Hi Paul,

> The image is of a small agricultural machine.

Looks great!


> Saved it as a AI file but for some reason Inkscape would not open it, so I saved it as a
> PDF and then opened it in PS. Fantastic.

MoI saves to the older AI version 8 file format, while I think Inkscape's AI loader can only load AI version 9 and higher AI files which are actually the same as PDF files. For going into Inkscape try using PDF format export out from MoI rather than AI format.


> I tried with a 156MB STEP file with this result (see attached image). I think I've discussed with you
> Michael before about very large assembly models.

MoI does not currently have an instancing system, so if the STEP file has many repeated elements in it as instances, those will expand to independent copies of objects and tend to consume a lot of memory.


> MOI had no problem opening the file but wont save it as a PDF.

You're likely running out of memory during the PDF file generation, which requires a fair chunk of memory in order to do its own processing.



> My PC has 32GB of RAM so I don't believe that's the issue. Any idea as to assembly limit would help me.

MoI is currently a 32-bit program and so it is only able to address a maximum of 4GB of ram.

For heavier models it can help a lot to adjust a display setting to make a rougher display mesh. By default MoI makes a quite dense display mesh which makes things look nice on screen but can consume a lot of memory if there are a very large number of surfaces in the model like it looks like you have there. To make a coarser display mesh go to Options > View > Meshing parameters and set "Mesh angle" to 30 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". This will result in a coarser display mesh used for the shaded surface display which will make things look rather more jaggedy on screen but it will reduce the memory consumption load by quite a bit, maybe enough for you to get your PDF export done.

In the future I'm going to look into making MoI a 64-bit program so it can make better use of all your system RAM instead of only 4GB of it. There will be a lot of work involved in doing that though.

- Michael