How to speed up detailed cross section drawing production

Hi All

I am seeing on the community lots of issues with the speed cross section drawing production in ORD as a past MX user I feel your pain....

I think we have found a solution to this issue. I am using 2021 Release 1, build 10.10.02.05

In our projects we use extensive substrata models in our cross sections and these are extremely slow to create detailed sections.  It's like watching paint dry... However when the software is running I noticed it slowed down at 6% and then at 31%...

So I detached the substrata models from the 3D view... The slow down at 31% disappeared... So umm we did the same to the active DTM ie detached it.. The 6% slow down disappeared and we were back to the speed we had in MX... OH joy!!! What took hours and hours was now back to minutes!

I was concerned that the existing level annotation we use on our cross sections would not appear but it actually does appear .. I think that is coming from the XML corridor file...

So fellow users this is our process, load in the 3D terrains when you create the named boundaries you need that for the extents of your sections... then detach the DTM's before you create your sheets. After processing the annotation and sheets then load the DTM's back in.

I also run a vba to add the chainage range per sheet of our detailed sections and this was also extremely slow to run... So that now runs quickly as I load the terrains in after that has run.

I hope this helps you all until Bentley fixes the speed of drawing production in ORD it's very very slow with the massive DTM's we all use these days...

Ross

An Edit for you all. I have updated to 2021 R2 and can confirm that this workaround is no longer needed as they have seemed to have fixed this in current release which is great to see!

  • Ross:

    Thank you so much for your insights and the tips regarding production Here. Much appreciated by myself and- I am sure- many others!

    Best Regards, 

    Mark

    Mark Anthony Plum
    Chief Technology Officer

    1601 N.W. Expressway, Suite 400
    Oklahoma City, OK  73118
      
  • Awesome catch Ross, that is great. Looks like the same reason as slow Quantities by Named Boundaries, etc. with large Terrains Looks like Terrain scanning optimisation is the biggest weakness right now. 

     

    EDIT:  on testing, works great - cross section creation and annotation for very large complicated model down by approx 40%

    Regards,

    Mark


    OpenRoads Designer 2023  |  Microstation 2023.1  |  ProjectWise 2023

  • Excellent, will try this out next week. 

    I've been looking at alternative methods to create static "MX" style sections for a while, using code from the SDK.

    But if this works for us too this will be a game changer.

    Regards

    Chris


    AECOM Roads UK&I Digital Engineering, Design & Solutions Lead | Sector Information Management Lead

    Associate Director – Digital

    OpenRoads Designer 10.12 | MicroStation 2023 | ProjectWise CE 10.3.4 | ContextCapture | ProjectWise PowerShell 2023 | ProjectWise WSG API | Generative Components | OpenBridge Designer 10.12

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  • Thanks Mark 

    With our current multi strata project 2 1/2 hours down to 12 minutes last week... Just remember if you have a small design change and have to reannotate do the same remove the terrains otherwise it takes hours... Yes the software isn't optimised in places... where it should be more work required here... They need some of our real life data sets...

    I will not go into static cross section named boundaries that is another post...

    Regards

    Ross


  • Static cross sections definitely another discussion, but if this works for us like it works for you guys, I'll be stopping development of that.

    Regards

    Chris


    AECOM Roads UK&I Digital Engineering, Design & Solutions Lead | Sector Information Management Lead

    Associate Director – Digital

    OpenRoads Designer 10.12 | MicroStation 2023 | ProjectWise CE 10.3.4 | ContextCapture | ProjectWise PowerShell 2023 | ProjectWise WSG API | Generative Components | OpenBridge Designer 10.12

    Civil 3D 2023 | Dynamo | Navisworks Manage

    PowerShell | Visual Studio | Office 365 | Power Platform | Teams | SharePoint | Visio

    Speckle | BIMVision | Revizto | Solibri