Good morning all. We have a potential new client who sent us over two DWFX files to do some high quality renders (stills and videos). One file is 3.5MB and when it’s brought into SU turns into a 40MB file. The other is 40MB, and becomes a 1.5GB SU file. Currently waiting to hear back from the client if we can get the original Revit file but was curious if anyone knows of a workflow to reduce the size/complexity of these files. The 1.5GB SU file can barely be moved. One scroll of the mouse wheel takes about 5 seconds for it to move. My machine is an i7-8700K @ 4GHz, 32GB ram, RTX 2070 8GB.
How did you import the file into SketchUp? Or did you actually get DWG or DXF files?
When you export a DWG from Revit, by default all Revit objects are turned into AutoCad blocks, each unique (similar objects like windows each gets its own block definition). The export uses either solid or mesh geometry. For conversion into SketchUp, I would prefer mesh (face) geometry. Solid geometry, especially when containing curved parts, produces a lot of tiny faces when imported into SketchUp. I once tried a file exported from Revit where I had inadvertently used a window component that had all the minuscule roundings in the corners of the window profiles modelled, and this resulted in similar model bloat as you describe. It also bogs down Revit itself, especially the embedded render engine.
Originally (yesterday) I was given the DWFX files and found an extension in the warehouse to import them. The smaller file imported decently but the larger one took forever. Today, the client exported the Revit projects to DWG and Im in the process of attempting the import again. At this point, its taken about 30-45min (currently at 97%). If I remember correctly, the DWFX file had about 900 components (based on the Model Info). I started to explode them, but once it got down to 729 components, there were already about 250,000 lines and around 150,000 faces and it was taking an eternity to explode them. Ended up just closing SU and waited for the DWGs to see if it would be any better.
What will you do, once it is imported?
Model just finished and this is the info that popped up. ATM, its still hanging trying to actually load it.
The client wants some high quality renders so was going to mess around with V-Ray and Lumion animations. When I imported the smaller DWFX to SU, then to Lumion, I noticed I would have to assign materials to many of the faces
I’ve only been using SU for about 2 months now so still pretty much an amateur lol
Appears to be much less bloated doing it this way. The DWFX import created a 1.5GB SU file whereas the DWG import is now 550MB and relatively smooth to navigate.
In Window menu>Model Info>Statistics you can see the number of faces and edges produced by your different import methods. Check the “Show nested components” box. When the count goes in the millions, SketchUp starts slowing down its performance.