What is the effect of texture resolution and/or compression on render time?
For example, I could have a texture image that is 500x1000 pixels or the same image at a lower resolution of 50x100 pixels. How does this affect the speed of rendering the image? I notice that when I get a large model with many big textures, SU doesn’t render them when I am rotating the scene.
What about compression. If I have a 500x1000 pixel image It can be compressed from high quality to medium or low quality. For example, I was using a large image projected onto a wall. The image was 150K. Compressed it was 50K. This reduces the size of the SU file, but does it have an impact on speed of rendering.
Reducing the resolution reduces the amount of data sent to the graphics pipeline and hence should improve the performance. However, compression does not reduce the amount of data and hence there should be no change in the performance.
I wish SketchUp would put out a little technical paper on how to make more efficient models for rendering speed.
With the work I do it is easy to overload SketchUp. For example, I like to do lush landscapes. If I put in a lot of 3D plants and trees I can quickly degrade performance. Also, I work on town plans. Imagine if you put in detailed houses for every house in a small town. And then if the bathrooms in the houses had beautifully detailed bathroom sink faucets. I see components for a faucet that have thousands of polygons and that are multiple megabytes in size. Does SketchUp have a way to ignore these very small items that will not be visible? Can components display quicker than the same polys in a block or independent? If I draw lines on a polygon’s face (which creates polygons in the same plane) does that slow things as much as the same number of polygons but not in the same plane. I have lots of questions like that.
Tried Goldilocks. Very interesting. Is there any notes anywhere that describe a bit more what it is showing and the implications? I didn’t understand a few bits of the output. Can you answer at all? What are the 2 numbers shown in the screenshot below
Goldilocks is a tool for testing whether the assets you have in your model are of the appropriate resolution for the current viewpoint. Are your assets consistent in their resolution.
It has 2 modes for testing: Texture and Geometry
In Texture mode, Goldilocks calculates for the current viewpoint how many texture pixels are mapping to each viewport pixel for your materials. eg If a face takes up 100 pixels wide in the SketchUp viewport, you don’t need a texture of 4000 wide for its material. As in, it will make zero difference to render quality (for any renderer) and just bloat your file. What it reveals is when you’ve imported a texture that is much higher resolution than required - I’ve found textures of 14000 x 14000 used on a tiny face in the corner of a room!
In Geometry mode, Goldilocks calculates for the current viewpoint the Edge Density for your Groups and Components. eg If a Component takes up 100 pixels wide in the SketchUp viewport, you don’t need 10,000 faces in its geometry - its just a waste of space which will have zero difference in render quality.
Edge Density is the number of edges in a Component divided by volume of Component to give a normalized “edges per unit volume”. The actual value is meaningless, what you want in your model is roughly similar edge density throughout - if you spot something with way higher edge density, may be worth checking it out. FYI I once found a coat peg in a model with 30,000 faces in it using Goldilocks.
Thanks. The discussion helped clarify some points. But it didn’t answer the question of what the numbers are. And mainly the discussion focused on textures, not geometry.
One question about textures. Goldilocks came up with a bunch of oversized textures in one model/view, but I didn’t see anything in the scene with those textures. Also, although it showed the name of the texture, I didn’t know where to look for it (since I couldn’t see it in the scene). How would I find textures in a particular model by name
