I've been creating fairly large files lately, usually consisting of fairly complex assemblies that I bring together into a single drawing. File sizes from about 50 MB to 500 MB are very likely to cause Shark FX v8 to crash. I would like to create even larger files for presentation purposes and to verify large assemblies. I had the same issue with v7. My models are pretty clean, with good geometry, etc.

I tried the demo of Shark FX v9 shortly after it came out but it had bugs that made it unusable to me. My already large file sizes were doubling in size just by opening them in v9 and there were other issues, but on the upside it used much more of the RAM I have available.

A colleague who uses ViaCAD 2D-3D suggested that ViaCAD may be more stable than Shark. He and I share files regularly and he has not had the crash problems. Is there any truth to this? I don't typically send him very large files, but he gets some of the complex assemblies. I'd be willing to shift to ViaCAD if that solved the problems.

I'm wondering if I should be considering a stand-alone rendering solution where I could assemble large files for illustration and presentation purposes. Any thoughts on this? I've read very nice things about Blender, but it has a very steep learning curve. From what I've seen I get the idea it can handle very large files very well.

Any other solutions? I looked into Rhino but it's just NURBS, not good for me. The very large files transferred very nicely and they look very good in Rhino, and they rotate, move, etc, more fluidly than in Shark. It's what made me think of using a separate rendering solution.

I have 32 GB of RAM, (pre v9 only use about 2 GB) i'm on a 27" iMac, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7. I purchased this machine specifically to run Shark FX v7.

Hello Steve

In Shark FX, try using the reference files to build your assembly. Its under file --> reference.

Regards

Jason

Hi Steve

The reference feature was added to Shark FX in V7. Goto file menu and find reference.

Regards
Jason

I tried the reference options and Shark locked up. This happened 3 times in succession.

I tried making symbols of parts and subassemblies, but the file size didn't get any smaller. Another problem I ran into was when I inserted the symbol into my drawing a lot of 'junk' that I had deleted earlier from the original drawing showed up. I reopened the original file I used to create the symbol from but the junk wasn't there. I saved as a symbol again, and tried it again. Same results, junk in the symbol that I couldn't get rid of.

The only thing that remotely works here is to import the sfx file directly into the drawing, with all layers intact, and then delete the layers I don't want. The problem with this is the file size grows very large.

Not all symbols have this problem, but when it happens it's a real pain.

It would be very helpful to my workflow if we could just highlight a part and save it as a symbol or a reference file, like when we export "selected only".