I am by no means an experienced user of Sketchup but I have usually been able to read the forum posts or google my problems and obtain a fix …not this time. All of the sudden Layout is not able to update the SketchUp reference file. The throbber just churns and then I get the “Move” icon and the reference file name in the Document set-up box disappears. I made sure my SketchUp model was saved and I have tried to unlink and relink the model. I am using the classic graphics engine because the updates in the past seemed to be slow and this is basically a construction document file for some cabinetry. The Model does have some textures for graphical quality and a few downloads from the 3-d warehouse but I have tried to keep the file somewhat small and clean. I have tried to reset the cameras in the last viewport that reflected the change in the model. That change was to edit the style so that the section fill was white rather than black and that seems to be the last action I did before this problem. After resetting the camera the part of the drawing I was focusing on in that viewport disappeared(was relocated?) Any suggestions?
We can all guess about what is happening but if you want help please post the LO file. Drag it to a reply. If it is too large use one of the drop boxes or transfer file services and post a public link to the file.
Sorry…should have just done this in the beginning.
I had a look at your LO file. When it opened it showed the .skp file as Out of Date. I clicked Update and it updated all of the pages just fine. Where are you saving the .skp file you were editing and how does its path compare to the path shown in the References panel?
I am here but trying to research this enough that I can communicate with you somewhat…I’m just not that literate with some of this stuff I’m afraid but would like to learn to eliminate these problems.
This is in response to your first post which i saw but doesn’t seem to be here anymore …the one with the kitchen plan image.
The drawing you show was the one that I think caused me the problems …well one of them. I edited the style in the scene so the section fill was white (it was black) and also edited the blue color seen in the wall as white as well. I think that was the action that started things. In reading other posts I also reset the camera in that same viewport and on my end that viewport is now in another area of the drawing.
In reading a post in which you replied in Jan 24 about cleaning up tags I see that i have been doing some bad things like making individual lines a group in some of my Quasi 2d sections that I construct on a flat plane in the model. I tried just making all of those drawings a group but the faces and lines in those drawings are untagged. So I’m trying to discern if that is part of my problem here.
In response to the path issue. It looks like the paths are the same to me …although I can’t seem to figure out how to get the entire path to show in the document setup box in layout.
I tried to clean up the model a bit and I purged unused layers and components. It still will not update. The interesting thing that happens is the file path is there and once you select it and click update the file path disappears and the red “Move” icon appears. I’m at a bit of a loss here.
The path in the References list will only show the part that isn’t the same as the path to the LayOut file. On my machine, since the .skp and .layout files are both in my Downloads folder so I see the following.
I asked about the path because sometimes users have more than one copy of a SketchUp model and are editing one that is not the one that LayOut is looking at. That would result in the sort of thing you describe.
Where is the .skp file saved? Is it on an external drive?
The red Move icon would show when the cursor is over a selection. That’s normal behavior.
I edited my post because I thought the stuff I removed would lead away from the issue you are having with the file updating.
I only see the white back face color in your model for one of the styles. It still shows as the default blue for the rest.
It appears you have a bunch of styles that are essentially duplicates. With one of them used for some scenes but not others. Viewports that use styles other than the one you edited won’t appear to update because there’s nothing to update.
Yes.That’s because you double clicked into the viewport and panned the camera away from its position in the scene. Although panning the camera is initially an easy adjustment when you want to show a limited area of the scene, it makes the viewport kind of unstable. If the Camera gets reset (maybe accidentally) you wind up creating additional work for yourself. This is especially problematic if you have dimensions and labels linked to the model. Instead of clicking into the viewport and panning the camera, just drag the edges of the viewport to show what you need to show or using a clipping mask and leave the Camera properties unmodified.
A note about overrides to scene properties for viewports: Those overrides take precendence over the scene properties in the model. So if you override the Camera in LO and then change the camera in the scene in the model, that change in the model will not appear in the viewport. The same applies to styles, effects, and tags.
If you do something like override scene properties in a viewport and then copy the viewport, those same overrides will be applied in the new viewport even when you change the scene. This can be very powerful for styles and tags but it’s a problem if you’ve overridden the Camera properties in the scene because the camera position will remain the same even after you select a new scene. You’ll have to reset the camera to fix that. If you leave the Camera properties alone, you won’t ever have to worry about that.
The incorrect tag usage shouldn’t have any impact on whether or not the viewports update. All edges and faces should be created and remain untagged, though. Only groups and components should be given tags.
As for your “Quasi 2d sections”, I wouldn’t expect that to really be a cause of the not updating issue. I can see where a view might not update in LayOut but that would be because you missed an update in part of the model. Here you have five vertical sections plus the horizontal one.
Based on the way you’ve created the model, if there was a change to the arrangement of the cabinets, you have a lot of of places that you’ll need to make edits. For example, suppose the sink and dishwasher are swapped and instead of four drawers in each of those base cabinets there are three. You have to change the model for this view and then go find the 2D plan section drawing and all of the affected vertical sections and update each of them. That’s a lotof work and increases the possibility of errors creeping in.
It would be easier, less work, and would reduce the chances for errors if you put in section cuts through the cabinets at the desired locations and create scenes for each of those sections. Then, if there are changes to the cabinets, you only have one place to make the edits: the 3D model. The sections will all conform to the changes automatically.
Also if you were to use components, at least for those objects that are duplicated, you would save yourself time during edits. For example take the two cases to the right of the dishwasher. If the client decides they want three drawers instead of four, you have two cabinets to edit. If you used components for the drawer fronts you would only have to edit one cabinet and the other would follow along.
Sorry. This got longer than I intended. To go back to the not updating thing, if it’s related to the change in the style I expect it’s due to all of the styles you’ve used in the model. I would bet you could reduce the number of styles to no more than two. Very likely you only need one style. Do you really need the Hidden Objects displayed in some scenes? The red dotted prism indicates Hidden Objects are displayed. Better management of the styles would help in this case. I’d be inclined to delete all of the styles except the one with the white back face color. Actually if you have the model set up correctly with sections and section fill, you shouldn’t need the white back face color. Just set the Section Fill to white.
Dave… I appreciate your thoughtful response. There is a lot for me to digest here. I think that I can work on the style issues and try to clean up the model. I also see how messy it is to have that many styles which is the product of me just turning things on and off to get a look i want in specific scenes. Better drawing management is called for. Based on your 2024 response on Tags I installed the Default Tag Geometry plugin and ran that in the model. it got rid of all the edges and faces. It went from thousands to 0 …is that possible?
Maybe we should focus on updating…I think part of my confusion has been that I have been watching that plan of the kitchen. Even though I turned the background color to white in that one view it never seems to change in the layout viewport. I did draw an additional element in that drawing and even though it churned a lot that element DID show up. So that means it IS updating.
Still having trouble or not quite understanding the Layout reference. When I open the Document reference box the file path seems to be correct. I see what you see and i only have one file in one folder entitled Cabinet Base.skp I click on the file path and it is highlighted in blue. If I click on “Unlink” the file path then has this ref # in front of the file name. Is this possibly because I have selected recovered files when i have shut down layout rather than let it keep churning away?
If i click on Relink it allows me to select the correct file in the file manager …I click Save and then the throbber starts to do its thing but then the file path just disappears. But after some time it reappears and is apparently updated.
Part of my concern is why is it taking so long? Sometimes it will churn for a couple of minutes and stop then I will have to click the mouse to get it to finally finish. Do you think this is still an issue with a messy drawing? I feel as if I have had better luck with even larger more complicated drawings in the past.
Thank you.
Default Tag Geometry won’t get rid of edges and faces. It only removes the tags from them and makes them Untagged. This is what I got when I ran it. Running it a second time would and should show zero edges and faces processed.
Indeed the viewport is updating. The change to the style not showing up implies that the style used by the scene hasn’t been updated. After editing the style you can click on the large thumbnail to update it. In your model it’s possible that you weren’t editing the style used by scene in question. Another thing that would prevent the style from updating in the LO file would be if you’ve overridden the style in LO. In your LO file the style hasn’t been overridden so that wouldn’t be the issue in this case.
It might help to understand the LayOut file better. the .layout file is technically a zip file that, among other things, includes a “ref” folder which contains a copy of the .skp file. When you open the project LayOut compares last saved date/time of the embedded reference file to the one at the path shown in the References list. If the one at the path is newer, LayOut will tell you the file needs to be updated.
Clicking Unlink tells SketchUp to only look at the embedded copy of the file. It will no longer be looking at your original working file. In this case it’s probably not what you want to do. Highlighting the reference file in the list and clicking Relink will allow you to reconnect the original working model to the LayOut file. You might try relinking to see what happens.
If LayOut was busy updating viewports when you shut it down you might wind up with a damaged LayOut file.
Probably part of it is due to the messy model. You have a lot of the viewports set to render as Hybrid so that means LayOut has to work through all of those viewports to look at the more than half million edges to determine if they need to be rendered and then render them.
Is your profile up to date regarding the graphics card in your computer? If that’s correct, the graphics card would also share the blame. Updating the reference on my computer take a little time but less than a minute.That’s in LO2026 which is also faster at rendering.
Starting with a cleaner, better model would go a long way to improving performance in LO but it might also be time to upgrade your hardware.
Yes the graphics card is up to date in my profile. I will check with my computer people to update. This is a larger file with more viewports than I have been used to in the past so I’m sure my errors have been compounded. Good to know about not shutting down prematurely. I actually think I am going to clean up the model and styles and start a new layout file. I might just do multiple layout files specific to areas for the cabinetry, i.e. Guest Suite, Kitchen ect. This is probably somewhat of a cop out but I haven’t dimensioned or noted most of the drawings and I still need to include details so to make a few smaller documents might keep my blood pressure in order. You have been very helpful and I have a bit more knowledge to improve my drawing habits. If you know of any videos that might improve my drawing habits let me know. I seem to do better with videos.
I appreciate your help and find these forum discussions very helpful.
Hopefully they can set you up with a decent Nvidia graphics card. Integrated graphics adaptors aren’t great for 3D modeling and such.
That might be.
I hope it works better for you.
A number of users like that sort of work flow because the LO file doesn’t get to be so vast. Of course you’d have fewer viewports per LO document then so updates should happen faster.
I don’t think it’s a cop out. I think in general, saving the dimensionins and annotations to after the model is completed as much as possible is good workflow. If you add that stuff correctly, though, updates to the model should update the dimensions and annotations automatically if needed. I would suggest that you create layers in LO for the dimensions and annotations that are above the layer for the viewports.
You might start with the videos at learn.sketchup.com They can be helpful. I have developed my “rules for success with SketchUp and LayOut” that have made my workflow very efficient but I’ve never made any videos about them. Probably not a lot of interest.
Best wishes.