Hi Grendel,

> I was trying to stuff a large assembly through it to see if it could do it. This model has
> 2647 pieces and a lot of lines, I waited about 45 minutes and the line task bar on top
> right of the UI would never come up. The cursor just sat there with the "I'm thinking
> about your request" circle...

Thanks for sending me the file through e-mail for me to test with.

The problem in this case is due to MoI running very close to out of 32-bit memory address space right during the setup stages of the export. When open virtual address space becomes scarce it can make memory allocator performance decrease a whole lot as it has to hunt around a whole lot to find any open memory areas.

If you free up more memory then you can avoid this and get more normal behavior for this export. The easiest way to free up memory in this particular case is to adjust the display settings to make a very rough display mesh setting before opening this file up. To do that before opening the file go to Options > View > Meshing parameters and set “Mesh angle” to 50 degrees and uncheck “Add detail to inflections”.

With those settings, then MoI does not consume as much memory just to load your file, and then there’s just barely enough space for the additional memory load required by the export itself. With those settings I was able to successfully export a PDF file of your model with the typical high complexity model behavior of about 12 seconds for the progress bar to show up and about 6 minutes total time for the export. That’s on a pretty run-of-the-mill core i5 system.

This type of model with a whole lot of repeated elements would benefit a lot from instancing, I’m hoping to implement that in the future.

Another way you could lighten the load for making a PDF export would be to delete a bunch of the objects on the back side of the view that won’t be seen anyway and save that off to a separate 3DM file. Then start up a fresh instance of MoI and load in that lightened 3DM file and then export that. That would probably be good to do to get a higher quality export because it would also be good to bump up the “Canvas megapixel resolution” option at 2D export time as well to get better fidelity in the smaller details, but that also consumes more setup memory for the export as well.

At any rate if you can avoid pushing MoI right to the very limit of running out of 32-bit memory during the export setup you should see better behavior.

Thanks,
- Michael