Hi,
I’ve written a fair large routine in Grasshopper for Tekla to model a belt conveyor. The code works fine in Grasshopper and Rhino alone, but when I add it to Tekla it can take days to process. I’m happy to post the code, but I’m wondering if anyone have similar issues and if anything can be done to speed things up ?
The code does create 25k of tekla objects, so I may have just been too ambitious.
Any thougths welcome.
Cheers
Greg
Hi Greg,
The performance will depend on the type of objects you’re generating. 25k Beams could be inserted in seconds to maybe a minute, whereas 25k Items with different shapes likely could kill the model.
So if you currently have brep geometry and transfer all that directly as Items you would need to try and generate beams and plates instead - this means extracting centerlines or contours from the geometry for input and apply an appropriate profile.
If you have many items with the same brep shape you can also use the Create Shape component to insert the shape only once, and then feed that to the Shape input of the Item component (instead of feeding the geometry directly). This will speed up the process and make the model lighter.
And do use the command “Delete Unused shapes” from the Tekla menu in Grasshopper in case you already have inserted 25k different shapes - those might really slow down the performance of the model.
Cheers,
-b
Is there some configuration in Tekla that can optimize the performance, like Rhino.inside plugin for Revit ?
Grasshopper Inside running very slow - Rhino.Inside / Revit - McNeel Forum
If you run your definition as a Grasshopper Component it can be several times faster, since it then runs within the Tekla process as a plugin.
Cheers,
-b
Thanks Sebastian for your advises.
For my case, this time I will need to operate in GH to generate structures in Tekla, and I need to wait for 20s each time I connect a new GH component. My rhino file is very lightweight and it’s already in wireframe mode.
That sounds off. If it’s the Tekla link that causes the delay, maybe turn off the Tekla object components (shortcut in the Tekla menu in GH) while doing editing in GH that doesn’t need live updates in Tekla. Which components are slow in that case? Data Dams are also an option to manage updates.
But it also sounds like it could be autosave kicking in. Do you have a lot of internalized data? Try disabling autosave and see if it helps. Check this thread: Recalculation
Cheers,
-b
Unless your conveyor is several km in length this sounds like you may have went overboard with details. Did you include a lot of manufactuer parts, like motors, bearing blocks, housings, drives…? The problem with most of those is they are too detailed unless your design intent needs that level of detail. This reminds me of a CC I made years ago. I created the exact plastic shape for a concrete form product using the manufactuers CAD dwg. It looked cool, and I was quite pleased with the result until I inserted a couple thousand of them into my model. Once I did that the model was virtually unusable. We use a lot of shapes in projects for manufactured parts, but I usually dumb them down so they only include what I need for our role. Complex spirals, helices, and things that are easy to model in a single part get deleted. Maybe this is not the case for you, but I thought I would toss out the idea in case you did not look at this.