CATIA V5 Drawing Crashing when Creating a View

Is your CATIA crashing whenever you attempt to create a new drawing view of a large assembly? Does the progress bar freeze without completing? If so, there are a few settings that you can change to improve your chances of getting the drawing you need.

Three Ways to Solve the Issue

‘Exact View’ is the default view generation setting, which is created from the exct geometry available in the Design mode. If your assembly is exceptionally large it will contain a large amount of data, and could use up too much memory when trying to create the view and cause a crash.

One option to reduce this memory load is to use ‘CGR View’ generation mode. This uses data from the CATIA Graphical Representation available in Visualisation mode, so only the external appearance is displayed rather than all the geometry. But even this can be too much data for large assemblies, and can still cause a crash. It is also not possible to create section views with CGR mode.

A more robust option is to use ‘Approximate View’ generation mode. This mode allows you to modify the ‘Level-of-Detail’ (LOD) of the view to suit your needs. Lowering the LOD makes the view generation much quicker, but the quality is reduced and some details may be missed. Increasing the LOD will take more time, but the view will be more accurate. It would be best to start with a low LOD and increase it gradually to ensure the drawing doesn’t crash.

An additional option that can be useful for large assemblies is to remove any small parts from the view generation scope. This is particularly useful when showing an overview of a large-scale assembly, where there may be thousands of small fixings that aren’t necessary for the drawing. Ticking the option to ‘Only generate parts large than’ and selecting an appropriate size can reduce the memory load further. These settings can be found by going to Tools > Options > Mechanical Design > Drafting > View tab (See below)