Speed / Productivity issue with layouts

[Haneef Tayob]

I'm currently busy with a relatively large project with approximately 100 A1 sheets set up in it, with a few external links to other archicad .pln file spread throughout.

I just find myself becoming extremely frustrated when I need to quickly print a full set. The updating just takes so long. I can easily wait over an hour.

I've also tried options where the layouts are in a separate .pln file. That option seems quicker to work on the model, but printing takes longer as different sessions of archicad are opened during updating.

I've set most sections to be manually updated, but plans are left on auto update. I've also split up schedules and detail layouts into other separate .pln files to minimise the number of layout in one file.

Any tips / suggestions? Is my pc too slow?

[Andy Thomson]

On large jobs it is not uncommon to stop all work thursday, update (all hotlinks from bottom to top), rebuild all elevations/sections, and update all drawings all day long friday (using weekend as emergency buffer if something goes wrong) to meet a monday publish/print deadline. This is an area of the program that I believe is receiving some serious (speed) attention.

[Anonymous]

With the good old PlotMaker + PMK's you could have the whole friday off work

[TomWaltz]

Juha wrote:
With the good old PlotMaker + PMK's you could have the whole friday off work

yeah, right, after you spent the last 4 days opening files and publishing them.

There is not a force on this earth that would make me want to go back from the AC10/11 layouts & workflow to Plotmaker and/or PMKs.

[NandoMogollon]

I think a good solution is "brute-force" in this case.

Try to do all the layouting work in a really good pc ( the better available) and let it do the work.
Let it do it, don't do anything else... so good the processor so fast the updating.

May be it is not the Best solution... but works.
And you can work in another PC...

Regards

[Anonymous]

TomWaltz wrote:

Juha wrote:
With the good old PlotMaker + PMK's you could have the whole friday off work

yeah, right, after you spent the last 4 days opening files and publishing them.

There is not a force on this earth that would make me want to go back from the AC10/11 layouts & workflow to Plotmaker and/or PMKs.

"Deadline" could be one such a force

[TomWaltz]

Juha wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:

Juha wrote:
With the good old PlotMaker + PMK's you could have the whole friday off work

yeah, right, after you spent the last 4 days opening files and publishing them.

There is not a force on this earth that would make me want to go back from the AC10/11 layouts & workflow to Plotmaker and/or PMKs.

"Deadline" could be one such a force

"want" was the key word there.... Not to mention, the PMKs took longer than the current process!

[Haneef Tayob]

Just had the most productive day (although it's still only Wednesday )

Opened up my project. After waiting for at least half an hour for my project to open up, I cancelled everything and exited ArchiCad, deciding that I've had it with staring at the screen or having links printing as blanks.

I then figured out how I'm going to split up the project into different files with the least amount of externally linked drawings. It took about an hour to split everything into 3 files.

Once done, I opened up the 3 files in separate instances and continued working on them. Downside is that when I need to print or publish them I have to do it in 3 steps instead of once. Not the most elegant of solutions, but at least I met my deadline.

I agree with Tom in not wanting to go back to plotmaker and pmk's, but as Andryo mentions, this part of the program needs some urgent attention. If there was no need for workarounds, then nobody would wish for dumb-good old pmk's

regards

[Karl Ottenstein]

Haneef wrote:
Downside is that when I need to print or publish them I have to do it in 3 steps instead of once.

You can place (via Organizer - top left button to browse to other files) views from any number of files onto layouts in yet another file. The external files will update with their own background ArchiCADs...so if you have multiple processors, you should still see some update improvement.

The file with the layouts could contain part of your model, or none of it (like old PlotMaker - layouts only).

Edit: duh, sorry, just ready your earlier posts where I see you have tried these methods. The problem might be not enough processors and memory to support multiple AC's running while updating the layouts? Although Andy's post suggests deeper problems.

Karl

[Anonymous]

We have a project with 22 floors. The project leader had made 4 elevation variations to another PLP-file and we tried to link them to the main team project just a few hours before the deadline. What happened?

The ArchiCAD opened background ArchiCADs and started to generate the linked file's floor plans from bottom up even if the facades were not linked/live anymore. No need to say waiting for 4x22 floorplans generating before getting the needed elevations to the layout took hours (too long) and did not meet the deadline even close.

So I wonder what is sooooo good in this new integrated "PlotMaker"?
It somehow reminds me about all the worst www-sites, where even the thumbnails are 2.5MB and take ages to load.

Maybe integrating PlotMaker was a good idea, but layouting should have been done possible with external [pmk] files as before.


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Regards, Juha