Hi Innis,
I ran another test to see what would happen if I separated my model into individual objects, and the times you're seeing seem directly related to having all of your surfaces in separate objects, I separated my model into one-surface-per-object, and the model took over 5 minutes to load (given the specs I posted previously).
One suggestion I'd make is once you get the model into AC3D, perform the following steps:
1. Select all objects/surfaces and perform an "Object | Merge" (ctrl+shift+m). This will be very time consuming, but probably not much longer than your load time, if at all.
2. With all objects selected (should only be one object now), perform an "Object | Optimize vertices..." (ctrl+shift+v). This will be a very slow operation as well.
This places all of your surfaces/etc into a single object - now, to group the objects the way you want them, go into surface mode and select the surfaces you want to separate into a new object, then perform a "Surface | Cut-away object" (ctrl+shift+x) - repeat for every "section" that you want in a new object. You should find all operations at this point to be *very* quick by comparison.
As you break your model into objects, you'll found that Hiding objects you're not currently working with will speed up editing immensely. I definitely see a lag on my 64k-vertex model when I don't hide anything and am viewing the whole model, but once I start hiding sections I'm not working on, the speed increase is significant.
Try this with your high-poly model and let us know how it works out. You're probably looking at a lot of processing time to perform this step for a single model (sounds like at maybe 1/2 hour, maybe more or less) - is this something you'll end up doing many times?
Dennis
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