these might help

Greg Smith · Post by **Greg Smith** » Mon, Jun 04 2007, 6:56PM

Here are a couple of tricks I figured out this weekend. They helped me out and thought I'd pass them on.

1/ Knobs and handles can be memory killers and buggy in the Presentaion view. I modelled a simple knob and a cup pull in another software, expoted them each as an STL but made sure the resolution wasn't too fine. Then I imported each one into the part editor, textured them and saved each one. Then for each one I swaped them out with a pull file in the materials folder. This is the same process we've been using for adding a custom finish or texture to a wood file for door finishes. This will allow you to place these pulls automaticly in the door editor, or manually from vednor items. When you create the pull you just need to make sure the correct planes are used or it could be flipped when brought into eCab. This trick took a job that couldn't be rendered in Pres. View and made it useable. The actual pull file sized dropped to 1/10th the size for the ones I did( ~110k to 10k).

2/ For those who use custom moulding profiles, if you create a profile (again in another software) (I made mine .010\" thick) and save it as an STL, you can swap that file out for a moulding file in the materials/ mouldings folder. Same process as above. This allows the new profile to be added to a cabinet in the moulding editor or in Add mouldings. This will allow the mitres to be added and the lenghts chosen for each peice. I used to add a board, take it to the P.E. run a profile on one edge, flip it then run a 45deg profile on the needed ends. This is way faster an any angle can be easily added.

I emailed Thermwood before posting this to hear their thoughts. Todd M. did say that messing around with the mouldings might cause trouble in the future and suggested that records and back ups be kept for any changes made.
I haven't really tested each trick over along time, but for now its made a big difference for me. Hope it can help others.

Peter Walsh · Post by **Peter Walsh** » Tue, Jun 05 2007, 2:39PM

Greg,
I discovered the memory-eating aspects of hardware early on (I think in V3). So, I don't place any hardware or knobs in my main rendering at all. What I do is create a rendering of a single door or drawer face with the knob or handle attached in a blow-up size to show the hardware to the customer. No one has ever objected to this, and actually the customer likes being able to see the hardware detail close-up.

In my renderings, I often show several views, with some close-ups of trim or joinery I want the customer to see (corbels, decorative trim, etc).

regards,

Rolf Bergstrom · Post by **Rolf Bergstrom** » Tue, Jun 05 2007, 5:14PM

Anybody have any memory saving tricks for dwr boxes (besides leaving them off)? I have found that adding dwr boxes, which I need, increases the size in huge increments for each box, from 300k for a cab with no dwr boxes to 2.5 MB for cabinet with 4 dwr boxes. Using a Hafele stainless pull I am only seeing about 10k per pull difference. The small job I am working on now went from about 4.5 MB to about 16.5 MB just adding the drawer boxes.

Nemanja Vujkovic · Post by **Nemanja Vujkovic** » Wed, Jun 06 2007, 6:03AM

Rolf,

did you try using blind dado drower boxes???

Rolf Bergstrom · Post by **Rolf Bergstrom** » Wed, Jun 06 2007, 12:54PM

Excellent! That makes a big difference and works perfectly for me as we are doing the dovetails on a dovetail machine so all I really need is the material length to be correct, I don't need the dovetail data.
So, I changed to blind dado and then to full dado and full dado made them a little bit smaller still and I still get the correct data I need.
My 4 Dwr Base cab went from 2.4 MB to 1.2 MB with blind dado to just over 1 MB with the full dado.