I imported this tree model from the 3d warehouse and when I zoom a certain amount the folliage from the tree dissapears. How can I correct this?
Can you share a screenshot or gif? Along with the link to the tree in 3D warehouse?
Of course, thank you for the help. Here are the images showing the folliage dissapearing.
Trimble Identity and this is the link of the model
your screen shows pixels.
if you want to show something smaller than a pixel, it won’t.
I’m guessing the leaves are so tiny that when you zoom out, they are smaller than a pixel on your screen ?
well, is it possible to do something like locking the leaves size so it wont get any smaller as I zoom out?
No. You can’t do that. You can scale the tree up or move it closer to the camera.
let’s say a leaf is 10cm long.
if you zoom on it, it’ll appear 1000px long on your screen.
zoom out a bit, it’s now 500px
more, and it’s now … well smaller
zoom even further, and it gets about the size of a single pixel. pixels are the minimum unit on a screen, you can’t have a half pixel because a pixel is a physical division of the screen.
and since this is Sketchup, and not CSI wherever, you can’t magically zoom and enhance.
so yeah, on a screen, computer, phone, tv… if you zoom out far enough, things become so small they don’t appear any more.
The leaves size doesn’t change, probably what sketchup is doing is something similar to what Twinmotion does, the details of some objects disappear depending on the distance.
What happens if you export a 2D image with a high pixel density?
I believe that this a behaviour that was introduced in recent SKP versions, I think from approx 2023 onwards.
What is happening is that components (leaves) are becoming invisible if they are “too” small and far away. Sketchup’s graphics engine will ignore the component when it falls below a certain size, rendering it invisible to the camera (but, oddly, the cursor will still snap to geometry even if its invisible). The size threshold relates to the pixel size of your monitor.
However if you explode the small leaf components, even if each leaf is the exact same geometry (but loose), then you’ll see that the leaves will not disappear. The graphics effect is linked to Component/Group size, not pixel size.
But if you do want to keep the individual leaf components (ie, not explode them), then there’s another trick you can use. Add an edge into the leaf component to make it’s overall size (the size of the bounding box of that component) much larger. You can then Hide that edge. The larger component size will make it not become invisible when zoomed out.
You will also find that if you view the same model window on different monitors of differing resolutions, the invisibility effect will happen at a different zoom level. This proves that it’s resolution-dependent.
The technique improves performance but it does have some undesirable effects at times. This includes workflows that rely on small objects (eg point clouds or construction data) and rendering/vizualisation workflows (where, despite performance decreases, you may wish to see lots detail).
The trouble is that it wasn’t explained, and there is no option to disable it.
I haven’t tried NVIDIA settings but that’s another place to look - maybe prioritizing Quality rather than Performance could help?
In my case I have exploded all leaves within my vegetation components (because I noticed that many tiny components are actually often more computationally expensive than one larger component, particularly where scaling and transforming is concerned). My trees now contain simple objects (trunk, branches, leaves on their own tag (called Details). Then the visible/invisible effect is consistent and controllable (by me) across all components, rather than being tied to screen resolution.
Zoomed in:
Zoomed out:
Yes. Explode the leaves so that they are not components, but are loose geometry.
Alternatively, edit the leaf to increase the size of the componet’s bounding box.
This should fix the issue. Let me know if it doesn’t.
(my post above explains further)
Just a warning, if you explode all the leaves and leave them as loose geometry, it will affect the performance of sketchup, if you make a few copies of the tree you can end up with a laggy file.
Do you really need to see the leaves of that tree from a great distance? There might be no difference between a 2D tree image and the 3D tree on the final output, if you are going to render and need that specific tree you can make it a proxy with VRay or Enscape so it doesn’t make your file laggy and on the final render it will show all the geometry.
No. Exploding will affect file size when saved, but not the amount of geometry SketchUp has to process. Reducing the nesting inside components can even have a small positive effect on performance.
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