First and foremost I believe those who have used Pro/E for 20+ years know a few things which many people at PTC don't know primarily due to the attrition at PTC. There is a consistent loss of "Tribal Knowledge" and changes in management / direction which has hindered the direction of Pro/E. This has been exacerbated by the need to make CREO more like SometimesWorks. End Rant.. (Continued loss of Functionality comment at bottom).
Issue:
Very Large models will not render using ARX
Reason:
PTC continue to use a very very old C Complier (as it was told to me) that is unable to make use of more than 2 Gbytes of RAM without really crappy mem / disc swapping
Solution:
Purchased Keyshot from Luxion at a 25% discount which paid for the ARX module. Downloaded the Trial Version and found that I was able to load a very large model and then "Pattern" it while in Keyshot which was "Awesome" ! Keyshot doesn't add 10,000 pounds of horse feathers when patterning large assemblies which is not the same as CREO.
Errata:
Essentially I can load assy models of 50-75 medium complexity with part and have them render okay, I just can load huge models lots of parts and complex surfaces in ARX.
Keyshot functionality as it relates to ARX. When loading a model in Keyshot we discover it auto-renders before you can do a setup. The reason is that it runs many times faster than the ARX version for CREO. So a large model in CREO runs really slow because of the memory limitations which are exacerbated by the use of ARX. I have had many machine crashes due to the memory problem. PTC needs to start using a modern C complier one that can do SMP / Hyper-threading that can handle Tbytes of RAM memory if available. The obvious benefits has escaped PTC and maybe with a swift kick in the tookas they will do something about it rather than attempted to make their product into a SometimesWorks Clone.
So now that I have solved the issue by not using the ARX plug-in and going to Keyshot.. Do I have any hind sight thoughts about this ? Yes.. I believe that Keyshot functionality cannot be jammed into CREO without repercussions. So for those that ARX works for I don't like the auto render ! I want to render when I want to render. Its like me putting food in a blender before I put the lid on and its starts to blend on high speed. In other words I want to make the best use of my time. I want to do setup before I render. I want to be able to set the render attributes, scenes, lights, environment, Etc... Etc.. Before I autoblend...
PTC should take note of this.. IMNSHO..
-ron
P.S. I have no idea why PTC moved the Perspective Setup to the View Tab ! The Perspective Setup should have remained under the Perspective Ribbon Button in addition to placing it under the View Menu.
(Continued comment from top. As an example of loss of functionality, as I have a long memory, while editing a section in assy mode we were able to drag sketched entities around. Not any more. This was fantastic functionality which saved time to adjust a section visually. Don't mean to rat hole on this but I want to make it clear that changes by newbee's have consequences. What PTC doen't have are people who have a lot of history with the product to make the right decisions).
