While I’ve had occasional quirks with the STL converter in SU, this quirk is baffling. The export is only choosing small details of the entire selection to export. No matter what I’m picking, it keeps reducing the choices to almost nothing.
@mmarcovitch this is odd behaviour, especially as I can’t see any changes that we made to the STL exporter for SU 2026 (or even for SU 2025) that should change behaviour. As @DaveR says please can you share the file for further investigation, thanks!
Now I’m really in a quandary. I just downloaded SimLabs STL converter (not free) and am having trouble getting it started. Everything is running poorly. Mouse clicks are delayed. I’m using a MACBOOK Pro 16" 2019 with the last of the Intel processors. I’m trying to figure a way to get a new, fully-loaded MacBook 2026 with the M4 chip. They’re a fortune and I’m looking to see what to sell to buy one. The big projects I’m doing (e.g. the engine room) taxed this machine to its limits. Something is going on between SU and Mac OS Tahoe 2.6. All of this nonesense started when I upgraded. I will keep experimenting.
I can confirm it exports ok in Sonoma. or at least, ti looks like in sketchup, but it doesn’t mean it’s a print-ready solid. maybe that’s where tahoe has a problem ?
and like Dave said, lots of things are not solid, like this. you have part of the bottom in a group nested in another group, and also in a different group, but turns out you have a few faces not in any group that are really missing.
even if I explode it all and then regroup, I still find places of odd precision like here. lots of inside faces and surface border issues.
what I would do, create a tag and call it “solid” and hide it. select each group or component one by one, check if it’s solid (using solid inspector,), if so, tag it “solid”. if not, fix it, then tag it.
the longer you work on it, the fewer elements you’ll have on your screen.
I’m going to check out that link. The export problem is even stranger than I thought. I know there are some inconsistencies in the drawing and I fixed some of them. I export 1 brick. Worked. Then I exported a group of bricks in the middle of the wall, and that worked too. Then I exported all the bricks and it went back to selectively converting some and DIDN’T convert the group that had just converted successfully. The store front/door assembly exported perfectly, but didn’t when I tried to do the entire assembly. And the cornices both exported successfully, but didn’t when I included the corbels. All it exported was (1) corbel. If I can get it to export all the subassemblies, I can fabricate the model from parts. Not my first choice, but could work.
Native. I downloaded the SimLab STL Converter, but had the same results. And I don’t want to pay for it if it’s ot solving the problem.
It’s the strangest thing. I think part of the problem is lack of available RAM, and it’s exacerbated by the brickwork. I made all those bricks by using actual 3D bricks of 8" X 4" X 3". They were all embedded into the wall surface so they protruded 5/8". I’m redrawing them as 8" X 4" flat rectangles drawn flat on the wall surface. I turned the full and half-brick shapes into Components, copied and pasted them onto a grid of guidelines on the surface, and then, when they’re all in place and aligned, select one brick and extrude to the 5/8" reveal. As components, all the bricks extrude together.
When I just convert the wall with bricks—not including any trim—it exported correctly. That’s how I arrived at the bricks being part of the problem. But it didn’t correct the upper frieze panel with the corbels. The frieze WITHOUT corbels DID export properly. But with the corbels, all that appeared was ONE CORBEL. The lower parts including the door and the window framing DID export intact. So as a workaround, I will export and print the walls as a series of parts which I will assemble after printing.
The worldaround does not solve the problem. And starting SU 2025 (which I still have) didn’t solve the problem either. This leads me to the Tahoe upgrade as the culprit. I need a bigger computer!
I really need to figure all this out before I start the next battleship project. These are heavy, 3D printing intensive efforts and this STL problem would be very difficult to deal with.
@mmarcovitch SketchUp export can be very memory hungry for large models, depending on how much you have selected.
What surprises me is that you get a partial export STL rather than the process failing completely. I can’t reproduce it as it always completes fine for me. Can you attach the various STL results from your exports with differing selections in case there are any clues in those please?
Also how much RAM do you have? And are you using ASCII or binary export?
When I duplicate your front wall model 729 times it uses 2.7GB RAM, increasing to 5GB during binary export (to create a 830MB STL) or 13GB during ASCII export (to create a 4.6GB STL file). This still doesn’t cause a failure though.
One the end wall with doing the bricks the more sensible way, I got a perfectly exported STL of the entire part. I redrew all the 4th front wall bricks and will print that in sections.
I’m working to figure out how to raise enough money to get the new MAC. I’m going to sell a very valuable guitar and already have sold one building from my model railroad. I should get enough to get close to the purchase price.
While it pains me to sell the guitar, it pains me even more when I attempt to play it. Most of my skills have atrophied to the point where playing is a chore and not fun. Between no callouses and some arthritis, plus the normal loss of strength being 80, the guitar is nice to look at, but the computer is much more needed at this time.
The guitar, a Gibson ES-175, is the same model I played in my college R & B band, albeit and 1995 vintage not 1966. If I still had the '66, I could buy three MacBooks. I rebought this one in 2015 having nostalgia about the “good old days”, but my Fender Strat was an easier instrument to play. But even that wasn’t easy any longer. My son had interest in the Strat, so he is now the proud owner.
Not sure if it will make a difference - if the bricks are all solid components - make a copy of the model, select them all and Solid Tools>Union or Outer Shell them into 1 solid component.
