Hi Forum Group,
I just downloaded 2014 Pro and am getting started with an online course. I have loaded several plugins and am getting familiar with the basics. I am having trouble with the Select Tool. When holding down the left mouse button and attempting to make a bounding box, no lines appear to indicate that the box is initiated. Dragging up left to down right and vice versa produce no lines to delineate the box. Also the facing “wall” of a rectangle of my 3D models is either transparent or just white. Is this normal or should all walls have a gray tone to them. One more thing…I have duplicate tool bars across the top and the left side of the work area. Is there a proper way to eliminate one of these to clean up the space?
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks, John
Many things in your post point to a problem with OpenGL support in your graphics card driver. You might try updating the driver. As a test, you can open the Window menu>Preferences>OpenGL dialog, uncheck “Use Hardware Acceleration” and restart SketchUp. If things now look normal, the problem is with your graphics card driver. Running SketchUp without OpenGL Hardware Acceleration makes zooming and orbiting quite slow with all but the smallest model files.
Anssi
Thanks Anssi,
I have tried what you and the Sketchup Techs have suggested. All to no avail. My machine is a 2010 Toshiba Portege R705 R35 and has an Intel GMAHD Core i3 Graphics card. Toshiba has not upgraded their card since 2011 and the Intel website says " upgrades not compatable with this machine". The Windows website said the same thing. I am stuck.
What machine do you sugggest with 8mgs of memory and perhaps a NVIDIA or ATI card that is readily upgradable?
Thanks, John
Unfortunately the Intel integrated graphics circuits do not work well with SketchUp because their drivers have so deficient OpenGL support.
I personally prefer computers with Nvidia graphics, as historically they have the least problems with SketchUp - ATI/AMD has a less clean record. Both have had their intermittent driver problems, though.
As to what particular graphics card to choose, that is not so crucial. I just scrapped my 10-year old Windows XP laptop that had a puny 64 MB Nvidia Geforce mobile graphics card. It ran SketchUp quite well, and SketchUp performance wasn’t the reason I let it go. If you play a lot of games, get a gaming card. If you use CAD applications and SketchUp professionally, get a computer with midrange or high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics (not Quadro NVS). The low-end Quadros are meant for traditional 2D CAD and are not worth the money.
Anssi