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Layout updating drawings & and the "Stop Drawing Update" feature

gdford
Advisor

FYI - the issue i am talking about below is from a massive teamworked project.

When I am viewing a layout and the layout starts updating the drawings, you can get a popup that ask you if you want to STOP THE UPDATE - I really really really want ALL of the drawings to stop updating with one click of the button. I do not want to stop each drawing individually - I want all of them to stop the updates. I also want the button click to immediately suspend trying to update ALL of the drawings until the layout is opened again. If I zoom on the layout they all try to update again. Who the heck thought that was a good idea?

The way this feature works now is an unbelievable pain in the ass, and I spend a crazy amount of billable time waiting for the drawings on a layout to either update, or me clicking the stop update button many times with long pauses in between and they if I need to zoom in to read a drawing title the updates start over again.

.... and before 16 people tell be that i can choose to update the drawings manually .... I know this. I am not talking about the settings for manual and auto drawing update. Archicad gives me the choice to stop/suspend drawing updates and i want this feature to actually do what it says. Please make it do so... this is probably the most aggravating feature i deal with right now.

Gary Ford
Self Employed - Modeling, Estimating, Construction
Archicad 12-26
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
3701 Mhz, 12 Core(s), 24 Logical Processor(s)
(RAM) 128 GB
NVIDIA RTX A2000
7 REPLIES 7

Hi,

 

How many layouts do you have in your project ? I'am working with file that have 4000 layouts so its also a bit time consuming to work in layouts, only thing what helped me to make it faster is to buy better CPU (single core speed as much as possible GHz).

GRAPHISOFT BIM Manager Training Week attendee
ArchiCAD v9 - v26 INT / NOR (5002)
cpu i5-12600K @ 5.0Ghz, ram 32GB, gpu 1060 GTX
ssd NVMe, Windows 11
ArchiCAD Discord channel: https://discord.gg/QdWxSJ33

We as standard have all views set to manual update. I know it’s better to be automatic but it can slow things down when just wanting to view a layout. We had issues in the past when users didn’t publish the recent version of the PDF or DWG and then made changes which caused an automatic update and the previous revision of the drawing to be lost. We just got in to the habit of forcing a global update when ever we create a transmittal. 

Lee Hankins
ArchiCAD 4.5 - Archicad 27UKI Apple Silicon 27.1.1
macOS Sonoma (14.2)
mija
Enthusiast

I don't have a solution for your problem, but I would also like to add that I hate that even tho when you set them as manual update, they still go through checking which also has a stop button that doesn't do its job correctly!


Archicad 25, build 4013
Montenegro

4000 Layouts in a single file? I would say that from a performance point of view it is not the most efficient way. When you have more than 500 Layouts, you should consider breaking up your Layout Book into multiple individual Layout Book files. In this case, this could mean several (up to 8 Layout Book PLN files. I am sure there could be a way to divide those 4000 Layouts into logical groups so managing those multiple Layout Book files is as painless as possible.

Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27

We were trying different techniques, but at the final stage we upgraded our PC's and left with everything in single file (attributes, model, layouts). 

Still when you have your layouts in other file you need to update them to place drawings correctly in layout views and its also time consuming sync between 2 files.

GRAPHISOFT BIM Manager Training Week attendee
ArchiCAD v9 - v26 INT / NOR (5002)
cpu i5-12600K @ 5.0Ghz, ram 32GB, gpu 1060 GTX
ssd NVMe, Windows 11
ArchiCAD Discord channel: https://discord.gg/QdWxSJ33

Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin

I mean, if it works for you guys and you are not wasting a lot of time because of performance issues, that is great. I just never heard of one Project File having 4000 Layouts before. Some firms start having issues with such large number of Layouts. There is even a workflow where you publish PMK files from the model Project File and place those to separate Layout Book files to keep performance at an optimum. Of course, managing all that is not as easy as managing a single file.

Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
Stuart Smith
Booster

Agreed. Waiting for drawings to update on layouts is a huge time-waster! Here are the problems:

 

1. It seems like every time you navigate to a layout, Archicad checks and updates each drawing.  Even if you toggle between two layouts without changing anything in any of the placed drawings, Archicad still checks and updates each placed drawing. The big problem is that the user can not do anything while the checks and updates are going on, and in complex projects, this can take several minutes. Is there a way to make the checks and updates happen in the background?

 

2. If you switch to another application while a layout is open (at least on Mac, don't know about Windows) and switch back to Archicad, the drawing check and update starts all over again! So if you decide to respond to an email while you are waiting for Archicad to update drawings, jokes on you sucker! you get to wait for that update again! 

 

Graphisoft, if you are looking for areas to enhance performance and productivity, this should be top of the list!

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