Wish to turn off preview of beams and columns!

[Karl Wir_n]

Is there a way to turn off the preview image that is generated every time you open the beams or column settings dialog? It takes a second too long to generate and is most of the time not useful. If you try to be productive and efficient these small delays are so annoying!
/Karl W

[Barry Kelly]

Karl wrote:
Is there a way to turn off the preview image that is generated every time you open the beams or column settings dialog?

No, not that I am aware of.
It is the only part of the settings dialogue that can't be closed.
You can alter most settings in the info box where there is no preview, but you can't alter all settings there.

There should not be any lengthy delay.
What Archicad version and operating machine are you using?
What are your machine specs?

Is your Archicad version up to date and are your video drivers up to date?

Barry.

[Karl Wir_n]

Thank you for answering Barry! As i suspected there is probably no way of turning the preview off.
/Karl

My computer specs:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7800X CPU @ 3.50GHz
128GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

[Barry Kelly]

You machine seems fine.
I would make sure you are using the latest build of Archicad and also that your video drivers are up to date.

Barry

[jkershaw]

One of our machines just started exhibiting this behavior as well - extreme lag in generating previews in the column and beam dialog boxes. Did not have this issue on this machine - or any machine - until this week. 

Machine/version in question is same spec as my signature. File works file on other machines.

Any ideas?

[BradJAllen19]

We are having the same issue as well. We are using AC26 and when we open the column or beam settings dialogue or the favorites pallet there is a lag and it takes at least 5-10 seconds to load the image.  You can't change any settings until the image is loaded and if you change the settings in a way that effects the visible geometry it has to re-load.

I've mostly been getting around this by using the info box as much as possible to change settings but I've been updating a lot of our favorites the last few days and it is really slowing down progress since it loads every time I update something that has a preview image.

[jkershaw]

We haven't had this issue in a while, but when we were having it more often, the workaround was to ensure the 3D window had been generated at least once prior to opening the beam/column dialogue box. 

[Karl Wir_n]

I started this thread in 2021. Now it is 2023 and it seems that more and more people are having the same problem. Watching that blue circle spin for too many seconds just to generate a 3d-miniature of your element, before you can edit, is so annoying. 

[BradJAllen19]

Hi all. A bit of an update on my end.

I sent the question to Graphisoft Support and they helped us get to the root of what our specific problem seemed to be.

Our company server is cloud based but we are not currently using BIMCloud.  Because of this our custom library was saved on the server and pathed that way in each project.  He informed me that was not the best way to do it and suggested we could have the library stored on the server but that there should be a copy on our hard drive in the Graphisoft folder so that everyone could path their library to the same place but have the library accessed directly from the hard drive.

This seems to have worked to improve the speed that beam and column previews load. This does create a potential issue with making sure everyone is always 100% up to date with the library on their hard drive but we have a small team and don't make significant changes on a regular basis so should be fine.

Thanks Kevin Losso for your help. Hopefully this fixes this problem for anyone with the same scenario as us.

[Barry Kelly]

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@BradJAllen19 wrote:

This seems to have worked to improve the speed that beam and column previews load. This does create a potential issue with making sure everyone is always 100% up to date with the library on their hard drive but we have a small team and don't make significant changes on a regular basis so should be fine.

---

You can use synchronising software that runs automatically when the machine is started, to copy the files from the server to the machine hard drive.

Then you update the library on the server, and when people restart their machine (or force the synchronisation software to run) the libraries on the hard drive will update to match.

Then just start Archicad or reload libraries if it is already running.

Barry.