Reducing the Displayed Surface Area

Use a mask, boundary, or related settings to suppress extraneous data from the surface display.

Apply a Mask

Use a mask to display a subset of a surface. The mask boundary can be of any polygonal shape, and you can edit the shape or move the mask around like a viewing window. Surface redrawing is faster because areas outside the mask are not displayed. The entire surface remains in the drawing for reference in surface volume calculations, and operations such as surface rebuilds continue to process the entire surface.

Create a Boundary

To reduce the processed surface area, create a smaller outer boundary around the region of your design. Areas outside the boundary are not drawn or included in calculations, but they remain in the file, available for future use. If you later need to enlarge the boundary and restore deleted portions, simply rebuild the surface. This operation requires a valid reference to the surface definition data, so you should ensure that this link remains intact.

Suppress Extraneous Graphics

Use any of the following strategies to reduce the amount of time and memory required to draw a surface:

• Set the contour interval large enough that you can see some space between distinct contours.
• Avoid using shaded display types except for small masked regions.
• Turn off the display of interior borders, and display only the exterior border.