Model Builder Community

On a couple of filed (that I emailed) i've noticed the X axis scale moving around, left and right. Zooming in and out will sometimes fix it, but that's been creating other problems: vanishing wall sections, that i detailed in an email and crashing.
Clerestory Side
Zoom @100%
Scale in Actual Inches
Shorten Block wall field using Material Dimensions fields and it Vanishes. Shows on Print Preview.
X (Top) scale is not starting at the origin consistently. Zooming in and out will sometimes fix it, most often not.

Front Wall Subsection
50% Zoom
Scale in Scale Feet
Wall block field only displays top 2 rows of block.
Closed and reopened the file and the program several times. No change.
Print Preview shows field as it should look.
Select the vertical trim under the hydrant (Just there as a pointer)
Material Dimensions says 85' but the x scale sometimes is shifted about 2.7 feet to the left.
Zoomed to 100% and upper left 1/3 or so of field is visible. X scale is now correct.
Zoom back to 50% and same partial field is shown (upper left 1/3 or so) and X scale is still correct.

I need to Zoom in and out a lot. I don't understand why this should be a problem.

Oh, yes, and it's crashed after a zoom a few times today.

Michael the Crank

thanks for the careful description, we will study it and your file you have sent. We need to look this over.

What is your graphics card? I know you have an XP it may be there is a lag due to your graphics card. You did not indicate your graphics card when you mentioned a few days ago walls of 100 feet not completing drawing. Wall sections "vanishing" indicate the texture is not completing drawing due to overload of the graphics card.

Zooming in and out is re-drawing. When there is a lot of material on screen and not a lot of ram, slowdowns can occur.

NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT
Computer: Core 2 Duo E8650 @ 3G
3.25 GB of Ram

Not a monster but serviceable

Michael the Crank

Decent card. Try deleting the wall on that file. Then add the wall after file is completed.

OK, deleted the field, made changes and corrections, made a new field, sent it to the back, all is well.
X Axis still moving around.
Michael the Crank

We tested the zoom function with your file and after repeatedly zooming in/out we were able to get the background wall to not draw completely out to 92 feet. Zooming in/out another time resulted in blue lines on the image.

Model Builder has highly detailed images that are designed to look good printed all the way up to scales of 1:24 and even 1:12. N scale has 6x more information than say 1:24 for the same area on your monitor. This can at times, depending on the image chosen/amount of image and the user computer, slow down the drawing. Your wall in the N scale file you sent was a texture also compressed by a factor of 4 before being painted out to 100 feet. Even more load. With each screen zoom the image is redrawn.
If you notice an incomplete image, or lines on an image like you previously did, select the texture and choose "Selection" >"ReDraw". I re-coded the ReDraw function. When textures are placed on-screen they are painted into a borderless container created for handling that specific image. The container is assigned a block of memory by windows to "remember" it. When zooming, each texture is re-drawn within the container, so when zooming larger more memory needs to be allocated by windows to handle this.
With the new test version you have downloaded, the redraw command will unload the container from memory. Then load the image into a new container, giving it a fresh start. This will clear out memory and reduce the redraw fails that your file gave you. If this works for you I will re-code screen zoom so that when zooming larger, images will each be assigned to a new container.

Longer-term we are going to have to make 2 resolutions for each image: screen resolution and print resolution. The items you manipulate on-screen will be low res versions of what will be then printed high-res. This will speed the process and cut down on the failing to draw and occasional crash you were seeing.

As a side note, you can also try updating your graphics card's driver (if windows has not been doing it automatically for you). NVIDIA has a pretty recent update (July) available for your card model, you can check it out here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Ruler:
I was not able to repeat the X-axis moving on any of the files you sent despite numerous attempts. If you get it to happen some more, you can try clicking "Window">"Scroll Home". If that does not fix, please send a print screen attachment we will look and see if we can see how the X-axis moved from the screen capture.

Thanks for the driver update tip. I installed it and I'll see if stuff gets better.
Michael