Does creating scenes makes the file heavier?

SketchUp
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Slowing the workflow?

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I have no inside knowledge of SketchUp’s implementation, but as a professional software developer I would speculate that no, the number of scenes in the model has a relatively small impact on SketchUp’s real-time modeling performance (unless it is in the thousands or more). Certainly the impact is far below factors such as how many edges and faces are visible, whether profile edges or shadows are displayed, the use of large images, etc.

2 Likes
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you’re asking two questions. because heavy and slow are different things.

  • does it make the file heavier ? technically, a bit, not much. I just created a standard file (with a scene, it’s my default), 76kb. I added 9 scenes, 86kb. at this rate, you would need million of scenes to equate a medium texture file.
    materials makes files heavy. other stuff to, but materials are number one. I’m doodling on a file, 3,2mb, containing 10million lines. no material.

  • will it slow the workflow ? quite the opposite. the thing that slows the ways SU works is the quantity of things on screen. take my 10 million lines files, moving around is heavy, like walking in deep snow. scenes allows me to quickly move from place to place. if you remove the camera animation between scenes, it’s even better.

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The biggest problem I have seen with lots of scenes is caused by the generation of thumbnails. If you have 50 scenes and it takes two seconds to generate each scene… that can cause a delay. The file size, however, would not be greatly affected.

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hmm do they generate thumbnails even if the scene panel is closed / off ? if we only work with the topbar?

… if a scene gets updated, and no one is around the scene panel, does it make a sound ?

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I have coded an application for cabinets. I can create a scene for each cabinet. If the Scene tab is closed when I create the 50 tabs then it is virtually instant.

If you then open the scene tab then you see a progress bar (very quick) as each thumbnail is produced.

This also happens with components. If you create a lot of components with the Component tab closed it is very quick. But when you open the components tab then thumbnails etc are created. So if you have 50 cabinets you could have say an average of 15 components per cabinet so say 750 components. When you open the components tab you end up waiting for several minutes and Sketchup seems locked up.

I switched to groups and no longer have the long delays. Since all the component parts were unique - having 750 components is just a big mess. Also using Groups resulted in a much smaller skp file.