As projects get more complex and more detailed, approaching deadlines might cause us to use hasty workarounds instead of modeling precisely to get the job done. This might cause your project to become heavy and slow down your Archicad experience. It’s good practice to check the health of your projects from time to time, in this article I will discuss some tips to keep your project balanced.
Library Management
The first topic I would like to address is library management. I've had users contact me when their Archicad is running slow and in many cases the cause of this is large embedded libraries. As a rule of thumb it is best to keep your project’s embedded library under 100MB, this can also cause a teamwork project to open slowly and have long send and receive times.
Another workflow to consider when you’re working with an external consultant using Revit and collaborating with IFC files, it’s best practice to save the library as an external LCF file instead of saving it to your embedded library.
2D/3D Performance
Solid Element Operations is a great feature and helps with the design aspects of almost every project, however too many can slow down your project’s performance. Once you notice your project becoming slower it’s time to review how many your project contains and clear unnecessary connections.
I also get quite a few cases where slow loading times is an issue, it is usually caused by too many polygons in a project. Downloaded objects can sometimes contain thousands of polygons. I had a case where a downloaded basin with very curved edges and detailed taps was placed in a healthcare project, copied across floors and hospital blocks. As you can imagine once this was replaced with standard Archicad basin’s the project ran quite smoothly afterwards. It’s possible to check the polygons in your project with the Polygon Counting Tool.
If you would like to learn more about keeping your Archicad file healthy, click here to discover more tips and tricks.
Contact TotalCAD today for more support. www.totalcad.co.za info@archicad.co.za
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