Auto-optimizing out-of-core method and system for rendering of large engineering 3d cad assemblies on handheld devices

Abstract

A method for rendering data of a 3D CAD assembly includes a parsing step for creating an array storing the size and location of the data, a sorting step of sorting the array in decreasing order of the size of the data, a loading step of sequentially loading the data of as many parts as will fit into memory, a rendering process of sequentially rendering the data of the parts from memory, an update process executed concurrently with the rendering process of removing from memory the data of parts loaded earlier by the update process that have already been rendered in the current rendering pass and loading into memory data of parts yet to be rendered in the current rendering pass, and an auto-optimize process of removing, after each rendering pass, the data of a subset of the parts loaded into the available memory by the loading process.