Place crosses along a line best way to reduce memory?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Hi,
V4
I need to place rivet position crosses as a line of crosses of equal spacing. Array seems the immediate choice but if I am doing this many times, having heard of block instance in TurboCAD to minimise memory usage, is array the best way.

What would the procedure be to minimise memory and redraw time for my file ?

I have in the past created a circle then copy pasted it again and again, looks nice !..file redraws etc SLOW.

i,e, I want 10 crosses spaced 20mm, what are the steps involved ?

Steve

2

Hi,
Anyone know correct way ?
I know that circles pasted many times slow up Rhino, as must do crosses, or maybe not.

What is best practice please ?

Steve

3

Circles would probably be better as they are one object whereas crosses would be two (lines). But in any case if you add a lot of objects to the file, it will increase the memory usage; and as curve objects are a display bottleneck for Rhino, displaying a lot of them is more or less guaranteed to slow down the dynamic display.

Using blocks may reduce the memory, but won’t help the display as far as I know.

–Mitch

4

Probably best to create a mesh object with as few faces as you can get away with (extruded triangle?) and place those where you need them. You can then join those into one single mesh object.

5

You could also use points and create a point cloud.

6

Hi,
Its an engineering drawing and I am drawing it out better and in a 3D way. Not sure I need crosses as meshes. Must be crosses as dimension lines and datums etc run through them. Also marrying up solids with crosses on them for where rivets go is easier than marrying up solids with circles.

I understood from a guy selling TurboCad that my practice of using copy command with circles or maybe even crosses would add to file retardiness as opposed to creating one circle and using a block command to create it again and again, You say there is a block command in Rhino, googling a tutorial by someone sees it create instances that even update all instances if master is altered, thats useful. Instances sounds like a way of working and lessening something, memory or file size ?

Not sure how a point cloud gets me a cross or many of them ?

Steve

Steve

7

Hi Steve,

I’d suggest going through these as a reference

And here the link I forgot; it’s a reference on blocks, groups and worksession.
I would just check out what functionalities blocks offer.

HTH
-Willem

EDIT,
Sorry I forgot to paste the link. Luckily I just stumbled on my reply by accident and noticed it did not make any sense.

8

It doesn’t. It only gets you a group of points treated as one object that is extremely lightweight memory wise.

–Mitch