?

Since you mentioned a roof, I'll walk you through how to create a roof: other object types should be a similar process.

 

Start, obviously, by creating your roof. Select it, right click and pick "Copy Roof Slab Style and Assign."

In the General tab, give your roof style a sensible name.

 

Under the Materials tab, Select the "Unnamed" component. On the right-hand-side of your style definition box there should be two buttons: edit material (looks like a pile of paper with a pencil leaning against it) and create material (looks like a pile of paper with an explosion in the top-righ corner).

 

Create a new material and give it a name. When you press OK you will see that the unnamed component will have been assigned to that material.

 

Use the other button to edit that material. On the Display Properties tab Select the Display Representation you want to use (for us it's nearly always "General Medium Detail," but you may well be different). On the right of the list is a box. Select this box to put a tick in it.

 

Yet another new dialogue box will appear! Under the "Layer/Color/Linetype" tab, ensure that "Surface Hatch" is set to be visible. You can Set any other visibility layer, colour, linetype, linetype, lineweight, or linetype scale settings you want to make here: Don't be afraid to experiment.

Once you're done move onto the "Hatching" tab. This lets you select whatewver hatching settings you want for surface, plan, or section hatch. Set these as you need them to be.

Finally, the "Other" tab. Make sure that the Top Surface Hatch Placement is ticked. Again, feel free to experiment.

 

OK all you're way out, update your sections and elevations, and hopefullyit should all come out as you want it.

 

dJE

the shrink wrap is in my opinion a needless thing lol. Although the way to get your materials to show up, along with all end caps ect. is to assign a material less material to the wrap, and then put your material on the object you are trying to view. If your shrink is turned off, you will find that your end caps will not display correctly.

Hi all again:

After some research I purchased a new Dell Lx072 Laptop:

OS: Windows 764b Home Premium

Processor I7-2720QM

Graphic Card:nVidia geforce GT 555M with 3G memory

Disk: two WD 500G 7200 rpm

memory 8G 1333MHZ,DDR3,2X4G

My main issue is still: why the system is still very slow on displaying and mainly moving 3D objects. The response now is better but still slow.

Any advice?

It could be graphics card related. Do you have the latest driver? Is the graphics card on the "certified" list?

What size is the drawing file? Do you make extensive use of scalelists? Are there xrefs in the drawing?

You have a 64-bit OS. Is Arch 2008 32-bit?

Thanks for your prompt resply ReMark,

I have the latest driver.

The graphic card is not on the certified list - actually it is not listed at all in Autocad site under nVidia cards.

The drawing size is: 11M no xrefs, another is 3.5M with 3 xref.

Scale List - there are difefrent scale lists for each viewport (VP) - there are about 15 2D VPs in 3 layouts all are displayed OK. The only problematic and extremely slow are two 3D VPs (in a separate layout).

I am using Autocad Architecture 2010 64 bits.