I am trying to add topo data into my model and I am struggling. I have tried lots of different options and nothing has been super easy or accurate yet so I want to know if I am missing something.
Here is a more detailed description of what I want to do. I am looking into purchasing a 30 acre parcel and I want to determine the location of potential driveways and build sites and get an idea for the scope of the work. The more accuracy the better.
The first thing I tried is the geolocation tool. It worked great except for the fact that it just wasn’t super accurate (missing a few critical hills in the section where I want to put the driveway.) nothing wrong with SketchUp but Bing or whoever’s data did not line up close enough to the counties Lidar map.
After some digging around I found that I can download topo data from my county with 5 foot lines in a 3d DWG File. Great! Almost… The file seems not too large at just under 80mb (never worked with dwg so I don’t have a frame of reference either so maybe that’s large) I have tried several times to import the file but it usually freezes up SketchUp and or just never loads. My guess is that the file is to large dimensionally as it is approx. 3x5 miles… to make matters worse I think the property in question happens to land in a corner of at least 2 or 3 of these files. My hope was to open each one individually and cut out the section I need and stitch them back together. I only managed to get one file to actually open and just placing a rectangle to intersect and section off the lines cause the program to freeze.
I resorted at one point to try to hand draw the lines from a screenshot of a map but that took forever to do a small section and would have been a nightmare.
I even resorted to getting a free trial of auto cad and sectioning out what I needed first that way But I couldn’t figure out how to cut through more than one line at a time which again would take forever.
So that is my problem. I don’t know if there is a better way or a way to make the files run better in SketchUp. I thought maybe If I could scale it down it would be able to open and then I could section it out and scale it back but not sure if that’s possible.
Any suggestions of other programs or methods would be greatly appreciated
A 80 MB DWG file can contain a lot of geometry, so the import process can be very slow. Have you tried to just let it run? My guess is that it might take hours or overnight while SketchUp looks like it is frozen.
Check your import options, too. Map data usually doesn’t work OK if you try to keep the same origin as the DWG file that might be thousands of kilometers away.
Post the file (or a link to it) if you want more informed opinions.
Here is a link to the file download. Not sure if there’s a different way to upload because it says the file limit is 16mb. You just need to select a section and it’s on the border of the poulsbo and lowfall files.
To be slightly more clear on what SketchUp does is it will finish the important and have the file summery and then sometimes about 5 to 10 min later the model appears. Then if you try to interact in anyway i.e. panning the camera it freezes up. I have left it overnight before without it catching up. The most successful attempt was actually from closing the program and opening a recovery file that SketchUp auto saved while frozen. With that one I tried once to use a section plane to limit the displayed geometry to try to improve performance but that locked it up and then I tried to cut through the model with a rectangle to cut through the lines so I could select and delete the majority of the model but that froze up and didn’t recover within 20 min.
Seems to work ok for me. I picked a section at random and it took 34 secs on my MBP M3 Max. I don’t know a lot about Windows specs but perhaps your machine is struggling with such a large file. Note that the section I imported is over 7 mil polys, so large for any computer re: processing power req. +1 to what @Anssi says. Let it run and walk away from your computer. Don’t try to multi-task or click anything. Just let it do it’s thing. Personally, if it doesn’t complete it in less than an hour I’m not sure if it will at all.
Interesting, I wonder if it’s some sort of driver issue on my end. I’ve been messing with it since and changed the import options to inches and that seemed to bring it from near impossible to loading in about 30 min and I’ve action every 10 min. Over the whole day I managed to chop down one file to the segment I need and now it runs fine. Only 2 more to go lol.
My PC is getting older but it still a pretty good computer 8corse@4ghz 32gb ram and a 3080ti GPU. For some reasons SketchUp never seems to be able to take advantage of the hardware because when I monitor usage it usually is at 6%to14% CPU 0% GPU and about 3gb of RAM
For example I was able to run SketchUp in 2 windows at the same time with no noticable performance delay during this process it still took the 10 min to catch up in between regardless
I don’t have access to SU pro anymore so I can’t test it right now but in the past when I had to do something similar to this, these were my steps. I needed a second program Global Mapper.
1 - download the lidar data / 3d dwg ( i prefer lidar data so then I can create my own custom contour intervals, more details for the area I want and less details elsewhere if necessary)
2 - open global mapper and create contours from lidar or just use the default 3d dwg
3 - draw a polygon / area of interest around the property you want to review and then crop the data down to reduce the number of lines / pt so the file will be smaller to work with in sketchup. I like a simple rectangle shape with an extra diagonal line, that way you can use the corner points or mid line pt coordinates as your point you want to move to the origin of sketchup. Write down the X,Y and Z value of the point that you will want to translate.
4- export the lines to sketchup (I believe this was an option), if not, export to dwg.
5 - import / open file from step 4 and move the center or rectangle or one of the corner points to sketchup origin (0,0,0).
6 - I think this is correct plugin that will provide the “correct” X,Y,Z values after you move the lines to the origin (TIG’s Coords Text Tag Tool)
I might have some time tomorrow if you want me to try it once on your site. I just checked the global mapper site and the cheapest option is $700 so that is not going to be solution for you if you only need to do this one time.
Thanks for the offer but I am almost done brute forcing my way through the freezing. Would have been great if the property didn’t land on an intersection of 3 different files!
I’ll have to check out some other options if I end up doing this more often but for now it’s a one off.
Sketchup like 100% of other 3D programs can use only one thread to model, so if you check the activity monitor you’ll never see a big percentage of use, it’s better to have a cpu with better single core performance than one with a lot of cores and threads, there are some tasks that can be done using multiple cores.
Your cpu, if my memory doesn’t fail, is from late 2019 or early 2020, Ryzen series 3000 was a huge upgrade from Ryzen 2000, but they were still behind intel on single core performance at that time, Ryzen 5000 made thing even on single core but high end CPUs like the 5900x and the 5950x had no competition, nowadays, almost no one buys intel CPUs, they’re worst at everything compared to AMD, and apple silicon is on a league of its own.
That’s just general usage with a average model. I am wondering if my GPU is somehow not being utilized because it is always under 3% when in SketchUp which is basically the same as when I’m just in Windows. I’ve been reading about some things to try to get it to use the GPU so I’m gonna try those over the week
Make sure your dedicated gpu is the main one and the one that sketchup uses, you can check that on the sketchup preferences on the graphics tab. The usage of gpu on sketchup isn´t that much, what gpu does is receive the data from the cpu and transform into images and display on your monitor, Some gpus specially integrated ones are slower than the cpu and if your models contains a lot of data, the model could get laggy, but your gpu is still considered quite powerful, so it doesn´t work at its limits while using sketchup, If you render using Gpu you´ll see how it gets to 100% quite fast, the same at gaming.
