This has been an ongoing issue over a few projects this year and I’ve decided to report this as a technical issue. Layout is rendering extra artefacts on certain geometry as black dots based on the length of the viewport. The certain geometry is cladding (weatherboards) to the side of a house that has been fully modelled to be 3D.
When the viewport is shortened, the dots disappear. So this is only affecting my long side elevations. If I make the short side elevations viewports longer, the dots appear on them also. For some reason making the viewports longer is triggering profiles to appear based on geometry that is behind the cladding - so strange.
The reason I am creating the weatherboards in this manner is that they look far better than using a texture, even with bump or displacement maps. I have tried several different iterations of the cladding profile but the end result is the same.
Has anyone had this issue before and if so how did you solve this - or is this a bug that I just need to put up with? I can split the viewport and create the elevation with two side by side viewports but that workaround is quite silly and not something I’d expect from a professional software.
Might be z-fighting with the structure that is behind the cladding. If you resize the long viewport to be the same ratio of the shortened ones, do they disappear as well?
In your first screenshot, Hidden Geometry is turned on. Is it also on in your elevations? Or, is Back Edges on? Have you modelled the studs that are behind the cladding? They might be bleeding through. Vector or Raster rendering?
Post the LO file if you want other things than guessing.
I have managed to figure out what was causing the black dots - I will post this to help anyone else who comes across this strange visual phenomenon:
I turned off certain layers for internal components of the house that are not visible in the elevations - such as the fitout of bathrooms, kitchen etc, internal trim etc. This did something to eliminate the issue, my thinking is that layout starts to render the viewports with extra profiles / dots (in the case of my weatherboards) when the amount of geometry exceeds a certain amount - even though it can’t be seen in said viewport. This explains why halving the viewport size seemed to fix the issue.
All of the internal modelled components were very lean. Everything is modelled with sketchup use in mind and there are no bloated components with tons of faces and edges. All of the components I use are streamlined down to minimum poly levels.
So for anyone in this specific scenario where weatherboards are triggering this - either halve the viewport size and create the elevation with two separate pieces or turn off internal details.
