Is there certain amount of data in the file to avoid that will cause performance to drop? I have to use a lot in each of the file, because of landscape development. But the files are also divided up into a file per district/ neighborhood (not an entire city obviously) to ease the load. But even with small neighborhoods, the files can be loaded, i.e. 300,000 Kb, which is average for most files of mine and at that amount for my computer easily handles this since I have a large RAM, CPU, Video Card, etc. I’m loading files up to 500,000 KB and slightly over per file. Is 500,000 Kb too much for the average computer to operate? thanks Jeff
The more important questions are how many edges and faces are in the model and what style settings do you use. Those are the main things that drive performance. In contrast, overly large texture images will bloat the file size but won’t have much impact on performance except during load because SketchUp resizes them anyway during load.
Also worth mentioning is that all things in your model that are the same should be components instead of groups.
And offcourse keep things low poly. A tree trunk circle in a model of a whole neighbourhood doesn’t need to be 24 sided. 6 could be enough..
thanks, I have been keeping fairly close on the edges and faces, while textures are reduced with using an extension “material resizer” and helps alot
thanks, I’ve been using components as well as groups. The components come in handy for using “Replacement” tool in the default trey for exchanging items to save time. But since my file is expected to be large due to the nature of size of towns, neighborhoods and containing many buildings, I’m having to delet items or break files which I tried to avoid to keep the original appearance I was hoping for in the first place
Are you still using sketchup 2023 as your profile information says? Since version 2024 a new graphics engine was introduced that enhance performance and lets you work with bigger files.
I’ve worked with small city size models when I was in the university, most of the buildings where just boxes, trees where png images components facing always the camera, only important parts of the project where detailed.
how long is a piece of rope, how thick is a book… how heavy is a sketchup file. you’re asking us an existential question here
weight in kb / mb is not as relevant as it used to, we have better machines, stronger connexions, bigger hard drives.
besides, like the other said, lines and face count are the numbers that matter.
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with the new engine and the pbr materials, files have a tendency to fatten up : a 1000x1000px material used to be roughly 1mb. but if it’s pbr, due to the extra maps in it, it can be up to 5mb. And pbr materials work well with hdri environment, that can add another 10-25-100mb to the mix.
I did a test when it was released, on a 17mb file. Adding pbr material to all the metallics and glass and a 4k environment form polyhaven, and breached the 50mb barrier.
it’s still the same file. it takes longer to open and to save I guess, but once it’s open, it’s the same.
The face and edge counts in a model are what matters most. With new versions of SketchUp, the amount it can smoothly handle has increased over the years and today counts over a million faces or edges usually work quite OK, but when you double or quadruple that things slow down. Faces and edges all have to pass through your processor core so single core performance is crucial when selecting a CPU for SketchUp. And a forest made of 3D trees will kill any model. And using components can make a very high-poly model into quite a small file when saved on disk.
There are many factors to consider, and some of them are counterintuitive.
You can have a very small file that’s highly space-efficient, yet computationally expensive because of its complexity. Equally, you can have a large file that’s simple in structure but heavy to process due to the sheer amount of detail.
In SketchUp, most real-world projects end up being a mixture of both at once. Finding the “Goldilocks” balance between flattened geometry, unique entities, and instanced components is, frankly, very difficult.
I’ve spent days optimising large, masterplan-scale site models—often an aggregate of work from multiple designers and architects. It’s a substantial task, and maintaining the discipline across teams to avoid hitting some of SketchUp’s fundamental limits is even harder.
Quite often, the simplest and most robust approach is to keep the model in manageable chunks and assemble or review the final plan outside of SketchUp.
my question was about file size–not number of edges, the number of edges won’t change the weight, though might affect the performance. YOur example of ropes, book thickness proves my point, Back to my original question in the topic heading, what is the average size file in Kbs for the average computer? I’m assuming between 300 K to 400 K
One thing to think about is texture image dimensions. Very often when people post files that have issues, there are dozens of images that are very large in size. As JPEG data in the file, it need not take up much space, but if the image is say 6000x4000, 24 bit, that’s nearly 69 MB of memory to store the uncompressed version in memory.
Extensions like this one can make a model be a lot less demanding:
