I posted recently about a giant Revit file we were working with and I’m at the end of my rope. I currently have a 55 MB sketchup file that contains alot of grouped walls and such. Nothing any different than what we’ve worked with in the past.
However. For some reason my ability to copy from another file into this one is obscenely slow. I’m currently having to copy individual ceiling plane groups into the file. this is a 5 story building and I’m having to copy individual, singular, boxes into SketchUp because the file for some reason is going so slowly.
Usually the problem is with the geometry. With Revit, the culprit might be the families used. System families are not usually very geometry-heavy, as a wall, ceiling or slab usually consists of just two big surfaces plus some edges, but imported families can be badly built. In one of my first Revit models I used a lot of simple fixed windows that at first sight looked just like some rectangular simple frames with a glass infill. I also exported it to use a rendering package I was used to through SketchUp. The model was a nuisance to orbit or zoom. At closer inspection I realized that someone who had built the window family had meticulously modelled all the minuscule rounded edges in the wood window frame, each translating into 12 faces when imported into SketchUp. Such things also slow down Revit itself.
Without seeing your actual model all we can do is guess.
Take a look at your Model Info>Statistics window with the “Show nested components” box enabled. If the edge or face count runs into millions, there is your culprit.
Thanks. When I exported things from Revit I went in through the Visibility
Graphics and turned off as much as I could while keeping the DWG file sizes
low. Normally I export as ACIS solids which keeps things individually
grouped and that has worked in the past flawlessly. However this Revit
file was 870 MB before we asked for some split models from the Architect.
My coworker combined them and stripped them down. I then went through and
exported individual sets via the Visibility Graphics setting.
All in All I had about 15 DWG exports, all less than 25 MB, and was able to
import them individually into SketchUp files. I had one master file that I
managed to get some of them into before I left for the weekend. The others
imported into individual files. The ceiling one is the file I’m currently
trying to copy over. I’ve run a CleanUp plugin and a Purge plugin to get
rid of as much as I could. There are 934 groups in that file alone -
pretty much all boxes.
My big master file has 35,689 groups in it as it sits now. The file size
is still pretty small though compared to the other DWG exports we managed
to get into SketchUp from this same project. It has 4300 Component
definitions. I’ve never really paid attention to the Model Info before,
generally I can troubleshoot things without going to it. Those numbers
seem really high? 36,000 groups seems… excessive lol.