Clipping Hellhole

Hello! I’m a complete amateur when it comes to sketchup and only use it to do fairly simple interior projects. But i’m having a lot of problems with clipping and things disappearing when I zoom in . This was supposed to be finished by today but it’s impossible to work with, I’ve tried everything googlable, please help me

• SketchUp Help: Clipping and missing faces

There are lots of posts here about the clipping issue.
Try switching to and fro between cameras in perspective and parallel-projection.
This can at least temporarily resolve clipping-plane issues.

Causes of clipping can include geometry miles from the model’s origin [toggle View > Axes on/off to check where it is] - this can occur when importing CAD files where their geometry is placed in world coordinates.
Also very large geometry can lead to this - but interior projects are unlikely to have this.

Also learn to put your geometry in groups/components and assign layers to them so you can switch their visibility on/off, in case things are simply getting in the way of the camera position.

Also check your Graphics Card driver is up to date, and after a restart look at its settings under Preferences > OpenGL - e.g. switching off fast-feedback might help you…

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When you check your graphics card driver go directly to the Intel site. Windoze does not always provide the latest driver. Also the Intel graphics are lacking when running SU.

Clipping issues when zooming into tiny geometry? We’ve all been there.
Clipping

Simple fix. Just adjust the field of view!
FOV%20Fix

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A lot of issues occur when the origin point (invisible XYZ axis) of a component or group is sitting far away from the actual geometry.
We used to see this a lot with Google Earth componets from the 3D warehouse, where you would see a small item like a flower be imported, but it will come in with a very large aerial photo image (or an empty group where the image used to be).

Oddly I find that rotating the model usually allows one ‘good’ viewing angle where clipping is minimised. I can’t work out why this, but it is true.
Rarely I do find that exporting the geometry as a new skp file and opening it fresh can help with severe clipping issues. It’s as if some models get increasingly cluttered with invisible junk and this causes clippng over time…I’m really not sure as it seems almost random.

I hope Sketchup developers can resolve this issue somehow; GPUs are now so powerful perhaps the rendering precision can be improved? Or is it a case of optimising sketchup for the types of drivers that Quadro video cards use ?

Failing that, why can’t we just have a simple clean up tool; If there was a button to push to force groups of components to update their XYZ basepoint so that it’s at the centroid, or just to the edge of the geometry.
I would use this as a rule but it’s a good cleanup function if you happen to be working with groups imported from other software (eg google earth, or any professional package that uses true coordinates; often this places an origin 100s of kilometres away, within every single group that’s been imported…it’s.very frustrating to fix manually!).

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I too am unclear whether this is a problem unique to Sketchup or not. If it is, it would be good to see it fixed, not so much because it is that difficult to work round, but just to reduce the number of posts on this forum about it!

I’m pretty sure it’s unique, I use several other modelers( modo, c4d, blender) and don’t see anything like that in those.
It obviously is an SU problem as it can be corrected by copying the entire model into a new document.
Clipping absolutely drives me nuts, I find suddenly a model file will flip and have clipping problems. Maybe it’s a legacy issue with the camera frustum system but by crikey it’s frustrating, especially in an architectural scenario where you have to build and edit big stuff and small stuff. The perp/ parallel thing has never worked for me, once a model has flipped that’s it, the only way is to copy the geom into a new file, very annoying if you have lots of scenes and Section planes set up. Rant over (for now):grinning: